Now that we can choose whether to have a job and a family, to be a
part time or full time mother, you would think our lives would be easier. So
why does whatever we choose seem to be wrong?
Take me for instance, when my older daughter started going to
school, I started working. It was convenient as my husband was abroad and I was
staying with my parents. But lots of people did not think so. How could I leave
my child with my mother and go for work? Where was the need for me to work anyway?
My husband earned enough! Nobody tried to understand that my needs were not
financial but emotional. I needed to feel that I have a choice. I needed to
know that I was good at other things too, besides being a wife and a mother.
I did very well in my job, but a few years later when I had my
second baby, I quit working. My situation was different now. My husband was
back, and being a nuclear family, I had no help at home for the baby. I could
not somehow think the job, however important it might have been, was in any way
more important than looking after my baby. The very same people, who criticized
me last time, criticized me again. This time it was, ‘How could you leave such
a good job? After all you could employ a maid for the baby! Lots of women do
so…’
Maybe women have always been confused. I think even the cave-women
felt that animal trapping was a lot more fun than tidying up the cave and
storing the food. At the same time I cannot help feeling that Mrs. Cave-woman at
least knew where she was meant to be, even if she did not like it. We do not
seem to have that kind of comfort.
Whatever the woman of today does, seems to be wrong. Every
newspaper, every television programme and nearly everybody with whom she comes
into contact, is eager to tell her that she should be doing something different
from what she actually does. That she has a right to work, that she has no
right to work; that home and family are boring, that they are fascinating; that
her children should be with her, that they should not be with her, that they
should be with their granny, with a nanny, in a crèche; that she is
contributing a lot, that she is not contributing at all, and so on… which does
little for her self-confidence or peace of mind.
Women have always been told not just what to do, but also what to
think. And they have been told this mostly by women. I do not know why we
cannot leave one another alone, respect each other’s feelings, and I do think
it a particularly female characteristic that we cannot. I do not think men go
around asking each other why their wives have not had another baby yet!
We are not an over-confident lot. Our propensity to guilt makes us
hugely sensitive. And it is made much worse by the simple fact of being at
home, where your sense of identity and self-confidence are painfully
vulnerable. If somebody in your office tells you that they really think you
ought to be programming computers instead of editing textbooks, you may feel
upset. But if you have made a fair job out of editing books, been paid for
doing it, and even been promoted for it a couple of times, you can shinny off
the suggestion or even discuss the absurdity of it with your fellow workers.
But sitting in the crisis situation of your kitchen on a bad day, the suggestion
that you might be wasting your talent hits hard.
However determined you may be that full-time family care is the
right occupation for you, you will still be asked constantly, how you can stand
it, and when you are going to stop doing it. ‘What on earth do you manage to do
all day? Why don’t you get yourself a job? You must be terribly bored’, are the
routine questions.
The point is that everyone knows being a full-time mother is the
most important job of all; it is also terribly hard and grindingly repetitive.
What women feel very strongly is that if they do not work, they do not have any
status. That they do not count in the society at all. People are not prepared
to introduce you as ‘Sunita’, who is very busy, looking after two children. You
do not have a label. Labels are extremely important to women. A label that says
just wife and mother is hardly worth the string to tie it on, not because being
a wife and a mother is uninteresting in itself, but because the wearer is made
to feel it is uninteresting.
What most women would like, in my opinion, specially when their
children are young, is the freedom to choose, to be able to get childcare if
necessary and, more importantly, to be able to get a part-time employment if
needed or desired, without mortgaging soul and conscience. A full-time job
involves too much guilt and worries about the children (more so if they are
under five) and about the job as well (fear that you have not done it properly
because you have had to rush home).
Many husbands still feel very ambivalent about their wives
working. They tolerate it rather than encourage it, however welcome the money,
and would rather the work went away and the wives came home. “His idea is that
if it makes me happy to work, that is fine, as long as I am not too tired to
fuss around him and run the house properly as well,” says Jaya, speaking for
many. “If I start moaning about the pressures, he says, ‘why don’t you leave?
We can mange without the extra money.’” But then there is another side to it. “Men
are having a difficult time at the moment,” said Renu, an ultra loyal wife. “They
are being usurped by women at work, they do not like it, and then they get home
and get grumbled at for not doing their bit. And they do not even have the
choice we do.”
This indicates that each sex has its problems, and there is a lot
more to be gained from recognizing the fact and helping each other out, rather
than standing in the middle ground and complaining about each other and our own
selves. If we are able to this, there will be no cause left for any kind of
confusion.
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