As the moonlight merged with morning, I woke up, once again with a determination to be a good mom. At least for the first ten tantrums. I am allowed to lose it on the eleventh, right?
Don’t get me wrong, I love my little boy who tilts the axis of my home each day without fail – it’s just that his brand of ‘happy’ doesn’t quite sink in but keeps spinning around until I am exhausted from the energy overdose. Paradoxical? Well, let’s see.
(On a tangent, I wonder if somebody could harness toddler energy to solve the world’s energy problems. No, really – I think they wouldn’t need to worry too much on that front ever again, then…ask the mommies)
Hi, I am a woman of the millennial age. I am a wife, a working professional and a mom. Though, not necessarily in that order. My average day doesn’t look like containing very much to do at all. For all I have to do is keep the kid fed and alive, meet all deadlines at work and oh, yes, ‘be there’ for my husband always.
So, it is pretty much crawling out of bed some three hours after I get into it, jumping into the sea of to-do list which includes getting my son out of his toy-crammed bed and persuading him to leave his tiny, plastic stethoscope behind with zero success, agreeing for the nth time to play his injured patient while I brush his half a dozen teeth, scrub him clean and put some clothes on him, fixing him about ten different types of breakfast before he decides it is the quick-fix omelet on my plate he wants to stick his fork in, feeding him tiny pieces while force-feeding him formula, fixing some ‘edible’ version of breakfast for my hubby, keeping his work clothes ready, drawing him a bath just the way he likes it, crawling into the child-sized, Batman themed tent my son just cannot have enough of and slipping out just in time to take a five-minute shower and get ready for work, leaving about ten minutes after my husband gives me a thumbs-up on the day and leaves for office and calling the nanny ten times to check on her exact position (I wish I had a GPS on her).
After which, long, disagreeable hours are spent slogging away at the work station, typing away furiously on the keyboard, making presentations, getting not quite the ‘well done’ you know you deserved and drowning in an avalanche of more deadlines and projects which, needless to add, have to be carried home to be finished until the wee hours of the morning before which there is the playing with the kid, the talking with the husband and of course, the dinner to be made. THAT really isn’t very much to do at all, right?
Now, if the sarcasm of my rather long prologue (which many shall deem a rant) wasn’t clear already, I will spell it out for you. As a new-age woman, I no longer feel the need to burn my bra but simply saunter into my beloved lingerie store and shower myself with some satin-y love that shall seamlessly move me from the pressures of using my Medela pump at work to the rigors of being in a dreaded conference to the bliss of my bedroom. Yes, I love my kid and my work and my husband. Again, not necessarily in that order.
There is, however, a singular problem with being a woman in this age poised to be equal with men – the fact that we aren’t and won’t be. In embracing the struggles of feminism to become whoever we CHOSE to be, we misinterpreted the struggle to be a medium of forging an impossible path to personal and professional perfection. In diving deep into a sea of choices, we forgot that we cannot and will not be the superwoman who can juggle 60-hour work week in a high-pressure environment and be momtastic over and above being an ‘ideal’ wife. There is no need to berate ourselves for not being the same kind of mom as those belonging to the stay-at-home mommy camp and no need to beat ourselves for those wrinkles that shall inevitably arise from trying to do it all. And yet, we do it- 24*7.
In being women from the new age who have simply, adopted the old-age marriages where being a companionate spouse, bearing children and raising them well have come to be the norm that we must carry forward, we are posed with an inevitable dilemma. That of making good the Ivy League or whatever coveted degree we slogged to earn, building a high-profile career and balancing a healthy, happy family life with it. And while most of us do a good job of it, there is always one something that slips and frustrates us. And that’s when the schadenfreude erupts.
As women who are caught in a flux where the feminist forces are constantly pushing us forward while the conventional molds of marriage and parenthood keep us in the same place as the gym cycle you can pedal all you want but move nowhere with- we need to accept that we cannot be all things at once. But we also need to put out one major TRUTH in the cosmos – these two forces, now in antagonism, need to be aligned together. By extracting ‘marriage’ from its conventional (read: patriarchal) mold where gender roles are still neatly (and inequitably) defined, we must work toward a building a space where no CHOICE (whether of reproducing or parenting or even working) is set in stone. Any approach to any activity in life should be stripped of its ‘programmed’ quality and invested with a newness that relieves us of our mental, physical and emotional gymnastics and allows us our much-needed breaks.
Just like the one you take for a quick smoke during wonky work hours. (Yes, you CAN’T refute the power of this analogy, can you? Although, smoking is injurious to health.)
And for that we need a she-volution that involves the ‘he.’ Yes, be our allies and see how potent a change a helping hand can make.
After all, the F-word doesn’t make us man-hating harridans (not all of us, anyway.)
Note: Image used in this post is only for representations purpose.
