Resisting Motherhood

One of the first few things that anyone tells me is that I don't look 'old' enough to be a mother.

I usually do not respond but the remark always reminds me of family photographs and the old albums I loved burying my nose in as a child. I always think of those young frail looking women- women in the family, my mother, her friends, sisters- with babies in tow that cautiously appear on the blurred edges, distant background or the fuzzy middles of those black and white, and occasionally color, photographs.  As a child, inhaling the dust of those disintegrating photographs, I would imagine their stories, the everyday-ness of their lives, on what lay behind those half smiles, transfixed solemn stares or toothy laughter. I would look at their babies, making connections, figuring out resemblances between the child and man/woman, but also noting the look of exhaustion, bone thin weariness that the women wore like lipstick.

No matter how prepared, every woman is unprepared for motherhood. I could not imagine the state of perpetual wakefulness and broken sleep that has come to characterize my 'sleeping' hours ever since Sophie, my daughter.

Sophie, my daughter. It seems so strange to even say it. Sometimes I wonder at how God thought me fit to be a mother when I can barely make sense of my own life. Sometimes I wonder if all women thought the same thought but continued with growing children up, come what may. Perhaps others too, like me, have struggled with the definition of motherhood. We don't seem to experience the emotions we are supposed to. Worry, the urge to care, the desire to protect are natural to every parent. But this glorious paean to the Tiger-Warrior-Nurturer that resounds in every word spoken written read heard about the 'mother' is not me. 

Should I be worried about it? 

I have certainly struggled with my transition to motherhood. I have resented my changed status, become angry at what I am 'expected' to do, felt adamant when I did not perform 'motherly' things. These were feelings that did not occur only 'post-partum' as doctors fancifully put it. These are feelings that rise to the surface like the 'occasional' Hurricane Katrina.  I have certainly not been a role model mother. For the sake of my mental sanity, I left my baby behind at home with a woman I do not entirely trust, to go to work that is not entirely satisfactory.For the sake of my desire to get back to where I started from, I left my baby behind. I have felt terribly guilty, torn between wanting to stay at home with her and going mad when I did  so. 

I understood why those women in the photographs wore those barely clenched smiles. 

Today, as on other days, when I left for work, climbing into my car, and my baby wailed after me saying 'Amma , Amma', my heart tightened and a half suppressed thought lingered in my throat.

Perhaps it is not motherhood that is glorious.  It is a child's utter utter dependence on you, the mother, that makes motherhood. The knowledge that I am irreplaceable, so needed is a tremendous ego boost but it is also, I think, what compels women like me to figure out 'motherhood' as constructed by others down the ages.

The Conservatives

I am no feminist. It is true that I completed an  MPhil course on a lengthy and unwieldly look at feminist theory across the ages and spaces. It is true that I have always been an (loud but behind the doors) advocate for justice for women, a defender of the female faith, with righteous indignation bubbling inside me when I hear of educated women falling prey to patriarchal vices.

But always, always, with a weariness that goes with the well worn shoe.

I am no feminist. My mother whipped me into becoming one.

Despite the metaphor, I kid you not.

She refused to socialize me into gendered identities. She wouldn't give me Barbies and other such excessively femininely anatomized dolls. She encouraged me to play every physical sport on earth. She was tireless in her determination that I should at all costs have a career. I wasn't allowed the luxury of even contemplating the possibility of just being happily married in the future. She was vehement in her tirades against bondages that tie down women ideologically.

All this, of course, right through the ages of 0-18.

There were contradictions. I saw her helpless against some choices she thought she had made. I saw her floundering, many a time, against the compelling rationale and logic of tradition and male reason. She had only her inexplicable reasoning that can't be put into social language to depend upon.

Nevertheless, our generation, this generation of women who ride the waves of Twittering Faces and are surveyed by the masculine eye on the covers of bidding scam cover stories, be it spectrum or sweat equity,  are only The Conservatives.

