Who's the Mama?

14 minutes ago

6 min read

It happened on a Sunday morning and I swear I was NOT ready for it!

There was a Sunday morning. I won't tell you exactly when — when I was standing at the bottom of the stairs, running late for church because I was the praise and worship leader and I absolutely had to be there before service started. My brothers, Mike and Matthew, were dragging their feet, and I heard myself yell up the stairs: "If you don't hurry up, I'm leaving you!"

And I froze.

Because that was not my voice. That was Mama Ceci's voice coming out of my body.

My brothers must have no

ticed it too, because once we got in the car, they looked at each other and then looked at me and said with the particular kind of smile that only siblings who survived the same childhood can share — "Okay, Mama Ceci."

I had officially become my mother!

Matthew, Michael and Phebe at Mount Rainier, WA (August 1, 2015)

The Loop Nobody Tells You About

There's a thing that happens when you're an immigrant daughter raising children of your own. You don't just parent your kids — you parent with the ghosts of how you were parented. Every time you raise your voice, set a boundary, insist on a routine, or find yourself hiding in the bathroom because it's all just too much. You're operating with software that was written long before you were old enough to understand it.

My mother, Mama Ceci, raised three children with a kind of discipline that, as a child, felt like fear. She didn't play games. You moved when she said move, you stopped when she said stop, and if she called your name once, you did not make her call it twice. Growing up, I thought it meant she didn't like me very much. It took becoming a therapist and then a mother to understand what it actually meant.

It meant she loved us too much to let us become people who embarrassed ourselves.

In our culture, the way your children carry themselves in public is a direct reflection of who you are. Mama Ceci grew up watching her own mother enforce that standard, and she simply passed it down. When she speaks about her mother, there's this quiet reverence — "She was a straight woman. She won't give you a chance to fool." No excuses, no shortcuts, no bringing disgrace to the family name. She took that and brought it to three kids on a different continent. And honestly? It worked. I mean look at Phebe today ;-)

But Here's Where It Gets Complicated

I'm a therapist. I spent years working specifically with children and families, watching the ripple effects of how parents show up or don't for their kids. And in that work, I started to see the ways that fear-based discipline, even when it comes from love, can leave marks.

I saw adults who didn't know how to communicate when they were upset because they'd spent their whole childhoods being told that speaking up meant talking back. I saw people who had learned to suppress and endure rather than name and process. And I recognized some of those people, quietly, in myself.

So when I became a mother to three boys — Kwame, Kweku, and Kobby — I made some conscious choices. I wanted to be strict and safe. I wanted my children to be disciplined and heard. I wanted them to know that when they had something to say, there was space for them to say it, especially Kwame, my oldest, who is deeply sensitive and feels everything at full volume. Don't tell him, but he gets it from his mama.

This is where the tension lives for so many of us raising children between two cultures. The Ghanaian parenting model I grew up with is not wrong. But it was built for a different world, a different set of pressures, and let's be honest children who did not have iPads. Granted, I had the privilege of growing up in the Playstation and Sega era.

The PlayStation Situation

Recently, I was out of the house and called home. My son Kweku wanted to ask about the PlayStation. I could hear Mama Ceci in the background saying no. And in the same breath, I said yes.

What followed was the most polite generational standoff you've ever seen.

In my head, I was thinking: if he's on the game, he's occupied, and maybe that gives Mama Ceci a little peace. In her head, she was thinking: this child has homework to think about, and discipline doesn't take a day off. Neither of us was wrong. Both of us were parenting from completely different frameworks and our poor child was standing in the middle of it, very wisely deciding to listen to the one who said yes.

(He'd already done his homework. For the record.)

But this is what it looks like, day to day, when generations collide in a single household. Mama Ceci is not just a grandmother staying with us. She is actively parenting my children, checking their bags, enforcing routines, yelling when the iPad takes over someone's soul. And I am both grateful for that and sometimes, in the most loving way possible, at odds with it.

Who's the parent again? Some days, I genuinely don't know.

What Mama Ceci Taught Me (Whether I Liked It or Not)

Here's what's funny about becoming a mother: you stop seeing your childhood as something that happened to you and start seeing it as something that was given to you.

The same woman whose strictness once made me think she didn't like me is now the woman I watched watching me, noticing the way I check my children's backpacks, how I insist on the wash-hands-shoes-off-backpack routine when they walk through the door, how I'll raise my voice exactly once before it becomes a whole conversation.

"I've been watching you," she told me on this episode, and the way she said it with quiet pride hit differently than I expected.

She sees herself in me. And the parts she sees are the parts she worked hardest to give.

She also sees where I've done it differently. The allowing-them-to-talk-back-a-little thing. The explaining-my-reasoning thing. The letting-them-have-feelings-about-discipline thing. She doesn't always agree, but she sees it. And I think somewhere in her, she also understands it — because she said it herself: "You shouldn't let your children fear you too much. You have to show them love."

She knew this all along. She just expressed it through presence, discipline, and an unshakeable commitment to not letting her children become an embarrassment. That was her love language, born of necessity and culture and her own mother's voice ringing in her ears.

And now it rings in mine.

For the Sandwich Immigrants

If you're like me, the child of immigrants who is also raising children, you know this particular flavor of exhaustion. You're translating in both directions. Softening your mother's rules for your kids. Explaining your kids' feelings to your mother. Trying to honor both worlds without letting either one down.

And sometimes you hide in the bathroom for five minutes because it is all just too much and you are overstimulated and that is completely, entirely, one hundred percent okay.

You are not a bad parent for needing a break. You are not a bad daughter for doing some things differently. And you are not betraying your culture by wanting your children to be heard.

You're just navigating the middle. Like the rest of us.

One Last Thing

My mother told me in this episode that she sees the motherhood in me. That the care I give my children, the attention, the checking — she recognizes it because she put it there.

I'm not going to lie. I teared up a little.

Because for so long, I worried I wasn't enough. Wasn't strict enough, wasn't present enough, wasn't measuring up to the standard she had set. And what I found out, sitting across from her on this podcast, was that she'd been watching the whole time and she was proud.

Maybe that's the thing about immigrant mothers. They don't always say it the way we need to hear it. But they're always paying attention. And sometimes, on a random podcast episode, it all comes out.