S.amantha Cristoforetti is ready to return in the space. On the eve of his second mission, he made some interesting statements on the subject of childcare. From the point of view of a mother who doesn’t want to give up on hers professional growth.
The new mission
Saturday 23 April at 11.26 (Italian time) the launch that will bring the crew of Crew-4 on the International Space Station. The four protagonists of this new adventure (Jessica Watkins, Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Samantha Cristoforetti) are ready for departure, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape CanaveralFlorida.
This is the second mission in space by Samantha Cristoforetti (in 2014 he participated in the ISS Expedition 42/43 Futura). He will spend five months in orbit on the International Space Station for the Minerva mission of the European Space Agency.
The statements on the management of children
In an interview with The messengerCristoforetti shared some details of her life as a mother of the two children Kelsi Amel and Dorian Lev. “How many post-its has he put on the refrigerator, since he will be absent for five months and in any case someone at home sends the family forward?” Asks the reporter. And the astronaut’s answer is simple: “I have a partner, the father of my children, who will take care of both running the house and our children. I have to say that it already has, always. He has always been the main reference figure both for childcare and for all household matters ».
His partner, Lionel, is a French engineer. The two live – along with their children – near the ESA astronautics center in Cologne, Germany. Samantha Cristoforetti’s response on their family management, at the moment of her departure, ends with an elementary sentence, but which says a lot: “It is not as radical a change as it may seem“.
Samantha Cristoforetti.
Overcoming a pattern (now obsolete)
In fact, what the statements of the first Italian woman in the crews of the European Space Agency tell is an equitable division of parental duties. Overcoming the pattern that the mother should take on the responsibilities of caring for the children, while the husband is busy elsewhere. The total serenity that Samantha Cristoforetti conveyed in her response is the answer to a model (now outdated) that sometimes comes to define a “mammo” a father of a family who decides to devote himself to the management of children.
Regarding the difficulty of explaining to his children that he will be away for some time, the astronaut confessed: “I believe that the sons and daughters of astronauts grow up knowing that there is a possibility that at some point sooner or later it will happen that mom and / or dad will go to space for a while. Then it is clear that somehow you have to manage the absence, the nostalgia“.
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