Shoonya ko Mulya - ruminations on the biology and sociology of motherhood

Reading Shoonya ko Mulya has been a strange experience – equal parts validation and confusion, admiration and trepidation.

Let me start at the beginning. Shoonya ko Mulya is a non-fiction book by Dr. Navaraj KC, a  pediatrician who works in Surkhet. You already get the sense of what the book is going to be about. The problems of children and their mothers in Karnali, a province known for being mostly remote, unreachable, poor, and not very educated.

I had heard a lot about this book before. And I thought I Know what it would be like – it would talk about the problems like malnourishment, etc, and the mothers who struggle a lot for their children and fail. Sure, the book has all this. I thought the first story was very strong, the story of a woman who lives alone, raises her child alone, and goes to work in the day, leaving her child alone at home all day. The child doesn’t speak at the age of four, and I am amazed when the doctor diagnoses him when he hears the baby make sounds like a cat – the child has only heard cats speak, and that’s all he can say. And the doctor teaches the mother how to teach her child to speak, and the story ends happily with the child beginning to learn to speak.

But the book has much more than the stories of deprived children and their struggling mothers.

What the book does differently from every other book about motherhood is that it talks about the medical reasons behind the things that mothers do. Sounds boring, but it was exactly the opposite.

**

For example, there was the searing story of a woman who gives birth to a stillborn child, and insists on suckling him. Dr. KC here talks about the unnatural bond between a mother and child – that no one else has. Microchimerism. When a woman gets pregnant, there is a link between her and the baby – a link of blood. Through that blood, and possibly other channels, some of the mother’s cell transfer into the baby’s, and so does the opposite – some of the baby’s cells transfer into the mother’s body, and remain there, alive and well. It was very recently that I heard of microchimerism – in fact, after I gave birth. And that too, in a garbled version by someone.

Somehow, I have always had this feeling, that this baby is mine. Anyone else who stakes a claim on her, or claims to know her better than me, is wrong. I am the one who knows her best. I know this sounds irrational. I know it sounds like the mad ravings of a mother. But then, Dr KC validates it, by saying that it is actually true. Mothers do actually know their children best. Mothers do have a special bond with their children that no one else has or can ever have, no matter how hard they try. Because mothers have their children’s cells ingrained in them, and children have their mother’s cells… Thank you Dr. KC for reminding me that I am not mad.

**

But, the story does not end there. Dr. KC continues by saying that the baby had died because, the baby’s father had gone drinking the night before, and the mother had gone looking for him. When she found him, they quarreled, and he kicked her, resulting I her starting to bleed.

Here I do not want to talk, or even think, of the careful, whitewashing language that Dr. KC uses to describe the father’s actions, instead of condemning him straight ahead. “He refused his friend’s offer to drink, but the friend was insistent.” “Somehow, unknowingly, his legs raised of their own accord.”

I am going to pass over this, and move on to what happened. The baby dies, the mother is inconsolable. And so is the father. He repents, he weeps…..

And then, the husband and wife walk out of the hospital together.

She forgave her husband, Dr. KC says.

Just when I was wondering how much of this forgiveness was willingly given, Dr. KC answers the question.

They say, in Nepal, women can only survive if they forgive their husband.

I know. I thank doctor. For not romanticizing her “love” for her husband.

But then, Dr. KC says, motherhood makes women more forgiving.

I know that. I have seen that in myself. It comes from loving your child. It comes from the fact that you cannot stay angry at your child for long. Today my child bit me until it hurt. But then, I cannot, or will not, reciprocate the favor. And some days, she does things that exasperate me, like pour milk or water all over the place. Even after I expressly forbid her.  And nowadays she has a new game – I ask her to put dirty clothes in the laundry basket, and instead, she goes and puts them in the dustbin – and laughs. Despite how angry I am with her, I cannot stay angry for long. In fact, sometimes I cannot even express my anger immediately, because it is more important to do whatever task that needs to be done at the moment – maybe feed with her, which requires exquisite patience and cannot be done if I am angrily ranting.

