Take what serves you and leave the rest

I’ll probably write about this a few times over the next month-to-a-year, as it’s a topic close to my heart. For today, I want to focus on the idea that when we honour traditions we need to adhere to them.

While on the one hand I absolutely agree with and advocate for the notion that wisdom has been gathered holistically over the ages, and when we pick-and-choose we end up disconnecting components from a broader system. However, my current position is that we no longer live in the societies or structures that these holistic systems evolved within, so they are not holistic for us by definition alone. Living in late capitalism, so far removed from many of the social norms and interactions that our ancestors observed, we have to find new ways to work with ancient wisdom.

For example, when it comes to zuò yuè zi (坐月子), there are things I’ll be following and other things I’ll be conveniently ignoring. First things first, we are doing a swine-free 坐月子. Typically, many parts of the pig are used, such as feet and organs, as well as the meat, bones, and fat. Since we don’t eat pork, we need to find alternatives to the nutritional components that the pig is used for.

(Yes, sometimes taking what serves us and leaving the rest means we have to work harder to get the same results!)

And really that’s where I’ve landed when it comes to the purpose of this blog. I was a bit torn between trying to create a community resource in an objective sense or just documenting the mundane challenges of parenting, and I’ve decided on the latter. It’s not just that I feel inadequate in the face of the sheer scale of the decolonial struggle (although it plays a part, as it should).

The way I see it, the internet is currently such a landgrab of SEO that nobody will really be stumbling upon this blog anyway. In that case, why not just write about our everyday lived experiences, and let those who encounter these words take what serves them and leave the rest?

So, in the future I will be writing more closely about the day-to-day. As much as this site is called The Decolonial Parent, there’ll be much more about our specific experiences of parenting and far less about the macro decolonial project. Consider it a sample size, where N = 1.