A wild patience has taken me this far…

Adrienne Rich, Integrity

Last week, South Africa commemorated Heritage Day. If you’re like me, this meant a confusing combination of welcome rest, and the inevitable unwelcome boredom of my children. Each year, as I scramble to put together last-minute themed costumes expressing my children’s complex, grab-bag heritages, I wonder what I consider my heritage.

Before I became a mother, my strongest identity was that of woman. Those were my people, with whom I belonged, and for whom I strove and fought. After motherhood, I have discovered this other layer of identity, one in which I could never have suspected lay a sacred and righteous politics – that of parent. Or caregiver. What I am – and what connects me to the billions of people the world over who do this – is a person tasked with the development and safety and well-being of (a) young child(ren). That status comes with enormous responsibility and joy, and more than its fair share of pressure. Those who know, know. And they are my people, too.

I say ‘caregiver’ because in this day and age, it is extremely rare that children are only ever the concern of biological parents. Even when parents are present and involved, our children must venture into creches and play groups and day care centres and nurseries. In these spaces, they encounter (mostly) women who take up the responsibility and charge of these precious little lives and minds.

In South Africa, many of these women – and they are mostly women – are doing this in contexts of extreme deprivation. I have been listening to some of their stories, told in engagements and presentations at the annual (Centre for) Early Childhood Development ((C)ECD) conference. Presenter after presenter has added focus to the daunting picture. We are in a wildfire, and the people on whom we are depending to fight the fires are poor black and brown women. We know we’re in a crisis – the recent release of the Thrive by Five index makes that clear. The people who experience this crisis on a daily basis are the gogos and the aunties who run ECD centres and convene home-based play groups. They feel it more acutely than most because implicit in our assessments of early learning is a question aimed squarely at them: what are the children in your care learning?

Do we stop to wonder what we can learn from these women? I attended a session in which one community-based support and mentoring programme laid it out plainly: the dedication of the ECD practitioners is the only thing keeping certain collapse at bay. That dedication is drawn from deep commitments to community, and children, and spiritual imperatives. These practitioners are exhibiting super-human strength in the face of super-human challenges.

But that’s not the whole story. They don’t want to keep doing this. This endless struggle and toil and working to keep themselves and the children in their care above water exacts a heavy toll. It demands a wild patience – beyond normal human limits – and it is, finally, finally, too much to ask. We celebrate the resilience and ingenuity of caregivers and ECD professionals, but it is time to put the light, bright pom-poms away and pick up the slack we have long-forgotten on their shoulders.

I dream of never being called resilient again in my life. I’m exhausted by strength. I want support. I want softness. I want ease. I want to be amongst kin. Not patted on the back for how well I take a hit. Or for how many.

— zandashe’ l’orelia brown

We are asking caregivers of all kinds – within and outside the home – to carry our children. Our children are the future, they are the world. Why, then, are we content to watch the people who watch over them burn out so completely? The cynic in me wants to assume that society does this because it is so much easier to blame poor women of colour than it is to address the poverty that hobbles them. The dreamer in me – the one who has been at the CECD conference, the one who is raising two small children – truly hopes that we just need to stretch our imagination a little. Instead of only celebrating resilience, let’s look at how we can ease the path for caregivers and practitioners. Lord knows, the basics of caring for and teaching young children require enough without adding the structural and social constraints with which too many parents and practitioners must contend.

We should be in awe of the wild patience of parents and early childhood development practitioners and caregivers.

But we should be more appalled at how much we continue to expect and ask of them.

Featured imaged by Maheima Kapur on Unsplash