And so, I learn to put anger aside as I am around my child. Gradually, it might extend to other people. I ask myself why I keep anger festering with, for example my husband, when I am so much more forgiving of my daughter. And then, it lightens up, gradually, as I wonder if there are better ways to go about it.

And so it seems that emotions are a luxury that only men can have. Women cannot have any emotions in the first place, or at least, cannot have any selfish emotions, because life simply cannot function if women hold on to these emotions.

So, yes, reluctantly I have to agree with Dr. KC when he says that motherhood makes women more forgiving. He also gives the medical and hormonal reasons for these happenings.

And it makes me very, very sad. Because, it is not necessarily a good thing to be forgiving. Because, like in the example above, women are forced to forgive men who deserve to be hanged.

But then, like Dr. KC said, the bitter truth is that here, women can only survive if they forgive their husbands.

And the saddest thing here is how men know what women are, and how shamelessly they use them. How they use women’s capacity for forgiveness to do unspeakable things and then get away with it.

**

So all the stereotypes are true. Women are more loving, more forgiving, better at managing life, then men.

While that confirms something I have been trying to articulate for some time, it is empowering, but also very sad.

I have been feeling something gradually build up over time after I had my baby. And the feeling is that men and women are not equal. Far, far from it. Women are much more than men. Nature has given them this responsibility. And nothing can change that.

As a child, I used to believe the opposite.

I used to believe that men and women are equal. And that they are only differentiated by society. I used to believe that women are unnecessarily thrust into or limited to the household. That they should have as much opportunities to go and work outside as men, and that men should also do half the housework. Women like Virginia Woolf and Jo March were my ideal, where they talked of women being stifled by the straitjackets put on them by society, and where they believed that just removing those limitations would mean freedom and equality for women. And for that, men should also help out in the housework. I did not believe that cooking and caring are the province of women, I did not believe they come naturally to women, I believed men said these things to get away from responsibility, and if only they were responsible, they could learn anything and everything that women do.

I knew, that my focus would shift and my views would change after marriage and babies. That is why I struggled to articulate everything before they changed. But I did not succeed. And now they have irreversibly changed.

For example, I do not believe that men and women are equal any more. I do not believe men can learn housework. Oh sure, they can do everything, cooking, cleaning, etc, but they cannot do the planning. Nope. I do not imagine leaving my baby with my husband completely, because I know he cannot do it. The ideas about care, the ideas about how to run life, they do not come to men. They come to women, and it is hard earned, from caring for young ones.

At one point, I had come to believe this so extremely, in the life-sustaining power of women, that I had even begun feeling angry with my earlier idols like Virginia Woolf and Jo March. These women, who wanted to be like men. These women, who completely undermined the world of women, and made it seem like the women’s world of care was not important. As if, getting out of home and writing and not getting married and having children was the answer for every woman, and should be.

Gradually, I recognized the influence of this kind of portrayal on my personality. My desire to get away. To get away from household responsibilities. To do things outside of home.

And how hard that made it for me to adjust to life inside home, life as a mother which is full of care work.

And all this is very depressing all over again, because it seems to indicate that I should never have aspired to do anything outside of home. I would have been better off if I had learnt housework and childcare.

And then I want to embrace Jo March again. For all that she gave me and generations of women.

I guess feminism is a step by step process.

First we (by we I mean all women) had to reduce our limitations (only reduce, because to get rid of them completely is impossible, because of biology and the burden of birth and care work.)

And for that, we had to kind of acknowledge that we were lesser than men. We had to accept the popular viewpoint – that household work was nothing, and that everything men do outside of homes is great. We had to beg to be allowed the opportunity – to study, to work. Here the women like Jo March and Virgina Woolf are useful.

And when we did start working, we realized that men had been lying to us all along. Men told us that housework was nothing and that the big deal was going outside in the world and earning money. When we started working for money, we realized it was by far the easiest thing we had ever done. It was a treat, compared to being at home and doing emotional labor 24/7.

