Black mothers and theirs emotional gaps

Baby shower. New room. Everything smells new for the little being who will come to brighten up the home. In any case, a fairytale that seems too enchanted for black mothers who usually don't have any support.

Silvia, my foster mother. I think I have seen her crying twice in my entire life. Now in her 80s, but at the time in her early 50s, she decided to adopt us, three little black children, newly adopted, with the demand of those who could not allow criticism of people. There was no room to fail.

A minimum wage. Many diapers. Nursery. Disbelief of people. It was the four of us against the terrible statistics that haunt Brazilian black families. After all, blood brothers, the three of us left a black family with many traumas: a violent father and an alcoholic mother, to enter another black family: a single mother without anyone's support.

In the National Adoption Registry of the Conselho Nacional de Justiça - National Council of Justice, of the 8,476 children registered for adoption, 65.93% are black and brown, which represents a total of 5,588 children in Brazil who suffer from violence resulting from family breakdown and cruelty from institutional racism, because even though children, blacks and browns are not the preference in the adopter's imagination, they still look for white-skin babies up to 3 years old.

On the other hand, single mothers make up the reality of 11 million of the Brazilian population where race emphasizes structural racism considering that 55.5% of the heads of families are black women.

"This issue of being a single mother here in my family is a very common thing, it is part of my reality. My grandmother, for example, raised 13 children alone because my grandfather left with another woman. He left the black woman with the children to marry a white woman. My mother got married, but she was always in charge which means she always had that 'strong black woman' attitude. She worked a lot running the house, she was the foundation of the house. So I always had influences of black women, housewives, finance managers. I have this family structure”, analyzes Thauany Lima, 28 years old.

The question is who can handle these women's pain when the economic, psychological and emotional problems appear? Because we cannot romanticize that raising children without family, institutional or state support is tough. These issues create tension in their mental health, bringing a series of side effects to these women that are far from being just statistical data as we pretend.

Who is the black mother's network?

The interviewee Lizandra Caldas, 29, Arthur's mother, says: "I don't have a 'network support'. Nobody wants to be with the child so I can go out and have time off. I once heard from my mother that if I wanted to go out and have fun I should have thought of it before."

This is a phrase easily reproduced by people who live with or are close to these women who blame women for motherhood. The interviewee provokes: "So you mean that when we have children we can't have time off? We have to live exclusively for motherhood?"

The absence of a care network is a typical feature of the way of raising children in the Western world: it is the sole and exclusive responsibility of women to take care of raising children and being "domesticated" in the housework while men grow in their careers.

The isolation that single mothers live is overwhelming for these women, as they are prevented from expanding their social life beyond the family.

There is a dimension of economic racism that operates against the emancipation of these women, as they are marginalized, limited to access to the formal market, restricted to circulating in spaces of power and restricted from participating in institutional decisions, which implies a reduction in public policies for these women in terms of education, health and services.

The oppression of gender, race and class are somatized to exclude the black mother as a subject, social being or thinker, as it reduces her subjectivity until she has no more energy.

The researcher Aza Njeri identified the phenomenon "afro-outbreak" as a category of psychic outbreak experienced by black people within the Afro-Brazilian diaspora. This is the exact moment when racism becomes crystal clear. This woman realizes that she doesn't fit the stereotype of the Westerner, which they call the universal subject: male, white, successful who flows to full humanity.

Postpartum depression also forges black families, as facing the challenges of unsupported mothering is challenging for these women. And this is what Thais Araújo, 28, tells us: "I had a postpartum depression to the point of not accepting my child and that was very difficult for me. But then I realized 'it was me or me'".

This paternal absence is also reported by Thauany, "The father is not present to buy medicine or go to a parents' meeting. So I consider abandonment, because he only shows up at the good time, when she is healthy, then he brings her chocolate and takes her to McDonald's. But Where is he raising, knowing and seeing our daughter's daily life? This week, for example, she learned the alphabet and he doesn't participate in these little things."

The construction of these women's subjectivity, within a patriarchal and racist system as in Brazil, massacres these women: low self-esteem, loneliness, exhaustion and guilt for not handling everything.

This phenomenon is recognized in modern literature as “social reproduction”, which means the devaluation of work related to care with regard to creation, education and family demands on which women leave at an economic disadvantage, since the work related to care are either poorly paid or not at all, keeping them in the condition of subordination and men in a higher paid position.

In 2016, for example, women spent 18 hours a week on average caring for people or householding which means 73% more than men (10.5 hours).

In addition, 2018 data from the Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (PNAD) - National Household Sample Survey, from the - Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística - Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), show that 92% of household activities are carried out by 5.7 million women, of which 3.9 millions black.

For those women who manage to break the bubble and access the formal market, there is no romance either. In terms of graduation, according to data from the survey "Gender statistics" carried out by the Brazilian Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) - Institute of Geography and Statistics, 10.4% of black women completed higher education compared to 23.5% of white women. At work, even working more hours, women receive less. Although the difference between the earnings of men and women has decreased in recent years, in 2016 they still received the equivalent of 76.5% of men's earnings.

Between housecleaning, lunch and mothering, this woman still faces the corporate market usually with interruptions and manexplaning by her supervisors, managers and directors, mostly white men who dictate how these women need to act. A typical scenario of moral harassment, if not sexual.

In the pandemic things got worse. This home office working mother hears "What are you doing now", Lizandra reports indignantly about the demands of the capitalist punctuality that crushes the routine of this mother, who finds herself challenged between virtual meetings and her son's school activities.

In this scenario, it is common for them to be alone or for their partners to operate in the patriarchal mood, not dealing with household tasks

“Today I'm 100% with my daughter, in the financial matter and I believe emotionally too, because I'm with her most of the time. The father stays with her twice a month, during the weekend or a few times a week, but the truth is, most of the time she is with me. But I have to worry, for example, in organizing if she's going to have clean clothes, if she's going to come back with dirty clothes, if she's going to take a sweater, right? If she took a toothbrush… Even then we women have to worry about taking a toothbrush because she didn't have a toothbrush there. Today after arguing a lot she has a toothbrush there. "

punctuates Thauany.

Who authorizes this mother, often in conditions of social vulnerability, to cry? Who gives the hand to the black mother?

.

The objection of these women is that they are banned from their womanhood, (read, femininity) in the face of motherhood, placed exclusively in the role of care providers. "I'd like to go back to looking at myself as a woman, not just a mother," says Lizandra.

We need to take responsibility for the psycho-emotional violence that black mothers experience, as the claims of these women denounce that we are being negligent in the care and support of people located at the base of the social pyramid, often left to their own devices.

State responsibility in terms of increasing day care centers, aid and gender pay equalization policies is fundamental. However, our role as family members or friends of these women is to provide support to lighten the burden of these women, as condemning them to the status of servants is criminal.