Ep 41: Politicizing Abandonment Wounds & Practicing Interdependence in Parenting

[INTRODUCTION]

Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. A place where we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. If you’ve been looking for ways to practice social justice in your daily parenting and nurture your child’s development while re-parenting your inner child, I’m so glad you’re here. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic abolitionist, and founder of Come Back to Care. A dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineages and communities. And we come back to care… together. So come curious and come as you are.

[EPISODE]

Welcome to episode 41 of the Come Back to Care Podcast. I’m so excited to continue our exploration of abandonment and codependence from the previous episode with you today. But before we begin. a quick note: my body is yearning to rest and go inward -- not rush to produce content. After this episode, I’ll take a few weeks off to recharge. I’ll be back the first Tuesday of November.  Thank you for helping me practice listening to my body and honoring its needs. 

Alright, in the previous episode, you and I explored abandonment in the context of the relationship between those who raised us and ourselves as children. To protect ourselves from re-experiencing this pain of abandonment, one survival strategy many of us use is people pleasing or codependence. This is where we abandon our own needs to people please others in hopes that they won’t abandon us. This survival strategy of codependence can unintentionally get in the way of our children’s development of autonomy, self-esteem, and self-trust. It can also make us shy away from taking charge in moments when our children need us to step up. 

In our exploration today I’d love to take five steps back and look at a bigger social political picture. So we can understand abandonment- not just in the context of relationships between us and those who raised us or between us and our children but also- in relation to white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy. Because what happens in society trickles down into what happens in our homes. Social norms often become family rules. Abandonment in the home is often a byproduct of structural abandonment from the government. 

Abby Cartus, a researcher and an epidemiologist said at the 2023 Socialism Conference , quote “Solid analysis is the engine of good strategizing and effective tactics.” End quote. So by widening our analysis of abandonment beyond parent-child attachment relationships, you and I can use this political analysis to sharpen our parenting strategies.

That’s why in this episode, you and I are going to unpack the concept of “organized abandonment” together. A term that’s enlivened by professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a prison abolitionist and scholar. Then, we’ll explore one antidote to abandonment and codependence which is interdependence. We’ll close out the episode with four invitations for you to play with when you practice interdependence in your daily parenting. So that you can strengthen your social justice muscles of interdependence- not codependence- when you go out to your community and advocate for change. If that sounds generative to you, let’s get started. 

Defining Organized Abandonment

Ruth Wilson Gilmore has been thinking about and teaching the term organized abandonment for three decades. Thirty something years of nuance and complexity! So, I’m going to respectfully pull out one thread of organized abandonment that’s directly about parenting and capitalism and weave that into our decolonized parenting practice. Because this episode is more about applying the concept and putting it into practice. But what I’m going to do to honor the richness of her work is to link a variety of her writings, teachings, and interviews in the show notes for you if you want to study organized abandonment more fully. 

Alright, organized abandonment in relation to parenting…here, we, go. You know how people are constantly anxious, worried, and depressed about having enough to eat, having healthcare, having housing, access to clear air, clean water and other basic human needs? These constant worries about survival get packaged and sold back to us as an individual moral obligation that says: “oh, then you need to work harder, adjust your mindset, be disciplined…and your American dreams will come true.” People are so busy grinding, pushing, and sacrificing to make ends meet that this mode of operation becomes normalized. You wanna eat? You gotta work. Organized abandonment is like your sensible friend who taps you on your shoulder and nudges you to lift your head up from the grind to critically ask: if almost everyone who’s not the 1% is struggling to survive, maybe our inability to make ends meet isn’t our individual fault but rather is a structural problem. The State could have cared for us and provided structural support for us to access what we need to live. But it abandons us and redirects the vast majority of resources towards those who already have the most. The goal is to maximize profits —even when those profits all go to the privileged few -- at the high cost of abandoning our wellbeing. 

One clear example was when the state shortened the quarantine period at the height of the Omicron surge. So that people got back to work faster to keep the economy going. It was a purposeful decision to protect the profits and the economy not the people. It’s an organized abandonment of the most vulnerable people, namely the poor and working class people, who had no privileges of working from home, who had to choose between risking their bodies or not eating. People who were driving buses, who packed grocery bags, and so on.