Work is a fake world. Work is a world that men have created, where you X thing and you get Y money for what you do. Or you do X and get Y benefits or if A is getting Y then you should get more because you are getting more.

And blah. And blah. And blah.

That is very easy. Mathematics is very easy. Because in real life there is no such mathematics. At home you slog for 24 hours and you get nothing. If you were not able to sleep all night because the baby or the grandmother kept you up, that doesn’t mean you get to sleep all day. If you served your father, or any other man, while he was sick and took him soup and meals to the bed, that doesn’t mean he will do the same for you. A woman’s role at home is all about give, give, give, and no receive. A man assumes that once the earns the money and gives it to you, his job is done, and he is entitled to all the services at home. That entitles him to domestic tyranny like yelling at his wife for cooking five minutes late and sending the food back because he likes it slightly warmer. But the woman is not entitled to any of this.

But I digress. These days I often think of a question that a celebrity woman received on stage. The question was from a woke man who asked – why do women only want reservations in “good” jobs? Why don’t they want quotas in the most terrible works that men do? The Difficult, Dirty, and Dangerous jobs that are only assigned to men?

I don’t remember how the celebrity answered it. But after years of turning it over in my mind, motherhood has given me the answer – it’s because women already do Difficult, Dirty, and Dangerous work at home. Let’s talk about dirty. They are the ones doing the most care work, until this generation, men rarely wiped their babies’ bums off. Or their father’s, or their mother’s. It’s very common in Nepal for men to get married, dump your woman at home to take care of your parents, and take off somewhere on your adventures. Let’s talk about dangerous. 70% of the burn victims in the world are women, because they are the ones doing most of the cooking. No amount of change in cooking technologies is going to change that. Let’s talk about dangerous  once more. In Nepal, already, women live the most dangerous lives, always at risk of getting petrol poured all over them, and burnt alive. And what do they get for it? Nothing, while men who do dangerous jobs get paid. And let’s talk about difficult. Anyone who thinks men do difficult tasks, can try and feed a cranky toddler with high fever, before they understand what ‘difficult’ actually is. And that is just one hour of a woman’s life. The rest may be even more difficult….

So the answer to the woke man is that men get paid for doing difficult, dirty, and dangerous work, and their work is limited. They do it only for a few hours. But women, they continue to bear the burden of the difficult, dirty and dangerous works, and get nothing for it, certainly no pay, not even recognition of how difficult, dangerous, dirty, isolating, and humiliating their work can be. And there is never any end to it. They do it at all hours of the day and night.

So the point I am trying to make is that this is the real world. The home is the real world, from which there is no escape. In today’s capitalistic world, work (not all work, like farming, but a lot of work, like office work) is a fake world created by men, which can be escaped, but which is already an escape from the real world. Why shouldn’t women like to escape into this world, which gives them everything the home denies? Money, power, status, paid holidays…..

So in came women like Jo March and Virginia Woolf, and captured our imaginations. We believed that we could do it, escape the destiny of being women, and bought into their dream. And it was precious. So precious.

As a child, up until adulthood, this was my preoccupation. Women and the wider world. I wondered, why aren’t there as many women monarchs, writers, scientists, etc, as men? And my answer was that it is because women have not been given opportunity. Today, I find the question laughable and the answer obvious. The bigger question is, why is what women do at home not recognized as being as great as, or greater than, the monarchs, writers, and the scientists?

Before all this, in childhood and adolescence and adulthood, it was exhilarating to prove that women can do anything. To see such women, to be inspired by them, to be able to travel, to be able to work, earn money, be good at your job and prove that woman can be as good as men.

