The Decolonial Parent

a continuous work in progress

Category: pregnancy

  • breastfeeding is hard – my story

    breastfeeding is hard – my story

    This is a read best left for those who are seeking reassurance and solidarity in their breastfeeding struggles.

  • Working during pregnancy

    Working during pregnancy

    It’s wild that we expect pregnant people to be full-time economic actors during their entire pregnancy. With how gross, destabilising, hormonally chaotic, and simply painful pregnancy is, we still expect people to show up to a job and perform its responsibilities as if they weren’t a living, breathing chrysalis with a solar storm raging within.

  • Why I’m doing postpartum confinement

    Why I’m doing postpartum confinement

    Yes, the truth is that I am under no obligation to do a postpartum confinement. I am not fully Chinese, my partner’s family is not Chinese, and I don’t live in a Chinese community. There is no social or cultural expectation that I would follow any Chinese traditions of any kind (including all those feast…

  • Release and Ready

    Release and Ready

    Do you have a point of focus for the year ahead yet? It’s not for everyone, but I typically find it helpful to sit quietly with my thoughts at the turn of the calendar page. This can take any form: barefoot during the silence of a new morning with a hot cup of tea and…

  • Evolving as Keepers of Culture

    Evolving as Keepers of Culture

    We’ve had a lot of conversations around here of late about what it means to be immigrant carriers of culture, and the dissonance of returning to your homeland after years abroad. Typically, the culture there has evolved and updated with the times, whilst often the culture carried abroad has ossified and become outdated. Our cultural…

  • Where we’ve come from

    Where we’ve come from

    As we look forward to raising our child in this complex and confusing world, we think it’s important to have a clear picture of how we ended up here. Coming from completely different worlds ourselves, we’ve somehow navigated our way to each other to build a life that reflects our values and nurtures our dreams.…

  • Take what serves you and leave the rest

    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…

  • Imposter syndrome

    Imposter syndrome

    Some people may ask, Who are we to write a blog on parenting when we haven’t given birth yet? And that’s a fair question.

  • How it begins

    How it begins

    One minute we were out here living our dual freelancer lives, doing our best to navigate the vagaries of a novel bureaucratic system in a language we have a feeble grasp of (at best). Within moments, we became custodians of a whole new future. Over the coming months, we’ll be preparing our home and our…