And the point is not for us to throw our hands up in the air in defeat and hope that the racial capitalist state will change its behavior, come back to us, and meet our needs. Capitalism has long since made it clear that it doesn’t care about us as people, only as walking credit cards. But we were taught to work hard and sacrifice our wellbeing for capitalism to achieve the American dreams. It’s like we got catfished by capitalism. The economist, Karl Marx, has been telling us about how Capitalism is lying and catfishing since the 18th century but we don’t listen. So, I’m saying all of this to say, a) I need to stop watching the Real Housewives of New Jersey and b) instead of waiting for Capitalism to change, we- you and I- can go find new partners like community-based coalitions and mutual aid networks that care about equity and access to basic needs. We can remove the blame and shame of our struggle to survive off our backs and reclaim that energy to pour it back into community building and coalition building that organizes around food accessibility, clean air, or affordable housing…just to name a few examples. 

I painted that picture of capitalism being an awful partner who doesn’t love us back and who catfishes us to highlight the codependence in this relationship dynamic. Many of us have been conditioned to love capitalism. But capitalism- as we know it- doesn’t love us back. 

Dayna Lynn Nuckolls, a liberation philosopher, wrote quote “we are so deeply codependent with capitalism that we treat capitalists like parents we eagerly seek to please and emulate. We become dysregulated and plunge into that fight response at the idea of another person being fed or housed without having sacrificed their life and body to capitalist employer.” End quote.

This abandonment isn’t an accident – it’s a deliberate consequence of government policies that prioritize building prisons over building libraries.

Think of when parental leave is over: parents have to stop nursing their child to nurse the economy. They have to stop nurturing the development of their child to nurture the growth of profits.  

Another clear example is health care. Capitalism deliberately makes health care a product we need to buy instead of something that’s available and accessible to everyone. Vicente Navarro, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University critiqued capitalism’s priority to quote “reduce public responsibility for the health of populations, to transform national health services into insurance-based healthcare systems […] and to privatize medical care.” End quote. Capitalism makes health our personal responsibility instead of a social-political issue.

The worst part of organized abandonment is that after the State abandons the most vulnerable to suffer and fend for themselves. It then punishes those same people for how they fend for themselves by criminalizing the ways they survive. The State blames the most vulnerable for quote unquote crimes and builds cages to lock these quote unquote criminals away for the quote unquote public safety. For example, all of my trans sex work colleagues back in Thailand were working on the streets because no businesses would hire them because of transphobia and gender discrimination. Abandoned by the state, we had to make ends meet and eat by selling our bodies. And we got punished for trying to survive by the police.  

Ruth Wilson Gilmore said quote: “prison is not just a response to a “free-floating thing called crime”—it’s a response to “surplus” populations. Which is to say that prisons are designed to absorb people: those people who have been abandoned by the state.” End quote. 

I hope you see that organized abandonment creates the structural inequality that causes people who are trying to survive the Hunger Game of Capitalism to wind up in prisons in the first place.

So, how about instead of punishing people who are playing the Hunger Game of Capitalism, we abolish the Game. We change those structural inequalities. And this is abolition, right? Ruth Wilson Gilmore wrote in her new anthology “Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation” quote: “abolition’s goal is to change how we interact with each other and the planet by putting people before profits, welfare before warfare, and life over death.” End quote.

Organized Abandonment & Parenting

Still with me? Shall we connect the dots back to parenting?

When society abandons parents- leaving you with no paid parental leave or universal childcare- you’re likely trying to survive the Hunger Game of Capitalism by being codependent with capitalism. By hyper-focusing on your employers’ needs for productivity, perfectionism, and urgency, you (along with other parents and me) might have nothing left in your cup to focus on our own needs and our children’s needs. Abandonment in society trickles down to abandonment in the home. 

Understanding how organized abandonment works can strengthen our efforts to not pass an abandonment wound down to future generations. 

The central idea of not punishing the individual but rather changing the conditions that led them to do what they did in the first place is what parents and I work on together when they ask me about how to discipline their children. I have a free self-directed audio workshop on decolonizing discipline that you can sign up for at no cost to come up with your own discipline plan at your own pace. I’ll leave a link in the show notes for you so we can keep our exploration focused on you and your healing. 

The same idea applies to you as a parent too, not just to how you discipline your child. For example, when you make parenting mistakes, instead of scolding yourself for being tired, yelling, snapping, or getting triggered in the first place, you can remind yourself that using mindfulness techniques or self-regulation strategies in air quotes is not a be all end all. You might have your breathing techniques or even body-based practices that can help you feel regulated in moments that you’re triggered. That’s wonderful. My invitation as we’re applying lessons from abolition is to go a step further and reflect: how might I change the conditions that led me to that triggered place? And especially, how can I change those conditions in a way that emphasizes community instead of individual action. Perhaps it’s doing a dinner swap with your neighbors so that one evening is free from cooking so you can take care of laundry. Maybe it’s arranging a Covid-smart community playdate so you can socialize with other parents and get your emotional cup filled. It’s both-and: both addressing the triggers in the moment and changing the conditions that are draining your cup.

