To be or not to be
Every woman must choose whether or not to become a mother. And given that it’s a choice that creates potentially the most far-reaching ripples in her life than any other, it should be a choice in the true sense of the word, where choosing not to do it is as viable an alternative as choosing to do it, with no concessions for reasons that are cultural, anthropological, historical or even biological. In other words, just because women happen to be the sex born with the reproductive apparatus doesn’t mean they must put it to use.
Many women might find this proclamation quaint, a relic from a bygone era when women’s choices, over their bodies and their lives, were not available to them. And while you’d be right about that in a particular sort of way — it may indeed be quaint for the women with successful careers and LinkedIn profiles who presumably are reading this — for a vast majority of womanhood, these choices are still the chimeras that they once were for all of us.
I have nothing against motherhood. I owe a lot of who I am today to my mother and the almost unnatural, mind-bending strength that she somehow alchemied from her grief when my father passed away, to stand up for me and my future. It is a wonder in my life that I will probably never be able to demystify given I don’t see myself as having children of my own, as of now.
The question I am trying to grapple with here is not how motherhood limits a woman’s own self-expression and ambitions rooted in her individuality, though that is something I am inclined to believe in my own particular case. That’s a question for every woman to decide for herself. Unlike Simone de Beauvoir, whom I admire with a tenacity despite our serious disagreements, I do not believe that a woman’s biology, her capacity to bear children per se binds her in an inextricable sort of way to a life of relative unfulfillment which is second-rate to men. Yes, we do live in a man’s world, from which we have been successful in wringing more and more room for ourselves in the past 50 years, standing atop shoulders of renegades like de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan and many others (it is highly unfortunate that I am not aware of feminist icons from my own Indian cultural background yet). And it is also true that motherhood even now extracts a far bigger cost from woman in terms of their professional freedoms and personal ambitions than men. But I don’t see the sense in equating women’s biological capacities with their unfreedom per se, as de Beauvoir did. I think it possible today that a woman can choose to have children and still live life on her own terms. It will be a fight, and there are many contingencies such as financial freedom that this will depend upon; yet in principle it is possible, and has been made possible only through the sustained awareness that the feminists of the yore ignited and set in motion.
I am also aware of my own situatedness as belonging to that minority of women, who are in a position to think about motherhood as a choice, and not an inevitability. Being able to weigh the pros and cons of any decision is something we all do with respect to most life decisions- whether to take up this job or that, whether to move to this city, whether to save or to travel. Why then, would we not think about whether or not to have a child? A decision that will shape in many ways the future trajectory of our lives.
Not A Choice
Majority of us in societies world over, but more so in the developing countries like India, have neither the resources nor the grasp needed over their own will to make such a choice. I am talking of the vast multitudes of women in the Indian middle-class who are enablers for their entire family- husband, kids, in-laws — but are never returned the same courtesy. Our evolving sensibilities towards this sharp subjugation make us uneasy enough to want to call her by a different name — from a housewife she has now become a home-maker — without any underlying change in the substance of this role and its relationships to others. For these women, control over their own lives and over their bodies is still as chimeric as the pre-revolution era. Revolutions of feminism have either entirely bypassed them or the basic need for human dignity has turned them into happy accomplices in their own lack of freedom.
But when I talk of motherhood in this article, I am forced to talk about it at a more abstract level, as a unifying trait that women across class and culture divides share. Women who received the privileges that led them to build successful careers, and women who didn’t. Women who were brought up in environments of equality with their brothers, and those who weren’t. Broad unjustifiable strokes on the canvas of womanhood that abstract from women’s varied lived experiences, but are essential for me to indulge in to convey my basic thought on motherhood and its relationship to women per se.
And that thought is this: we think of motherhood as a natural extension of womanhood. It’s a notion that’s very hard to separate from your skin as something that is cultural, by which I mean it is something that is expected of women because only women have the reproductive apparatus. We think it natural, women become mothers because only they can. And it is my opinion that every decision taken by women to become a mother that’s taken without examining, and hopefully shredding this expectation to pieces, is one that is not free in any real sense.
Monica and Richard
I love Friends, like a billion other people on this planet. Monica, played to perfection by Courtney Cox , other than being my favourite of the six, also represents a progressive womanhood. She is free to pursue a career her mother thinks very little of, proposes to the man she loves rather than waiting around, but most importantly is willing to let go of someone she loves and sees a future with, because his choices on parenthood do not align with her own. She wants a baby, Richard doesn’t.
Let’s flip that equation for a second. Also let’s walk away from the perfect characters of the sitcom to the imperfect people that most of us are. It is my hypothesis that it would be exponentially harder for a woman, and rare, to assert her right to not have children against a man who unequivocally wants to be a father. ‘Exponentially hard’ I can live with, it is after all a hardwired cultural expectation scaffolded by biological unevenness of the two sexes. ‘Rare’ is what I have a problem with.
Why is it that women who choose to not have children are far outnumbered perhaps by men who exercise the same negative right? Is there something innate about women and motherhood? Is it natural for women, at least a vast majority of us, to want to be mothers? Is there a maternal instinct?
