Episode 52: Karina Mora - My Journey As A Parent
Hola!
Welcome to another week of Season 5 where I’m doing a deep dive into sharing my story and what has brought me here. Last week I shared all about my dating life and how that impacted how I valued myself during that time. Today I’m talking through my journey as a parent.
This is a raw and complex part of my story to talk about because as I am the bridge between two completely different generations, I feel like the glue that is trying to shield my kids from my experience growing up and completely shifting to provide a new foundation as I parent them. And it’s hard stuff!
Shout out to therapy. Especially my current therapist because she has helped me navigate a LOT in the past 6 months.
But let’s start with the fact I initially, had no desire to have kids. I wasn’t much of a kid person when I was younger…or when I was older either. Perhaps it’s the fact that as the oldest I felt like I didn’t understand children, because I had this expectation put upon me to never act like a child.
Anyway, when I got married, I also didn’t desire to have children. And it was fine…until I started seeing a few of my friends at the time become pregnant. Then I thought…maybe I do want to have a child. That thought lasted for a little bit….but then I decided no we were fine without kids. When we were first married we were living paycheck to paycheck. Didn’t have savings…and we were trying to build a business. However, by the time I decided that maybe it wasn’t the right time to have kids, I was already pregnant.
So there I was. In the thick of it. Everyone around me was so happy, and honestly we were too.
Now that I was pregnant, I actually took an assessment, for the first time ever, of how I wanted to change some things for my child. I had to start thinking of boundaries for myself and my family. I remember going to my parent’s house and having an intentional conversation about how I didn’t want any negative body image talk around my child.
You see as it’s like in many Mexican houses, it’s common to give nicknames to each other. And those names aren’t always flattering. For example my nickname was…and I hope I’m not going to regret this…cachetes, because I had big cheeks. So you can just imagine…or perhaps you can relate to nicknames similar to this…and names that would change based on how you looked as you grew. I wasn’t something we liked…but what could we do. Well when I was growing up nothing, but now, I could be intentional about stopping that “tradition” and setting the boundary of no pointing out any physical features on my kids and using it as a joke.
And my parent’s have honored that boundary with my children. It was hard having those conversations because we were so reliant on my parents. At the time, my husband and I both still worked for my father, and I knew he had fired me before, and so while I was learning to set boundaries I also was careful.
Just before my daughter was born in 2011 we moved from the northside of Chicago further south closer to my father’s shop. At that time my sister also moved in with us because she was finishing up college in the city. It was a great time because I loved having my sister around, and when my daughter was born she was able to help with, and enjoy her first niece. It was nice for my parents to visit and have both their daughters in one place, and I think they felt better that we had each other.
At that time, I was content with just one child…until I was at a wedding and saw a big family interacting, and one night of oh what if we had more was all it took for us to end up pregnant with my son.
I was so happy to experience having a boy, but because I had the first boy in our family on my parent’s side it was new territory. I also had to make sure I set boundaries about expectations they might have of him or pre-conditioned theories about raising boys….which traditionally is very patriarchal way of thinking about it.
And now that I had a girl and a boy I wanted to be intentional about protecting both and not putting specific expectations on them, especially when it came to specific gender roles. My husband and I don’t necessarily follow typical gendered roles in our home so I didn’t’ want them to grow up viewing the world as boy vs girl. This way of thinking was not really common in Latine households.
Remember when I mentioned in the last episode about colorist comments that I heard? like about how my kids might have blue eyes and light hair. I for sure put a boundary on that. I grew up hearing comments about my eyes being darker than my sisters, or my features looking more like my father, or my skin having a darker shade, and all of those comments weren’t necessarily stated in a positive or uplifting tone…so since I knew how I felt hearing those things, I didn’t want them to feel any kind of negativity no matter what their features were. And I’ve been intentional about talking about any of their features in a positive and celebratory way. The world will do enough trying to tear them down, they will for sure not be hearing that in the home or by people closest to them if I can help it.
My kids are 11 and 9 now, so it’s been an on-going process especially with each milestone as they age, to navigate their experiences and nurture them while also trying to figure out how to heal and shift from what I was taught.
I will share that after I had my son, about almost a year later I realized I had postpartum depression, and anxiety, and was given medication and encouraged to seek a therapist. Well after a year on medication, I was feeling much better, but still hadn’t found a therapist. So while I was feeling better I wasn’t actually healing or working through anything. I was slipping back into old habits and parenting the only way I knew how. So while I wasn’t necessarily speaking out negativity to my kids, I was a yeller, a gritona. And I defended spanking because “it worked for me” It’s sad for me to admit it now, but while I was on medication my hormones were balanced again which helped with the depression, but I wasn’t actually doing anything to help me in my parenting. It was like the medication was just a band-aid….until I didn’t have it anymore. Which happened….which led me to actually finding a therapist. I had run out of my perscription and I couldn’t get it renewed without a therapist to recommend someone to continue the prescription. So I found one…and went to therapy for about 3 months, before she ended up moving out of state. Perfect. But during those 3 months I was able to have a better understanding of some triggers and also how to manage my anxiety. It actually was helpful. And it was then around 2015 that I decided that I wasn’t happy with the way I was parenting in my day to day. The way I was disciplining wasn’t working and I knew that if I continued I would lose my kid’s respect as they got older.