From all my years of community organizing, I keep seeing that a powerful antidote to our forced codependence with capitalism is our interdependence with one another.  

[MID ROLL]

Keeping this political education and psychoeducation free and accessible couldn’t happen without your support. Please consider sharing your financial resources with me to sustain our decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational parenting movement. You’ll receive access to monthly community Zoom meeting to digest the content and put your awareness into action together with a group accountability. Visit patreon.com/comebacktocare to support me in solidarity and do this healing work together. It’s patreon.com/comebacktocare. Alright back to the episode.

[MID ROLL END]

So, let’s explore interdependence and how you can practice it in your daily parenting. This is a snippet from Ep 15: Four Ways to Practice Interdependence in Parenting. I want to share the part about interdependence with you because it’s relevant to our discussion today and I had an absolute joy putting it together. Here, we, go.

Interdependence: What it means and feels like

“Interdependence is mutual dependence between things” wrote adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy. It means my survival and wellbeing is connected to yours, to my spirits and ancestors, to all beings, and to the land. It means that when we all have what we need and share the excess, we flourish together. It means that I got you and you got me because we both matter to each other. 

While individualism seeks dominance and competition, interdependence focuses on wealth sharing, cooperation, and earth-honoring ecosystem building. 

To paint a picture of what this cooperation and connectedness look like in interdependence, allow me to turn to my 4 best teachers: nature, children, social justice organizing, and my beloved Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh. 

In her essay, the Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance, Robin Wall Kimmerer joyfully and gratefully described harvesting a small fruit called serviceberries. Rooted in her indigenous wisdom, these berries are gifts. She wrote quote “we recognize that these are gifts from our plant relatives, manifestations of their generosity, care, and creativity. When we speak of these not as things or products or commodities, but as gifts, the whole relationship changes. I can’t help but gaze at them, cupped like jewels in my hands, and breathe out my gratitude.”.

Dr. Kimmerer continues quote “In the presence of such gifts, gratitude is the intuitive first response. The gratitude flows toward our plant elders and radiates to the rain, to the sunshine. Gratitude is so much more than a polite “thank you.” It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging…Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need… We take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver.” End quote

Her words wake up every cell in my body because they remind me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching of Inter-Be that I grew up practicing. 

Thich Nhat Hanh taught that nothing and nobody exists alone. In a single flower, when we look at the flower deeply and with mindfulness, we can see sunshine, earth, rain, and the body of the cosmos. Each bite of an orange can be filled with gratitude for the grocery store workers, delivery truck drivers, farmers, the orange farm’s soil, sun, and rain…all of whom made the orange you’re delighting in possible. There’s no separation. The flower doesn’t exist without the cosmos in it. The orange doesn’t exist without sunshine and earth. We don’t exist in separation from all who came before us. So, to be means to inter-be. 

Like Dr. Kimmerer described, Thich Nhat Hanh highlights the gratitude that connects all of us in an interdependent ecosystem. In a climate where there’s so much division, my heart and my rage find so much inner peace when I remember that despite our differences in our intersecting identities we’re deeply connected with one another. Our liberation certainly binds us together. 

While gratitude deepens the sense of belonging, reciprocity nurtures our interconnection. Dr. Kimmerer describes reciprocity as “to give a gift in return.” She wrote quote “What could I give these plants in return for their generosity? It could be a direct response, like weeding or water or a song of thanks that sends appreciation out on the wind. Or indirect, like donating to my local land trust so that more habitat for the gift givers will be saved, or making art that invites others into the web of reciprocity… I accept the gift from the bush and then spread that gift with a dish of berries to my neighbor, who makes a pie to share with his friend, who feels so wealthy in food and friendship that he volunteers at the food pantry. You know how it goes.” End quote.

I wonder what other examples of interdependence you witness around you.

I see it in small acts of kindness around me when a mom pitches in to pick up her friend’s children from school and her friend practices reciprocity for that kindness by making dinner that evening. It’s not out of obligation, politeness, or you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. They do it because they care about each other and when they’re well, they flourish…together. 

I see it in bigger acts of kindness in a community. From meal trains to mutual aid networks of parents working together to address the baby formula shortage in the US. 

