This Sunday, 84% of United States adults are expected to recognize Mother’s Day — to lift up and highlight the motherhood journey and the bonds that come with it.
Other countries also observe Mother’s Day, but on different dates.
In her new book, “Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey Through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries,” journalist Abigail Leonard explores the experience of parenting across different cultures.
The book follows the lives of four women in the United States, Kenya, Finland and Japan as they enter a new chapter of life as mothers.
Leonard joined The World’s Host Carol Hills to discuss her experiences. You can listen to the interview by clicking on the blue player above. The following is an excerpt from the book, focusing on Chelsea, a new mother in Kenya.
For Chelsea, the decision to name her Ada after her own mother was easy. But choosing a last name has proven harder. Kenyan children can have as many as four names—to honor relatives, appease ancestral spirits, and affirm community identity—and still disagreements arise within families as relatives vie to have their line represented. Ada though, has just one name. No one in her family suggests another; they have not even come to meet her.
Chelsea’s aunt, who took Chelsea’s younger brother in after their mother died, has not reached out. In a culture where children also call their aunts “mother” and view them almost as parents, her absence is particularly disappointing.
“I guess they’re still not happy with the idea of me having a baby right now,” Chelsea explains quietly. She suspects it’s because she had the baby out of wedlock but tries not to dwell on it. “It’s just going to stress me out for no reason, so I want to focus on raising the child and building a career and if they choose to be part of it, that’s well and good, if not, pia iko sawa, it’s still okay.”
Perhaps more painfully, Joseph also has not come to see his daughter, or suggested a name from his side of the family, which he’ll need to do soon for it to be listed on the birth certificate. They do still exchange videos though, so he knows the intimate details of their life: One day Ada was thrusting her tiny fists in the air with excitement, and the next, practicing a furrowed brow. “Every day is something new, so seeing these little changes is exciting, I like it,” Chelsea says contentedly. And Joseph is helping them financially at least. Between that and Chelsea’s full salary, which she still receives during her three-month maternity leave, they remain financially secure.
Still, there’s no guarantee that Joseph will continue to help. Chelsea could petition for formal child support, but she says she might not be entitled to much because they’re unmarried and, she adds with some apprehension, it would be an irreversible step into the unknown. “Once you go to court, there’s no going back.” She could burn bridges with Joseph, she says, and Ada might lose her relationship with him forever. “I want the conviction to care for her to come from his heart, not because he was forced by someone to do it.”
She knows intimately what it feels like for a daughter to realize her father supported her out of obligation rather than love. When she was in primary school, before her stepfather entered the picture, Chelsea’s father never paid for her schooling, except in class five when he bought her uniform. That small generosity was so unusual that she still remembers it. Then everything changed in secondary school. “He started paying my school fees and I got a medical card from him, so I felt like, maybe my dad is coming back into my life.” For years, he’d seemed almost like a figment of her imagination, but now here he was, ensuring she was well cared for and getting a good education; finally expressing his love.
As soon as she graduated, though, his financial support stopped, and the medical card soon expired. Years later, after her mother died, Chelsea found a letter among her things. It was a summons for her father from the Federation of Women Lawyers, an organization that offers free legal aid to women. That was the first time she understood clearly, heartbreakingly, that her mother had sued her father for child support. “It was not a good thing to find out someone only supported you because they were forced by a court to do so,” she says ruefully. “I don’t want the same thing to happen to Ada, so if the father decides to support her, fine, and if he doesn’t, at least she knows he made that choice, rather than that he was being forced, which is worse.”
Jane Achieng, a Luo historian at the University of Nairobi, says that before colonialism upended centuries-old traditions, Chelsea’s Luo community would have helped her, likely even forced Joseph to take some responsibility for his child. “The social protections were very strong and there were no outsiders as there are today, people with no community, just floating.” The extended family clan was the primary economic unit, and communities shared child-rearing resources, unlike today’s nuclear families that conserve assets to pay school fees, for example. And the very concept of wealth was different. Historically, Kenyan families measured their fortunes in terms of cattle, land, and children. “Children were the most important part of the wealth,” says Achieng. She argues that modern expressions of affluence—like expensive cars that sit unused in gated compounds—don’t produce the same social benefits.
In Chelsea’s case, Joseph might have taken more interest in Ada if the culture still ascribed such high value to children. While today single motherhood is relatively common—six of every ten Kenyan women will have at least one episode of single motherhood by forty-five—historically it was rare. That’s in part because today women are more economically empowered and can leave bad or abusive relationships. But it’s also because of a traditional practice called tero or “wife inheritance,” in which the community organized marriages for women who’d lost husbands.
Asande Bonyo, a ninety-one-year-old Luo woman, explains that when her first husband died, she was still quite young and so she married another man from the same family, Nyangoro, and they had several children. When Nyangoro later died in a tractor accident, she married a third member of the family, Oketch. “That was the tradition back then, but if you refused the next marriage, that was also fine.”
The tero system was also polygamous, and when she married Oketch, he already had two wives, each of whom had their own shamba, a plot of farmland in the family settlement. Bonyo says she and her co-wives formed a tight familial unit. “We loved each other; my co-wives loved me so much that they would even wipe me with water,” she says using an expression that connotes deep, unconditional love. Six decades later, she still lives on that same plot of land, next to her co-wives.
Bonyo gave birth to eight children, six of whom survived to adulthood. After the birth of each child, her co-wives and others in her community brought food and gifts. “Those were very good days,” she smiles; “you would be cooked for and would just eat.”
She recalls filling up on fish and arrowroot, a starchy vegetable thought to have medicinal properties, and not returning to her farmwork for over a month. The traditional rest period was forty days, at which point she celebrated with a ritual bath, similar to the Japanese practice of “raising the floor”, returning to the outside world after a month of postpartum care provided by a new mother’s family and community. It’s a kind of cultural convergence in which groups on different sides of the globe landed on almost identical postpartum traditions of rest and community support, to address the same biological reality.