What it takes to be a feminist mum
Updated On: 26 January, 2024 04:01 AM IST | Mumbai | Rosalyn D`mello
Answering the calling of motherhood means having to live in the trenches constantly, doing messy, unpaid, revolutionary work
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What no one tells you about motherhood is that there is a heavy weight to the co-dependency, especially if you are committed to parenting in a way that is gentle and compassionate. Representation Pic
Under regular circumstances, now would be when I would need to have lunch organised. According to the routine we have followed for the past six months, my partner would take our child away from the apartment from at least 8 am until 10.15 am, giving me space to work and cook our daily meals. He would then rush back, bathe and eat before leaving for work by 11.15 am. Where we live, any form of domestic help is unaffordable. However, this Monday, we began the process of acclimatising our child to day care. There is only one public or government-subsidised ‘kita’ per town and there’s usually a wait list. We were lucky to secure a spot. There’s a methodical process by which the child is habituated that spans two weeks. For the first week, he is expected to only be there for an hour, accompanied by one of us. Since I work in the mornings, my partner has taken on this responsibility. We haven’t had the guts to enlist him for longer than 12 hours a week. But hopefully, within the next 10 days, he will be able to manage spending four-hour stretches of time alone with his caretakers. This process of him acclimatising means I am slowly gaining longer stretches of work time. From having ‘no time’, I am accruing ‘some more time’.
It means, however, that the tendency to be as productive as is motherly possible during that ‘some more time’ is quite compelling. I was already able to do ten times more than most regular people during less than half the hours, and now I find the need to excel further in order to do less once our child wakes up from naptime. He is now inching towards two years, inhabiting that final 23-month stretch that is characterised by teething, tantrums, language leaps and bursts of emotions.
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