Kusungira

Come and rest for a while.

In Zimbabwe, among many families, including in the Shona and Ndebele tradition in which I was raised, Kusungira is a season of lovingly holding a new mother before and after birth. Traditionally, she returns to her parents' home, where family and community surround her with rest, nourishing food, practical help, encouragement, and time to heal as she gradually settles into motherhood.

There is something profoundly beautiful about this tradition.

Before you fully step into caring for another life, you return to the people who first cared for yours. You return to the first place that held you. Those who once carried you now carry you again as you learn to carry someone else.

Parenting doesn't begin in isolation. It begins within relationships that have been holding us all along.

Before mothers carry babies… families carry mothers.

Kusungira isn't simply postpartum support. It is an intergenerational handoff. One generation quietly says, We carried you. Now we'll carry you while you learn to carry another.

In many ways, Kusungira is a return to the Mbereko one last time before becoming someone else's Mbereko.

It reminds us that before we become a place of safety, comfort, and belonging for our own children, we are gently gathered back into the embrace of those who first offered that gift to us.

This is the beautiful continuity of care that has always lived within the village. It is one of the many ways communities remind us that caregivers deserve to be held too.