Zidia got sober before having kids. But she still wasn’t ready

Redcliffe mum Zidia Valdebenito recalls a night when her second child, Zye, had just gotten to sleep and the elder one, Matayo, started crying and woke the baby up.

She ran into the room and started yelling in the toddler’s face, terrifying him.

“I think the turning point for me was when my son reacted to what I did to him with violence,” she says. “When I put him in the timeout, he grabbed the chair and he smashed it.

Zidia Valdebenito is a Redcliffe-base businesswoman and mother. Credit: Parent TV

“I just realised what I’m doing is not working, and so I had to make some drastic changes.”

Zidia is an example of a parent who had to deal with her own personal trauma before she could successfully raise her kids.

The child of Chilean immigrants who came to Australia following the 1973 coup, she is an alcoholic whose parents were alcoholics.

She went through counselling and was sober for nine years before becoming a parent. She thought raising kids “would be easy”, but found she had unresolved issues.

“You just tend to deal with things the way they happened to you as a child. I was all about trying to instil fear to get some power control dominance. I was a bit of a bully, you know, as a mum.

“I had to do things like lock myself in my room so I didn’t lash out at the kids. And I would, you know, just yell and get the pillow and I would smash it on the bed because I was scared that I was gonna hurt them.”

Zidia’s story is part of the film Seen, a parenting documentary by Gold Coast filmmaker Hailey Bartholomew.

Bartholomew was inspired by the fact that up to one in four of Australian children are being raised by a parent with mental illness.

Zidia Valdebenito (right) with her partner Andrew and children Zye and Matayo.Credit: Parent TV

“We may feel that as parents we are not doing what our parents did to us,” Bartholomew says. “But unless we work through our stuff, we inadvertently bring that to the table.”

Bartholomew, who has struggled with depression and ADHD, conceived the film (with producer Sam Jockel from ParentTV) after her own children had reached adulthood.

In addition to Zidia she interviewed NRL player and boxer Joe Williams, a suicide survivor who is trying to make up for being absent from his two teenage kids’ childhoods.

Mum Anne Unwin, meanwhile, had to find empathy for her kids after realising she had been raised to suppress her emotions.

And dad Terry Downes had to overcome the influence of a hyper-critical father to be the parent he wanted to be.

“When you’ve got challenging things going on in your home, it’s not necessarily the kid’s fault, it’s coming from somewhere else,” says Maggie Dent, who is one of the parenting experts interviewed in the film.

“[The film] is gonna be really tough for some people to watch. But what I loved is how some of the people who share their stories say things that just about every one of us have said.”

Dent herself confesses to almost hitting one of her sons before becoming a world-renowned parenting expert.

“Fortunately I was able to stop myself mid-flight with my hand to realise, hang on, that’s not the mother I’m going to be.

“It’s never too late to improve your relationship with your kids of any age.”

Ultimately Zidia, who now works as a counsellor on family and addiction issues, was able to reach out to her own longtime counsellor for help in dealing with motherhood.

“The main learning for me was always to go within. It really meant having to go back to my childhood and realise, ‘man, this is what my mom did to me.’

“This is why I love this film. It’s because it doesn’t put the focus on the child. It puts the focus on the parent to actually stand up and do something. You, as an adult, want to hold yourself accountable.”

Seen is premiering at the Randwick Ritz on March 2 and having screenings at HOTA, Five Star Cinemas New Farm, Talara Primary School, Event Cinemas North Lakes and Nambour Cinema, March 9-April 23.