Sitting on a damp wooden bench at our local skate park, I put down the article I’m scrolling through to catch my two-year-old riding his balance bike up and down the ramps, turning sharply upon descent to repeat the journey over and over again. He rides from one end of the skate park to the other, navigating quickly around and over each obstacle with the confidence and athleticism of a tiny BMX biker. Looking at him, you’d never know he only learned how to ride this thing two weeks ago and just discovered he can use it to do tricks five minutes ago.
He is in the zone, but suddenly locks his twinkling eyes with mine mid-ride, with a grin so wide as if to make sure that I am seeing what he is experiencing: his freedom.
My transition to being a toddler mom wasn’t easy. The blood curling, screeching pitch of his screams when he threw a full body tantrum could immediately activate my fight or flight. Caring for him as an infant actually came naturally to me. I knew this kid intimately nine months before anyone else in the world did. Even after he arrived, I felt like I could actually feel what he felt, like every cell and nerve ending in our bodies was invisibly tethered to each other. But after the breastmilk dried up, the postpartum hormones leveled off, and his needs became more complex, he went from being an extension of my own flesh and blood to a ticking time bomb. He transformed into an alien whose wrath could be incurred by anything and everyone, with his capacity to feel far exceeding his ability to articulate what it was that he was feeling.
I intellectually understood how frustrating this stage must be: you wake up one day and realize you possess an interior reality that is distinct from the realities of everyone around you. And that knowledge brings a new mountain of discoveries about yourself and the world and how you feel about it all each day. You simultaneously discover your autonomy and your captivity — choice as a concept exists, sure, but for some reason you are not allowed to access it. You can barely process what you learned yesterday before being confronted with a new assault on your senses and insult to your integrity, as your mom tries to dress you in the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Toddlerhood: the declaration of independence. The start of a lifelong journey to self. The journey of recognizing that one is, in fact, a person and defining what exactly personhood looks like for you.
Despite empathizing with his experience, I was taken aback by the abrupt shift in our relationship dynamic. What began as power sharing became endless battles to see who had greater power over the other. The intensity of his tantrums seemed to be his way of letting me know that he may be of me, but he is not mine. He made it clear that what I want for him is not always what he wants for himself and my efforts to predict and control him were futile. My energy would be better spent elsewhere.
When he, for example, held steady eye contact while slowly turning his red saucy bowl of food over on my white countertops, I took it personally. His defiance seemed like a personal challenge to me and a piss poor reflection of me. I projected all sorts of ill will and negative labels onto this little person who was doing nothing more than testing his boundaries. Sometimes there are no villains or heroes in a relationship. Sometimes we are simply caught in the crossfire of someone exercising their own autonomy.
My mindset started to shift once I had the courage to admit my unfiltered motherhood woes to a coach I was working with. I used every awful word people have ever used to describe children and it felt so good to be validated via my coach’s knowing chuckles and nods and the space she patiently allowed my worst self to take up. “He’s trying to kill me!” I dramatically concluded. My coach, a mother herself, smiled gently and responded “Maybe. But what else might he be trying to teach you? What is the greatest lesson you are learning from your toddler right now?”
That question was the first crack in the self-righteous armor I had built to survive this stage. I unclenched my jaw, felt my body soften, and the tension float away. The camera in my mind’s eye slowly panned away from me and zoomed into his tiny, heart-shaped, wide-eyed face. I replayed the scene I had just described from his perspective.
For the first time, I noticed his modest ambitions — his preferences — and how easily and frequently they were disregarded. I felt his frustration at living a life where he was robbed of every daily choice that I take for granted: what to eat, what to wear, where to go, what to do, what to say, who to hang out with, how and when to move his body. All of these decisions were made for him. By me. Not always out of necessity or safety or to protect some family value, like I pretended it was, but more often than not out of habit and convenience.
Once I allowed myself to entertain the possibility that the purpose of my toddler’s existence was not in fact to destroy me, new ways of being with him unfolded before me. I could make the choice to sink slowly and deliberately into toddlerhood together, rather than wish it away. My toddler was teaching me that we can aspire to do more than exert power over the people we love. He was teaching me what it looked like to truly be free. Free from societal norms. Free from the knowledge that systems of oppression exist, let alone dictate our behavior. Free from anyone else’s expectations. Free to tap into our intuition. Free to follow the wisdom and natural pace of our bodies. He was teaching me that I had willingly cast myself as the greatest threat to that freedom. He was teaching me that I could either choose to be his first oppressor, or I could be his freedom doula.
This idea of mothering as freedom doula-ing was splash of cold water on my face after being stuck in the postpartum “how do I do this perfectly” dry haze for months. I consumed a wide variety of parenting literature, but regarded much of what I was reading with skepticism. Most parenting content creators all look like they attend the same mid-day barre class. They speak authoritatively about children they have never met based on “expertise” they have developed online, and finger wag at any choice a mom makes that is less than the best for their child. Call me close-minded, but I have trouble taking advice from folks who would almost certainly call the police on me for existing too Blackly in their presence. There is a cultural homogeneity in American parenting educational spaces that goes un-interrogated, even though it’s obvious that their cultural lens influences how they determine what is best for their children and, in turn, what they can sell to us as being best for our children.
My biggest parenting fear is adopting white supremacist cultural practices, masquerading as parenting science. I did not want to unintentionally expose my child to oppressive norms earlier than he needed to be by pursuing perfection, control, and efficiency over everything else. I did not want to throw money at every problem and look down at any parent that had different resources and made different decisions than I did. I did not want to accept, as God-given facts, guidance that is at best one or two generations old and often the exact opposite of what our parents and grandparents were taught. I wanted to better understand what was informing the dominant American parenting norms today and what we can learn from non-white, non-Western perspectives.