I see it in social justice movements. In 1977, a group of disability activists in San Francisco staged a sit-in that lasted 28 days to advocate for disability rights. During the sit-in, members of the Black Panther Party brought food to the activists every night. As described in the documentary Crip Camp, one member explained that the Black Panthers brought food because quote “you are trying to make the world a better place for everybody so we are going to feed you.” End quote. Boom! Interdependence. 

I see interdependence all around me, especially in children. 

Young children between ages 4 and 12 also know how to cooperate and work interdependently with their friends, otherwise they might be kicked out of the friend group or not invited to their friends’ birthday parties. Next time your child has a playdate with a bunch of their friends, I invite to you watch how these young children negotiate what, where, and how to play together. It’s quite beautiful to see young children who are typically assertive and spunky sort of tone their behavior down to be a team player. Michael Tomasello, an American psychologist whose work focuses on evolutionary anthropology wrote in his paper titled, The Role of Ontogeny in the Evolution of Human Cooperation, that humans learn early on to adjust their behaviors to cooperate with others or to be a team player.

It seems like our children simply understand these concepts: cooperation and fairness. So I dug a little deeper like 200 million years ago deeper. Yup, did I tell you I’m Gemini Sun and Sagittarius rising. I love getting to the root of things and getting curious. 

In the journal article, Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis, Michael Tomasello and colleagues describe how our ancestors 200 million years ago had to learn how to find food together, also known as collaborative foraging. As a group, they learned to work together to find large animal carcasses that were recently killed and they had to learn how to share the food fairly. Tomasello and colleagues write quote “Individuals who attempted to hog all of the food at a scavenged carcass would be actively repelled by others.” End quote. Hello cooperation and interdependence. 

All of this goes to show that interdependence is just as common and available to us as independence, even though Western societies prioritize individualism. Exploring the indigenous wisdom of interdependence highlighted by Dr. Kimmerer and the teaching of Inter-be by Thich Nhat Hanh always brings hope to my heart. My feet feel energized as they’re rooted and plugged into this web of reciprocity or in this ecosystem of interdependence. Then, I get to witness interdependence that’s already around me- in children, in social justice action, and in our human evolution. The possibilities of practicing cooperation, wealth sharing, and relationship building are already here even though the water we’re swimming in keeps asking us to choose scarcity, competition, exploitation, and dominance. 

Now shall we connect all of these dots to our decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational parenting practices?

Practicing Interdependence in Daily Parenting

I have 4 invitations for you to experiment with, if you’d like. Two of them are for you and the other two are for you to explore with your child. Let’s start with you because you’re important. 

The two invitations I’d love to share with you are first, to reconnect with the people you trust and second, to reconnect with the land you’re a guest on. 

Reconnecting with the people you trust means building your community of families that you can give love to and also receive love from when you need help. 

Angela Garbes wrote in her beautiful book Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change quote “In the current whirl of life, when professional work, domestic work, and childcare are all happening simultaneously under the same roof, it is easy to feel defeated by the duties of mothering. To view a child as a nuisance- and to feel guilty for the thought. These sentiments are not indicative of personal failing.” Garbes continues quote “According to Andrea Landry, an Indigenous Anishinaabe activist from Pays Plat Fist Nation, they are the legacy of settler colonialism. Prior to colonization, ‘we had children with us at all times and that’s how they learned their roles in our communities’, says Landry. Children are taught by elders based on their interests. If adults noticed that a young girl was drawn to plants, the healers and medicine people would take her under their wings and mentor her. Now, occupied with work that keeps us apart from our children most day, Landry says, we’ve lost sight of our children’s strengths because we’re so busy with capitalism and colonialism.” End quote.

An antidote to the individualistic mentality in parenting is to raise our children in a trusted community where the responsibilities of parenting can be shared. 

Garbes shares that quote “in community, life feels less exhausting, its weightiness distributed. Not too much to bear, bolstered by love…Building relationships can be messy and awkward. Interdependence requires real communication, empathy, sorting through calendars and logistics. It means misunderstandings, problem solving, asking and listening, not just popping in and dropping off but sometimes lingering and running late.” End quote.

Reconnecting with the land you’re a guest on is my other invitation for you. As an immigrant and a guest on this stolen land of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations of Chicago, I feel so humbled and grateful each time I hit the record button and make this podcast for you. While land acknowledgement is important, land sovereignty is even more critical. 

