Following is the excerpt from a telephone conversation between my friend and I.
Mukta: “I can see from the pics you posted on Facebook that you had a gala time in Goa with hubby and the li’l one.”Monika(name changed): “It was OK ... The whole time I was running after Karan (her 3-year-old son). It was exhausting. It is more work than fun travelling with a 3-year-old.”
Mukta: “But your captions to the pictures read otherwise.”Monika: “Sweetie, you don’t expect me to say that my kid tired me out so much, I felt like packing my bags and running home. Mums can’t say that, it is not allowed.”
My many other friends, who are also young mothers, are going to kill me for this but I have to set the record straight. This is for everyone who thinks that motherhood defines a woman and it is the be all and end all of her very existence. Motherhood is just one of the many other important roles a woman plays in her life. Men and also many women have hyped it so much over the centuries that women who can’t have children feel incomplete. They feel like they have somehow failed their families, friends and the society. Like other natural phenomenon, child birth is also one such natural process.
A woman is not all about motherhood. There are many facets to her personality. I feel sad for women who suppress their creativity and passion for other things in life just because they became moms. Vibrant, young ladies who till a few months back were in the groove of things suddenly become or act like these coy and submissive creatures, not because they want to but that’s how the society wants to see them after becoming moms.
Like any other relationship it has its moments of frustration, anger, fatigue, restlessness and tears of desperation. Why this façade? Why do we feel pressured into projecting only one side of it? Will the society stop pressurising us into becoming supermoms because we are not and can’t be? And women please stop pretending like you are.
It is so happy and uplifting to find some of the new moms breaking out and coming on their own like the educated and intelligent young women they are and not like cows in a herd they are expected to be. So much has been written and spoken about motherhood that it has become almost impossible to break the mould. Sometimes it feels like all this hype is artificially generated to feed the multibillion dollar industry ‘motherhood’ has become today.