But then, reality bites. And after marriage and childbirth, I realized that I cannot escape from this role. While men can. I realize that there is no choice but for me to take care of the child, and eventually, home. Because if I leave my husband to it, it is never going to get done. That’s how men are. They bring the rules of their workplace into the home. They will say things like, I did X, now I will take a break, or, I will do it on my own time, or, I need to rest, I am really tired …….. it doesn’t help, no matter how many times you tell him that the rules don’t apply here. That there are no rests until you finish the job, and it is not ok for him to do it on his own time.

Take a look at this cartoon, to see how the modern nuclear heterosexual parenting is not helpful for women. Men simply don’t see the full picture.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/26/gender-wars-household-chores-comic

I find the first half of this cartoon highly effective and illuminating, it shows how women are overburdened by the mental load. At the end of this cartoon, the cartoonist says this is because of social conditioning. Women are conditioned to be care workers, and men are not conditioned to learn all of that. There was a time when I believed all of that. After motherhood, the opposite thoughts started buzzing in me, and after Dr. Navaraj KC, it is confirmed. It is not just social conditioning. Some of it is, of course. For example, women are not born to do the dishes and they don’t do it better than men. Men are not born to play and be aggressive and lazy and lord it over everyone, they just do all this because they get to.

But apparently, women are hardwired to do some things, for example take the mental load.

Or, so says Dr. KC.

In a story about a woman who is seen as dumb by everyone else but who is a loving and wonderful mother for her child, Dr. KC talks about how motherhood elevates a woman into a goddess who elevates her family. “In a society where mothers are safe and respected, their optic lobes are healthy. There is a lot of oxytocin and dopamine in their body, so called love hormones. Then these women find it easy to be affectionate, and do such work in abundance. It is only then that the woman seeks the objective of her life, and suddenly, the security and development of herself, her family, her children, and her environment, become her main objective. (Motherhood gives a person) the ability to identify their goals correctly, the ability to take the right step, and the ability to be resilient when problems arise.”

I have no doubt that he is correct. I know it not only from my own experience, but from the cumulative experience of seeing all the women around me, versus all the men, who never seem to get their priorities right in the first place, let alone the ability to identify and take the right step. I know this sounds sexist, but ask any woman and she will agree.

I know I should probably be celebrating the fact that women are so much more powerful, capable, than I thought. That nature had given them so much more. But, I also find it depressing. Because

-          It indicates that women should do the household work, not men.

-          If men know that the stereotypes are now proven by science, they will find an even greater excuse to not to do the housework, they will say things like, oh, this is how nature made me, I don’t know anything.

-          It is also depressing for women who may not have these qualities that nature gives to most women, to have these stereotypes foisted on them.

-          In fact, it is depressing even when women do have these qualities, to have the burden of these responsibilities always thrust on them.

I am going to digress a little bit into how the focus on the physical qualities, the body, of a mother, the stereotypes, is so depressing, and damaging for many women.

**

All this focus on what the body does.  It makes me think, are we only our bodies? Only our hormones? Or do we have senses, decision making abilities, and other capacities beyond what the body gives us?

Again, this brings me back to Dr. KC.

Somehow, in the debate for quality, I had come to believe that motherhood is simply a function of the body. In my mind I wanted to get rid of motherhood because it limits your life, makes it impossible for you to be equal to a man and enjoy the same opportunities. So, for me, birth was simply something that the body did. That the woman’s body simply received the sperms, her uterus ripened it up, and she churned out the baby, was incapacitated for a few months, and then it was back to business as usual. Only the act of birth differentiated the woman. The rest was social – everyone can and should do childcare so that men and women can live perfectly equal lives.

This was my belief.

Long before Dr. KC said “A woman is not a flower. A woman is not a fruit. A woman is the soil on which the entire tree grows,” my views had been changed by my own motherhood.

I knew, already, that I was not just a machine whose purpose was to churn out a baby and then go back to life as usual. My thoughts, my feelings, my planning, my goals, changed when I conceived, and that gave me direction to plan life for the best of the baby.

And reading Dr. KC, I realized how and why this change had occurred. That a woman is not just an instrument for production, as men would have you believe. A mother has an agency. And her agency feeds into how she cares for her children.