I had a few really good examples of parenting that I reflected on. One of my best friends is a physiatrist and it was so good to have her as an example as she parented her kids. I could talk to her about how hard it was…and how I would mess up, and just try to use some techniques I saw her use with her kids.
I also thought about my aunt and my three cousins. I saw the relationship they had and thought that I would love to have a nice relationship with my kids like she has with hers. I would really enjoy having my aunt and cousins at my kid’s birthday parties and I would admire and think to myself I hope my kids and I can hang out like they do.
It was those relationships that really helped me shift away from what I had known as parenting and have hope for something different.
I started seeing how other homeschool moms would interact with their kids, and I knew that I had an opportunity to prioritize my relationship with my kids and that everything else was secondary. Yes, I’m saying that their academics were and are secondary to setting a good foundation for communication and overall raising kids. You can listen to my conversation with Carolina on episode 26 where we talk about homeschooling to get a better understanding of what I mean by this.
But around that time in 2015/2016 I threw everything I knew out the window and started learning about gentle parenting and getting rid of chancel culture in my home. At that time my kids were around 4&2 and I remember communicating with them look I’m not going to do spanking anymore, but we have to work on our communication…me included. I started apologizing, and explaining things better like why I was asking them to do something, I started helping them communicate their feelings so they could better communicate with me.
It was WORK. And it still is. But I’ve moved away from a reactive way of parenting. Now, I got good at helping my kids through stress and big emotions…but I was still stuck in doing that for myself. And that is what my current therapist is helping me through, which has been a HUGE help especially with my anxiety.
During the past two years of the pandemic I had clear boundaries for our family. And I kept them even if family didn’t understand or agree. I had some hard conversations during the past two years, and it hasn’t been easy, but I knew that it was important for our family to uphold the values that are important to us.
I say this as an acknowledgment that for anyone going through this, you’re not alone in trying to raise your kids differently than you, and that this is hard work, but will be worth it for them in the long run.
As a homeschool mom I’m not only navigating the relationship of parent and child, but also as educator. And that makes it a whole lot harder. BUT that’s why I say that it’s crucial to have a strong foundation built on communication and respect because if that isn’t there…then everything else you add on is not going to sustain.
Since I started homeschooling I’ve seen more and more families of color start homeschooling.
I’ve been so encouraged by this because I think it’s so important to be in diverse communities. There are more and more interracial families, and it’s crucial for us to learn about and uplift the diversity of cultures. It’s important for us as parents, if your kids are bi-or mulit-racial to acknowledge and learn about the wholeness of cultural heritage.
In last week’s episode I shared about how I’ve had to check a lot of the biases and conditioned ideas I grew up with. Because of that I’m intentional to break those mentalities for my kids, and celebrate their Mexican heritage as well any of our friend’s cultures. It’s encouraging to be around families where we can see the diversity in ways of living. We can support each other in academics and in parenting.
It’s a little funny how at the beginning of the episode I was adamant about not having kids, and now 11 years in, I homeschool both my kids, and have leaned all the way in to creating a new parent/child dynamic from what is the norm in our culture and was the norm for me growing up. And thinking back on that, I’m so proud of the work I’ve done, I am proud of the work so many of us are collectively doing as we heal and learn how to parent. This next generation is already so amazing, and I can’t wait to see how they grow. BUT it does start with us. Us doing the work in order to shift the parenting narrative in hopes that our kids can add onto that and continue shifting for the better.
I think a key component to having the strength and support to create a different environment for our kids is finding the community that is going to be there as an encouragement. It’s HARD work and to go it alone is going to be even harder. In Season 3 of the podcast I talk with educators that can provide resources to help in supporting kids outside the classroom. I also encourage parents to make sure they’re finding community that will also pour into them as an individual. We all need that time to decompress from our parenting responsibilities. We were creative, ambitious, hopeful people before kids, and I believe we still are. Just because we add the title and responsibility of a parent doesn’t mean the whole being of who we were before kids disappears, it might just take a little more intention to make sure you are not lost in your role as caretaker. It took me a while to realize this, but once I did, I felt energized again, and filled with hope. But a big part of that was having people around me to encourage me and support me. My community.
Again if you don’t feel like you have a community to support you as a parent, send me a DM on instagram, an email, anything. Because you can find community here.
Next week I’m going to go deeper on my story with therapy. Therapy is so important to me that I gave it a whole episode.
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I’m also excited to announce our first in-person one day event called “Cultura Presente: Celebra tus Raices, we are going to do a deep dive on the effects of assimilation may have on you, and recognize our cultural strength, And how we can put strategies in place to reverse that way of thinking. I’m so grateful for the community I had now. I’ve truly been inspired in this whole brand I’m creating that is FOR us. Where you can feel safe being yourself.
Shout out to my partner Sandy from Beautea Queens, and collaborators Izzy and Daisy from the Hablando Claro Podcast, and our host location Neuroyoga Institute. Get all the info at elevatinalacultura.com/events
Alright, enjoy the rest of the day/afternoon/evening whenever you’re listening, y nos vemos next week.