Jade Begay, an Indigenous rights and climate activist, wrote quote “One of the most critical ways to dismantle ongoing colonization is to return land to Indigenous people. As its rightful stewards, we know how to care for the planet, to make it sustainable for all life. Returning land to Indigenous hands would have a ripple effect on addressing other crises: shutting down the extractive industries that are fueling climate change, removing the violent state that defends them, and building sustainable water and energy systems for all.” End Quote. 

I’d love to invite you to check out the Native Governance Center’s website. They are a Native-led organization that lays out very clear and concrete actions we can take to support land sovereignty such as voluntary land taxes, land return, and showing up to protests. I’ll leave the link in the show notes for you. 

Now let’s shift gears to some of the ways you can practice interdependence with your child. 

In general, interdependence in parenting looks a lot like decentering your power as a parent so that you can meet your child where they’re at. It’s about power-with instead of power-over. For example, when you feel like you need to teach your child a lesson or set limits, perhaps connect emotion to emotion first. Then, when your child’s ready to hear you out and learn from you, teach from the stance of I’m right here with you instead of letting me control and dominate you. More on this in episodes 4, 12, and 13.

In this episode, the two invitations I’d love to offer for you to experiment with your child are first, practicing enoughness and second, practicing gratitude. 

Toddlers and preschoolers begin to understand concepts like fairness as they’re learning to share. I believe they’re at this precious point in their development to explore how much is enough and then share the excess with others. For example, after your child has had a few bites of snacks, how would it be for you to bring their curiosity to their body? Are you full? How is your body telling you that you’re full? Or, wow we have three more cookies left. We can ask your friends if they would like some cookies and then share. It’s a practice of looking at what we have as gifts that are abundant instead of as products that are scarce. So that your child can begin taking what they need and sharing the rest…out of love not charity and out of abundance not obligation. After they share those cookies or toys, perhaps you can direct their curiosity towards their feelings and body again: how do you feel when you share those cookies? How do you feel when you see that your friends can enjoy the cookies too even you have less to eat…but you’re eating together, talking, laughing, or just sitting next to one another reading a book or watching something on an iPad? This way your child can begin to sense into what togetherness and interconnection look like in practice and feel like in their body. 

Another option is a practice of gratitude through mindful eating that Thich Nhat Hanh taught me. Many cultures across the world have traditions of giving thanks to the food that they’re about to consume. Toddlers and preschoolers are also very curious about where their food came from. And you can be as scientific as you’d like. I don’t usually go into photosynthesis and all of that. I keep it sweet and simple and stick to soil, sunshine, and water that help grow the vegetables. So that , for example, these tomatoes are gifts from Earth and we have a responsibility to take care of the Earth too. Other times I talk about farmers, delivery truck drivers, and grocery store workers who put food at the grocery store. And we practice giving thanks to these people to highlight our interdependence and connection with other people. 

You know your style and you know your child. As always, please play and experiment with these invitations to make them yours. 

I know you love your child and I see the extra intentionality you put into infusing social justice concept like interdependence in your daily parenting practice. Thank you so much for doing this liberation work together. 

To wrap up our exploration today, we talked about how guilt and growth are two sides of the same coin in Ep 32: How to Work with Parenting Guilt and Self-Judgment Pt. II. The more you know about parenting, the more of “omg I can’t believe I did that to my child.” And you can use this guilt as your catalyst for future parenting action that’s more aligned with your values. 

In the same vein, with any progress comes pissing people off, especially people who want to protect and preserve the oppressive status quo. And I know that naming this out loud strikes at the heart of our codependence and our fear of abandonment. 

Recently I had to cut some people loose and my fear of abandonment kept me stuck in codependence with these people who didn’t deserve my energy or attention anymore. Does that resonate with you?

My ancestors came into my dreams and told me to respect myself...respect myself enough to bless and release those people. They said self-love is here to stay but this is the season for self-respect. 

So from my codependence to yours and from my fear of abandonment to yours: may you and I respect our humanity, divinity, and dignity enough to stand firmly in our power. So that we stop abandoning ourselves to be codependent with others. So that we stop contorting, conforming, performing, and making ourselves small for others’ comfort. 

Ahh, I’m excited to take a brief break to rest and recharge. While I’m recharging, if the Podcast has filled your heart cup and you’d like to help nurture our work together, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps other parents find the Podcast and do this unlearning together. I read each and every review with humility and gratitude. I’ll see you in November and we’ll wrap Season 4 together at the end of the year. 

Every link to the research studies, books, and extra resources mentioned in this episode along with the transcript is in the episode show notes for you at comebacktocare.com/podcast.

As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.