So in true Makkah fashion, I read a book.
In Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, Michaleen Doucleff travels around the world to learn from indigenous parenting wisdom that has been passed down for generations. Doucleff, with her sassy 3 year old daughter, visits Maya families in the Yucatan Peninsula, Inuit families above the Arctic Circle, and Hadzabe families in Tanzania. She observes and documents striking differences between their parenting philosophies and the approaches that are popular among the highly educated, mostly white Western parenting circles she belongs to.
Doucleff researches the origins of current dominant parenting practices in WEIRD cultures (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic societies) and was surprised to learn that a lot of the advice we currently receive from our doctors and reputable sources originates from a handful of pamphlets aiming to optimize childcare in mass care settings (hospitals, orphanages, daycares, schools, etc.) — settings where individualized attention isn’t always possible. This emphasis on optimization and efficiency became necessary after the industrial revolution required us to be working in specific places at specific times. So we built our parenting norms around the demands of capitalism, rather than the needs of our children.
Doucleff then outlines, in great detail, what parenting looks like in cultures that prioritize understanding how children are as a starting point for determining how to educate and guide them. The insights shared throughout this book are too great in number to detail here. But what I will say is this book diverted my energy away from trying to always have the right answer and towards asking better questions.
How am I modeling our family values and the role that each of us plays in upholding them? How can I work with my child’s natural desire to learn to teach and guide him? What wisdom exists in silence, rather than in issuing an endless stream of directives? What behaviors are developmentally appropriate and how do I set age-appropriate boundaries for his exploration of these behaviors? How do I stay emotionally grounded when challenged by my toddler’s emotional extremes? How can I use play, stories, and imagination to share the most important lessons with him? What opportunities do I have to bridge the gap between the child world and the adult world, so that he has lots of practice navigating it before becoming an adult himself? In what ways can I incorporate a greater sense of autonomy — the feeling like he has control over his own life — into his day, every day?
I finished this book feeling both exposed and held. It showed me how absurd it is to take a child being a child personally. It taught me how children learn and just how ineffective many of the methods I was using were. It reminded me (as I have written about before) that understanding is a far better foundation for a relationship than control. And once I opened the door to trying to understand him, I was often deeply moved by what he was experiencing and honored that he trusted me enough to witness it. In a society that tries its hardest to make caring for children impossible, where hostility to children has become normalized and their very lives are no longer seen as worth protecting, honoring the truth of one child’s life and his desire to feel it deeply feels like a spiritual rebellion.
This book offered me a surprising number of practical tools to manage my own emotions and build more points of connection and understanding between me and my toddler. It demonstrates that children are often more physically capable and less emotionally capable than adults expect them to be. Nowadays, I get embarrassed when I lose my temper, because I recognize that I am an adult and he is the child. How can I expect him to master an emotional regulation skillset that I, at my big age, am still working on?
The sad truth is, many people were not allowed to exist freely as children, so they are triggered when they see their own children experiencing a liberation that they have never tasted for themselves. But breaking generational curses requires us to provide for ourselves and others what we didn’t have access to growing up. We can’t talk such a big talk about healing our inner children while actively harming the current children in our lives. No matter what childhood trauma you are currently healing from, we’re the adults now, babes. It is our time to be the grown ups we wish we had.
On the best days, mothering a toddler is like singing a perfect harmony on the first try. You’re creating something beautiful together that vibrates throughout your body. It is like being in a perpetual state of time travel: remembering the past, savoring the present, and praying for the best of the future. It is bearing witness to who this person has always been and who they are always in the process of becoming. It is seeing up close how humans are made and it is a study in what makes up the essence of our humanity. Looking into his eyes, which are a version of my own, I see myself. And every time I extend understanding and compassion to him, a little bit of it seeps through to the baby Makkah within me. As the saying goes, healed people heal people.
I want to remember everything my toddler says and feels in this fleeting phase before he internalizes that there are things one shouldn’t say or feel. I want to bottle up the confidence and sense of belonging this little Black and brown boy feels walking into any room, and feed it back to him later in life when he encounters all the rooms that were not built for him. I want to see the world through his eyes. To never let a sunset or bright moon go unnoticed. To never compromise my beliefs. To know Allah intimately and never ignore any of Allah’s signs or favors.
Even on the worst days, mothering a toddler feels like a difficult Sudoku puzzle or a mind-bending riddle. I end the day exhausted, brain pulsing, but satisfied. The effort required to sustain life on a dying planet is precisely why we do it. The rigor is the point. Conflict is always an opportunity to deepen intimacy, and there is no conflict and no intimacy quite like what you experience with a two-year-old. He can ride his wobbly bike with ease today because of all the times he fell and I helped him get back up yesterday. The more I believe in him, the more he believes in himself. And the more he trusts me to guide him, the more I try to honor the responsibility I’ve been entrusted with.
I want my toddler to know he is always allowed to make mistakes and show up imperfectly. I want him to know that it is what he learns from those mistakes, how he owns the consequences of his choices, and how he repairs any harm that he causes to others that matters most. I want him to know that there is no such thing as a bad feeling, and that every single emotion is trying to remind us what is important to us. I want him to know he is allowed to have preferences and that he is allowed to have disagreements with others, even those in authority. And, over time, I want to show him how to express himself thoughtfully, clearly, and respectfully. I want him to know that there is nothing he can do that will make me stop loving him. And that loving someone is one of the bravest, most important things we can choose to do in this life.
Toddlerhood gets a bad rap, but it is freedom in its purest form. Choosing to love this phase, rather than resist it, has facilitated ease in parts of my life that I didn’t know could experience it. As bell hooks once said “The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.” May we all taste the sweetness of love and liberation in this life and the next.