A woman sees ten times more colors than men, a woman’s skin is ten times more sensitive than men’s, writes Dr. KC. (Prior to this, I had only seen this information used to answer the question – who enjoys sex more? Men or women? And male-gaze answer was “women”. This is known, a famous trope in folklore and apparently contemporary literature too. I was always skeptical, because it is also more painful for women. Plus it is used as an excuse for violence. However, that’s a different story. Here, I am just amazed that instead of going the male-voyeur way, Dr. KC talks about how women use this nature-given abilities to enhance their care work, to feel their baby inside them, and a stronger connection when it is outside them.)

And then, Dr. KC writes about breastmilk, where it is finally clear how women are not a machine, but active agents who transform their bodily functions through their agency. And I feel like the stressful days of my motherhood are here all over again. Immediately after birth, my baby wanted to nurse for hours at a time, 1-2 hours at a stretch, and then come back again in 15 minutes. And still after all this feeding she was not peeing, so we had to start her on formula. After months of trying to increase my supply, through various kinds of foods, extra water, and what not, I finally had to accept that I was a low supply mom. My baby grew up on combo feeding till she was 2.5 years old, at which age she naturally quit breastfeeding when she stopped napping in the day (it was long established that she was not breastfeeding for nutrition, she was only using it to go to sleep. And when she no longer napped, there was simply no occasion to breastfeed. At nights she is so tired she droops off).

The point here is, when Dr. KC talks about the advantages of breastmilk, the feeling that I am less of a mother comes back to me. I know he is right, of course. I know breastmilk is amazing. I found out only after I became a mother, that it has elements which can cure the child of minor sicknesses, boost its immunity. Dr. Navaraj adds things I never knew – that in summer the milk is more watery, and in winter it is more creamy. That in the morning it has cortisol which wakes you up like coffee, and in nights it has sleep-inducing elements.

I know that all of what he says is true. And still, when he says, “Doctors say that a mother’s feelings and her mental health change the quality of milk. If the mother thinks my baby is becoming thin, then the milk starts having elements that fatten up the baby,” my heart breaks into two. Did I not love my daughter enough?

I think of my Mother-in-law, who spoke of having abundant supply. “You hear your baby cry, and milk spurts out of your breasts,” she said. I am again in two minds when I hear this. Fascinated to realize that milk production is an emotional thing, not just a physical one. That you, as a mother, have agency. You are more than a machine which pumps out a baby and pumps out milk. You are a person, and your agency impacts your body, makes it divine, so that it produces the best nutrition for your child. Again, I am sad that this fact is so little known. Before I became a mother, nobody told me. The impact of male, capitalistic, allopathic medical system is that such knowledge is not valued.

It reminds me of an old folktale. A prince is separated from his mother at birth, because his stepmothers are jealous of his mother. After many years, she comes back. And to ascertain if she is his mother, there is a test. He asks several women to stand behind a wall, and he cries, to see who will sprout milk. But naturally, his mother’s breast sprouts with milk, and, squirting over the wall, it reaches his mouth.

I would have failed that test, my dear daughter. My breasts barely sprouted a drop in the first few days. The supply grew gradually but it was never more than a small trickle.

My mother-in-law would have passed that test. “Sometimes, my breasts would suddenly start flowing when I heard some other child cry, it doesn’t even have to be your own child” she would say. I have no doubt, of her motherly, nurturing qualities.

And apparently, I should not be so sure of mine, according to Dr. KC.

What happened to me? Was I too full of testosterone? Was my earlier feelings of wanting to escape home and be in the men’s world of work and travel too influential? Was I not happy during post partum? (Of course I wasn’t, I was beginning a mild post partum blues, but isn’t every other woman the same? Nobody is delirious with happiness like men show in their movies, every new mother is on a spectrum of depression, so why was it that I only could not supply my daughter enough?) So what exactly happened?

