The Agony and Ecstasy of Ethiopian Motherhood in American

By Mesrak Gessesse

Many young Ethiopian women came to the U.S. in the early 1970s. We hoped to finish college and return home. Few of us expected to be here more than eight years. Many of us were not willing or able to return to a Marxist Ethiopia.

After two decades in America, many of us have become mothers. We are now facing challenges that our mothers rarely faced. We must balance career, maternal responsibility, domestic duties and culture. “To get ahead” we are expected to work and contribute to the family income. We have to raise the children and teach them about their Ethiopian culture. We must guard our children from the excesses of American society. Oh! We also have to do the housework.

Motherhood for Ethiopian women in America is filled with emotional tribulation. We come from a very traditional society. Children have strong ties not only to the nuclear family but also the extended family. Even neighbors play a role in the upbringing of children. The broader community served to enforce discipline. Perfect strangers disciplined the rude child.

Raising children in America is not easy. We live in an environment where family ties do not seem to be very strong. There is much talk about children but not enough sacrifice and genuine community concern for their upbringing and guidance. Parents have little time to be with their children because they have to work. They also have their own entertainment needs. Children get much of their cultural information and values from television. By our traditional standards, much of these values do not appear to be wholesome.

As Ethiopian mothers living in America, our lives are dominated by fear, anxiety and guilt about our children. We agonize when we hand over our infants or toddlers to the baby sitter or day care center. Child care like many other things in the U.S. is a business. It is impersonal and mechanical.

We worry about our children’s safety in the hands of complete strangers. We worry about the quality of care they will get from minimum-wage child care staffers. We are horrified by reports of child abuse. We worry if the baby sitter is watching television while our babies lie helplessly in their cribs in unchanged diapers. We worry about our children getting into drugs. We tend to feel terribly
guilty.

As our children grow, we feel inadequate that we have not sufficiently transmitted our cultural values or helped them develop Ethiopian language skills. As working parents, we often have difficulty doing this on a regular basis. Some of us even avoid cultural education to spare our children cultural conflict. Of course, we feel guilty and even ashamed when a newly-arrived Ethiopian relative or American friend asks, “Does your child speaks your language?” There is always free advice: “You know, you must teach the children their language and culture. You don’t want them to forget, lose their identity….”

The absence of support networks compounds our problems. There are few programs available to teach young Ethiopians about their history, culture and language. There are few resources that we can tap to provide our children much needed cultural and linguistic experience. Obviously, these networks and resources can only alleviate the problem. The television culture, peer pressure, children’s “shame” of feeling culturally different mitigate harshly against any efforts to have sustained cultural and linguistic experience.

What can we do? First, we need to find a way to communicate with each other about our common problems. We could establish a newsletter. Second, we need to explore practical solutions to our most pressing problems. For instance, we can facilitate child care services by employing older Ethiopian women who now live in the US. Most of these women find themselves idle, bored and lonely. We could start a registry for such women and match them with compatible families. Our children could learn Ethiopian language skills and acquire basic cultural values in the process. We solve two problems in one stroke.

Ethiopian mothers should actively participate in the existing Ethiopian community centers, churches, mosques and other self-help organizations. It is possible to start family-oriented networks in every state and most cities.

In time, our children will want to know about their heritage and Ethiopia’s ancient civilization. It will be tragic if they should, one day, return complete strangers to the land of their mothers and fathers.
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Mesrak Gessesse resides in Victorville, California