I am the spokesperson for The Conservatives. I have thrown to the sea the monetary and emotional investment my parents made in my education, years of studious toil, academic excellence, for the sake of marital peace and concord. Unable to argue my case or defend my right or have the courage to take a stand, I am, back to where we started from. A prehistoric anomaly, date me beyond much before the Suffragettes.

Or, take the woman in the predicament cubicle adjacent to me. Lazy about her intellectual abilities, she is much more interested in her husband's career than her own. She has a mother who rose from Lab Assistant to Professor and Head of the Department, who managed home and work,  faced all odds (and ends) to walk a very thin line of frustration and achievement. Yet, my friend, a co conservative, happily gives up a lucrative bank job because she has a high income group husband and was all set to go to the US immediately after marriage.

Yet another co conservative gives up yet another lucrative government bank job on being persuaded by her husband (perhaps) of the lack of challenge in a sarkari naukri, of the inappropriateness of her long working hours for a happy married life. She too is the offspring of the working mother syndrome.

We may head public or private institutions. We are 'allowed' a prominent voice in the administration of public and external affairs. We are 'given' representation on workforces, task teams, educational institutions, scholarship processes, university admissions. But we make choices, willingly, that date back to beyond. Even our grandmothers have been more self righteous.

Complacent in our 'relative' freedom or the lack of war against the male bastion, we luxuriate in the space our fore-mothers made for us. The foray into the outside world our mothers fought for, we shrug aside and relax in air-conditioned cars bought by our husbands. A false sense of economic security lulls us. A good education, an MBA, has ' bought' us a coveted husband with whom we can speak in strange tongues and familiar dictions of interest. For all other purposes, we continue to display our husbands' underwear on the domestic washing lines of marital triumph.

In a nut shell

To multi-task is a woman's destiny.Her destiny is not her femininity, which is altogether questionable. It is not her sexual identity, which is complicated. It is not related to the choices that she makes in life. The choices she makes are imagined. She has no choice.

And yet, she has to multi-task. Not so that she can fulfill all her responsibilities or because, as a modern woman, she has multiple roles to play.

Multi-task or Perish. That is why it is her destiny.

Of course, some may say that some women have it nice. They merely have to wave a hand in the air and this or that is done! Those women don't exist. They are fanciful creatures in our envious and our men's lethargic imagination.

I walk a winding path from the back gate of the Institute to its shrouded center. It is a quaint little jogger's path, reminiscent of University greens colonized by students, dogs and families who sprawl, read, listen to music, talk or just watch others walk by. It only reminds me of other spaces. There is no such communal activity here. Only the Institute's self sufficient internal organization symbolized by women behind vegetable burdened push carts calling on other women who step out briefly for the ordinary potato perusal- to go back to scanning the weeks' The Economist.

Or perhaps they are also busy coordinating their lives so that it makes sense to an outsider like me looking in through the windows. Perhaps they are checking in on babies, on pots on the fire, on the spot on the floor, turning a blind eye to the laundry, sighing after the speck of dust that resolutely clings to the edge of the table. They are, like the rest of us, barely managing to put themselves in order to go out and battle a world that has sized them up and told them what to do or what not to do. They trail in surreptitiously late and leave early, to catch up with the thoughts they left behind at home.

The woman who comes to sweep and swab my house has aged with the cunning she has had to exercise to barely survive a drunkard, five children, two grandchildren and a decrepit everyday life. She is old at forty and shrewd for her years. She keeps the tabs on the ways of the well to do. She tells me which keys turn for which door and how to keep to keep the stair railings shining.

What happens when one day the rationale for such an existence disappears out of the window? When the centers we had thought we had established for our lives disintegrate or just move away? What happens when there is simply no need to do what one did everyday grumbling, muttering but purposefully?

Will we be able to find the courage to stop, stand and stare? Or will we raise swords, imagining that the point is not lost after all, those centers of our lives have not crumbled away?