I tried not to feel guilty about all this. Should I have felt guilty? Would that have helped?

Another dead end.

I do feel guilty now though. Back then, I believed people who said it’s not my fault and I should not feel guilty and a fed child is the goal and if I meet it that’s good enough. But now, I have seen my daughter fall sick very frequently. We end up taking her to the doctor every month. Without fail. Usually it’s something to do with her chest – cough, flu, all that. And every month she takes some medicine or the other, sometimes antibiotics and sometimes blood tests and X-rays too. Now I think about all the benefits of breastmilk and how other children around me – including my sister’s child who never once fell sick until he was a year old – seem to have much higher immunity than mine. I feel guilty now. But what’s the use? Another dead end.

So yeah, focusing on the physical capacities of mothers could turn out to be very toxic, for women who cannot perform up to the stereotypical standards. Women who cannot nurse their children enough, women who cannot give birth, women whose bodies fail them, can be utterly toxic for the individual woman involved. But I do realize that not praising the special qualities that mothers have is also another kind of toxicity.

Sigh.

Another dead end.

**

So let’s go back to what we are to do. About the fact that women have extra capacities and extra power, and are getting extorted by the patriarchy for it instead of being given more resources and agency to lead their family units.…. And I think, surely, surely, this is not what nature meant. Nature did not mean for all these abilities of women to be extorted by the patriarchy for its own benefit.

I think what nature meant was women’s collectives which have power and agency and resources.

Let me explain a little bit.

We have already seen that women have an unfairly large share of the burden of care work. And also that men cannot reduce it, even if they want to. For most women, the solution would be to have a group of women around who can easily share the mental load, who can see things as clearly and put the wellbeing of everyone in the front seat so that everyone works fairly. And what about men? We know by now that men were traditionally left out of this whole world of childbearing and postpartum.

Take a look at how people in Europe did it back in the seventeenth century, centralized women’s expertise and left men out of the process.

https://juliamartins.co.uk/giving-birth-in-17th-century-england-a-tentative-list

I am not sure that having men be a part of the childbirth and postpartum process is very helpful, especially for women who have no other support and where there is no one to understand what she is going through. I mean, sure, for me personally it was good to have Girish around, and he was fairly supportive during the post-partum phase, helping me recover and learning to take care of the baby. But if we zoom out and look at the larger picture, we find that often, the worst mansplained theories of childraising have come from men. For example the theory that babies should be left to cry because picking up babies makes them addicted to human contact and they start manipulating you. I don’t even want to react to this right now, because if my baby thinks I am her safe space and comes to me when she’s crying and becomes addicted to that relationship, I would be very happy indeed.

So anyways, my point is, it’s a good think to have men be a part of childcare, child raising, and the post partum scene, but it’s better if they do not mansplain, at least in the early stage, and let experienced women lead the care work, which they can follow. The problem is that it is rarely so. The problem is that men have now invaded these female areas and think they should have an equal say. What a bullshit equality is. Women don’t want equality. We want a recognition of our differences and adequate resources and agency to deal with it.

What I mean is, up until a woman has a baby, she can be theoretically equal to a man. Can be. Theoretically. Is not so yet. All of that changes when a woman has a baby. And then she is not equal. She has greater power, as outlined by Dr. KC, and greater responsibilities, as we see in society. And, we have also already seen that men’s support may not be enough because they do not share the mental load. So what a woman needs is a woman’s collective, people who can understand things and work with her.

A woman’s collective is even more important today because a woman is expected to do so many things. Not that women ever had it easy, but today it’s like, apart form managing the housework and doing all the care work, women also have to manage careers, and heaven have mercy on any woman if she also has artistic passions by the side. So how is a poor woman to manage all this, when she barely gets a full night’s rest? And her male partner just leaves her to handle all the stuff and heads out? So yes, having a bevy of women around is the solution. I know I got the most support from my mother and mother-in-law during this time.

