POMO Child Rearing

How would you bring up a child if you took the lessons from postmodernism literally? The young Swedish writers Athena Farrokhzad and Tova Gerge present a postmodern parenting guide, a matricide or an infantile declaration of passion. Please read it biographically.

Do not pretend the child exists as a subject with any greater relevance than all the other surrounding objects with pretensions to subjectivity – be they present or absent.

Let your child incarnate whatever object you need at that moment. Every time you put its body to some new use, exclaim: "I baptise thee... (umbrella, shoehorn, broth, dialectic, etc)."

Tell It

For many months after Leta’s birth I felt like I was going through an identity crisis, even after my hospital stay when I could think about things more clearly. I didn’t know I was going through it then, but I had many symptoms of a mid-life crisis, including excessive drinking and lashing out at the most important people in my life. I can look back at those months now and see what was going on, that suddenly I was a mother, but didn’t feel like I thought mothers were supposed to feel. It was as if overnight I had gone from working in the mail room to becoming the CEO, and I had no idea how to run a company. I didn’t want to run a company. (More here.)