Oh dear, oh dear. Poor James Anderson goes home to England in the midst of the ongoing Ashes cricket series in Australia to attend the birth of his second child and gets told off for taking paternity leave.
In an interview with Sky Sports, former fast bowler Bob Willis opined “I don’t agree with the Mothercare buggy-rolling thinking that the modern man has. He should be on the tour, that’s his job”. Frances Edmonds on Radio 4 called it “advanced macho-man behaviour” whilst coach Andy Flower described the timing as “not ideal.”
Well Andy, I’m sure the little lady tried to keep her legs together till the Ashes got over but damn, these babies can just be really inconvenient. I mean, the nerve of that child to arrive in the midst of an international sporting event. Didn’t she know daddy was needed elsewhere? And Mr Willis, of course, what job could be more important than cricket? Parenting? Oh! Sorry! I forgot, that’s solely a woman’s job. We don’t need the dad for that. He’s already done his bit by sparing one of his quadrillion precious swimmers for the effort. To think that we should now ask him of his precious time and support his wife as she pushes a four pound baby through her vagina. Tsk, tsk.
And it’s not just the powers that be in sport that seem to think this way. When I was pregnant with my son and anxious as the D-date approached that my husband should be by my side in time for the birth, I was met with many an indulgent and slightly condescending smile and told: “All you new generation kids and your expectations. Fathers aren’t needed at the birth. Or afterwards. What on earth can they possibly do, anyway?”
More recently when I asked a friend due in December how much paternity leave her husband was entitled to the answer was a brief and not too sweet ‘none’. He had his 20 days annual leave and whatever was left of that at the time of the child’s birth was all the paternity leave he privileged to.
Again, the message was loud and clear: fathers are really not needed.
And the discrimination doesn’t end here. Now that admission season is around the corner, all one hears about is schools. The number of times I’ve heard that such-and-such school insists on mothers participating heavily in school
activities is alarmingly frequent. Why aren’t fathers expected to give the same amount of time? What are working mothers meant to do? Clone themselves?
Sure, there are some things that fathers just cannot do. They can’t breast feed. Actually that’s the only thing a new father can’t do. Nature doesn’t make impossible the millions of other tasks that crop up once you have a child in the house. Burping, diaper changing, rocking to sleep, singing and the obligatory making of funny faces and sounds do not require a pair of mammaries, thank you very much.
What I really want to know is how does this make fathers feel? Aren’t they annoyed by the assumption that they can’t help in anyway? That they’re useless? Or do they take advantage of their presumed incompetence and secretly relieved that they’re ‘off the hook’?
You tell me, dads.
— Menaka writes on motherhood, art and culture.
menaka.raman@gmail.com