But then, as a woman there are only dead ends everywhere - there is nowhere you can find such a women’s collective. Men can, and often do, romanticize the old joint family – as a structure which provides childcare and elderly care. As a woman, you know better. As a woman, you know how much women suffer in this extended family of male relatives that you have to please, and the women’s support which comes at a high cost. Yes, there is the support. But let’s not forget, women are also made to sleep in sheds for three weeks after giving birth, considered ‘impure.’ And then made to do the most back-breaking work while the senior females do the relatively easier work of childcare. I am pretty sure that if we had had a matriarchy, then mothers would not have sent their daughters to cold and moist sheds after giving birth, or denied them nutritious foods, or called them impure. But patriarchy and its second-grading of women is so deeply ingrained in us that this scenario is unimaginable at this moment.

So, yes, where do we get that women’s collective? First of all there are no collectives any more because the joint family surviving on combined labor and cumulative land is no more, and there are only nuclear families. So how are two people supposed to do the work of six? I know that comic said that outsourcing labor is not the solution, but I think it is. Expecting the couple to do all the labor is very very tough. We must all outsource, wisely, and society must be less unequal so that everyone has this option, and not just wealthy people who can heap their labour on illegal immigrant women. And it’s also about job creation, if you don’t give these jobs to illegal immigrant women, they won’t have any work!

But the problem with this model is that women are poor. I know when I say this that some body, usually a man, is going to point at a rich lady like Neeta Ambani and say, what do you mean? Is she poor? No dude, she is not poor, but if you look at the statistics, you will see that women are paid less than men, and own lesser land and money than men. And also that if men have money, they spend it on personal pleasure (drink is blamed, but it could be anything, like ‘literary gatherings’ in my family ), while if women have money, they will spend it on the well-being of the family. Ref Dr. KC, and many other economic reports. So where can women get the money to pay for care while they take on the managerial role?

Sigh. Another dead end.

In fact, when I got married, I did not want to be the manager. But the role was foisted on me. By little things my husband did. For example he would ask, where are the baby’s shirts? And I say, exactly where they have been all these years, and still he has no idea where they are. When I ask him, please pack for a day’s outing, he comes back to me with a list and confirms ten times about the number of items he must pack. I have often resented this role. Why do you ask me? Am I God or what? I became a parent at exactly the same moment as you, I know exactly as much as you do, I used to say. And he didn’t understand that either. Someday, I hoped, in the far future, if not in the near, he will evolve to be my partner and not my underling.

But now, after reading Dr. KC, I have realized that that is never going to happen. Either I accept this role, or spend my life arguing with him. But according to Dr. KC, no amount of arguing is going to give him the dopamine and the oxytocin and whatever else that will make him set his priorities like a woman.

Sigh.

Another dead end.

All this is super depressing.

**

This “book review” has become much longer and more convoluted then I intended. So I will try to make the conclusion succinct.

The conclusion is that equality is not enough for women. We need more resources, we need more money, we need more respect and we need more agency to fulfill the duties that nature has given us.

We asked for equality in the beginning, because the difference was so great, we were so vastly unequal to men, in terms of money, agency, resources. But now that some of us, a tiny portion of us, are equal in terms of money, resources, voice, social standing, or any other advantage that men have, we see that equality is not enough.

Because, nature has given us a greater burden. A greater responsibility. And up till now, we have been given only the responsibility while men have been getting away scot-free, and their freedom increases in capitalism while women’s burden increases. To give women all the responsibility and no money, no agency, to fulfill them is criminal. It is overburdening us and killing our mothers.

So what we want is justice. We want more money, more agency, so that we can take on the planning role (which, according to Dr. KC, we cannot escape), and delegate the tasks – either to willing family members (including men) or to paid helpers.

**

 P.S. I am going to finish with the perennial dead end. Stereotyping motherhood and heaping expectations and responsibilities on mothers is toxic. But so is not praising the special qualities that mothers have and the extra miles they go to take care of the people around them.

Sigh