I partially echo de Beauvoir on the answer to this question. I think the maternal instinct is something that is born after the fact. It is something that grows in us because of the extensive changes that our minds and our bodies undergo in the course of carrying and birthing a child. And I am even inclined to say that it could be something that we subconsciously imbibe because for a mother to say that she doesn’t feel any natural motherhood instincts is guaranteed to make people look at her funny.
The struggle against expectations of a pious, ever-giving motherhood and the resulting feelings of inadequacy and guilt are something women have experienced and documented for years. In the most moving and penetrating excerpt on this that I’ve come across, the celebrated poet Adrienne Riche wrote in her journal in 1960s :
“My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.”
Shirley Radl writes hauntingly in the book titled Mother’s Day Is Over of having bought the myth of idyllic motherhood and of struggles “to pursue her own interests against overwhelming odds”.
Many other feminists have spoken openly about the struggles to balance their individuality with their motherhood. Are these the odd ones out? Or did they become feminist icons because they echo something that most women who are mothers experience but don’t have the vocabulary or the moral courage to voice?
Of Sneak Peeks and Of My Own Mother
I have always known my mother as my mother. But sometimes I see glimpses of who she would have been if motherhood had not become her primary identity. When I was six or seven years old, a precocious child with little respect for other people’s privacy, I read something that she had written somewhere. It was not even a diary I think, at least not in the way that people who religiously jot their thoughts down in journals maintain them anyway. It was a notebook or perhaps a single page, my mind doesn’t remember. But what I do remember, distinctly etched upon my memory, are two lines she’d written which when translated into English say, ‘who are Anki and **** (my brother), who are they to me?” The lines stuck with me, even though at the time they were incomprehensible to my seven-year-old self and left me only befuddled. I did not think of them again in the intervening years but now that I am a woman myself looking for answers on motherhood, I reckon the profundity of that interrogation. It speaks to me about what she was experiencing then, a quest for identity, a yearning for self-discovery, in a context where most of her life’s decisions had been taken on her behalf by others, first her parents and then her husband and my father. I marvel now at the strength of those words and the capacity for autonomy they entail, an ability to break away from everything that has come to define you, and ask, who am I, outside of being a mother and a wife and a daughter and a daughter-in-law. She did not have access to the space and the means needed for that exploration, did not have what Virginia Woolf calls ‘a room of her own’, to write, to think, to discover, or to just be.
As it turned out, she became the finest of mothers in the world. The strongest, too. So much so that when her strength was tested in a way that she never saw coming, when my dad passed away one ordinary day without warning, with no prior illness or hospitalization or falling sick, she emerged on the other side of whatever that experience would have meant for her with a resolve and determination that my feeble words might not be able to do justice to. She had no sources of income, no savings, no property to her name, but she decided that nothing was going to change with my brother’s and my education, and that if that meant liquidating ancestral lands which my father himself had never been able to get his fair share of during his lifetime, so be it. That was the only straw she had, and she knew it was but a straw, but she clutched it for the sake of her children, put her own psychological and emotional needs aside and plunged head-first into a mission to finish what she and my father had started which was to ensure that their kids get the best education and opportunities to succeed in life.
I don’t know how she evolved as a person because of this experience, it would take almost ten years for both my brother and I to become financially independent and for her mission to conclude. What I do know is that for a person who can exhibit that kind of resilience and grit, there is little else in the world they can’t achieve or conquer. If given a chance.
I wonder how many of the other women in my own family who have taken it upon themselves to be solely care-givers and nurturers would have gone on to become dancers and professors and chefs, if the cultural milieu was one which enabled them as much as it enabled the boys and men in the family. I also know of men in my family who despite exclusively being given the opportunities and privileges did not make much of them, and are yet again married to women caught in the same vicious cycle of patriarchal neglect.
With Choice comes Responsibility
While I fully support the right of every woman to be or not to be a mother, it would be foolish to ignore the responsibilities imbued in that freedom. A woman exercising her right to forego motherhood also inescapably entails a man denied fatherhood in the context of a monogamous marriage. And therefore, the exercise of this freedom has to be contextualized and carefully exercised. This means being open about our choice or even about our ambivalence on motherhood at the start of every serious relationship. Our perception of fairness is often a subjective experience, based on how reality meets expectation; and so we need to take responsibility for the expectation we arouse in others through our decisions that concern them, before allowing ourselves the freedom to change our mind. The decision whether or not to have children is as consequential for men as it is for women, and women in this case have the power. How we exercise that power will say a lot about who we are as individuals and as women.
Natural Mothers vs Mothers of Choice
In the end, women like my mother, and many others, do not become excellent mothers because there is anything innate about motherhood in my opinion. It’s not a specific superpower they are born with, they become exemplars because, sometimes, that’s the only choice available to them. And what I think we need is an expansion of that choice. Once women are enabled in a way that choosing motherhood and not choosing motherhood become equal, viable options they can freely exercise, then I will perhaps find admiration for the institution. For now it is but an institution, like marriage is, with nothing intrinsically pious or inevitable about it. And for now, for the billions of women without a choice to say no — for reasons that could be cultural, historical, anthropological or psychological- it is one of unfreedom.
