New World Parents
Last night, since publishing ‘Death of Democracy’, I received some feedback from quite a few people regarding the choice of the word, ‘mother’ in my concluding paragraph. The argument being that I should replace the word ‘mother’ with a more inclusive and non-gendered word — ‘parent’. To be honest, I had pondered over the right word to use while writing the article — it is only after some thought, that I had decided to choose the word ‘mother’ intentionally. Choosing the word ‘parent’ over ‘mother’ somehow felt like diluting what I was really trying to say. I had a long debate with my sister on this matter. What really struck me was that while both of us agreed that men and women should be considered equal, we still couldn’t come to a general agreement over the choice of words. It obviously needs some clarification, so here it goes:
My sister was of the opinion that a mother is necessarily a female and what a mother should do inside a family is completely her choice, but since the word ‘mother’ has historically been connected to a care-giving role, the best way to liberate women was to remove the word ‘mother’ and preferably be called a ‘parent’ instead. That way, a parent would be considered multi-functional, sharing all responsibilities equally.
I contended that, a mother necessarily has a care-giving role and a person is completely free to accept that care-giving role or not. I considered the roles to be important because it signified real responsibility that cannot be defined away. The best way to liberate women (and men!) is to do away with the narrative that a mother is necessarily a female and a father is necessarily a male. Instead they are roles, carrying real responsibilities. A woman can choose to be a mother, a father, both or neither, and so can a man (or a person of any other gender). In this perspective when I say ‘mother’, I mean the same non gendered mother as in the statement — “India is my motherland”.
I Googled the definition of mother and the results surprised me. The noun — mother, meant ‘a woman in relation to her child or children’, however, the verb — mother, meant ‘bring up (a child) with care and affection’.
The noun is inconsistent with the verb and it carried an vague connection that somehow women are responsible bringing up (a child) with care and affection. This inconsistency felt quite deep so I started thinking about family.
The way I thought about family is that the parents had some imaginary roles having real responsibilities which were directly connected to the real rights of the child. You can modify, rename or remove the imaginary roles but you can’t tamper with the real responsibilities. The broadly defined primary responsibilities of the parents are
- Funding the venture called ‘family’
- Bringing up the child with care and affection.
Most people would agree with these two responsibilities being real. Which made me wonder, why do some people still have a problem if I connect the roles to the responsibilities while simultaneously discarding the old idea of connecting the roles and the gender.
The more I thought about it, the more I felt like there was something more at play here: an implicit assumption of the inequality in the value of certain responsibilities. Where in fact, the real value of both the responsibilities are completely case specific and on average, equal. It is our collective social inability to grasp this dynamic nature of the value of all responsibilities that leads to a mistaken prior judgement of fixed value of responsibilities and hence, roles, which was the real cause of our conflict. An attempt to redefine or remove imaginary nouns is to attempt to treat the symptoms of the real problem of injustice that, certain people taking up certain vital responsibilities don’t get the respect and recognition they deserve in this world.
It is in this context that I wrote — “…the challenge of 21st century mother would be to raise a child that can effectively participate in a conversation…” Here, the mother isn’t a female by default, the mother is the non gendered caregiver inside the family who holds an extraordinary power over the future of humanity at any point in time. Once we establish the correct order of importance of any role, the word signifying the role becomes less of an issue.
However in the case where we do need to use words to denote specific a specific responsibility we would not have an effective word to signify that position if we remove the words altogether.
Most of the thoughts that I have written here stems from my own childhood — Thanks to my parents I was(and still am) comfortable and happy. My mother always took pride in being a mother and so did my father in being a father. There was never a conflict of interest, my thinking is, that was because of well defined roles within the family and a clear perspective of what was important. Today modern families may choose to share their responsibilities as they see fit, technology has gifted us that power. How they choose to share the responsibilities and hence the roles is completely up to them, and we have no business talking about that. A single parent may take up both the responsibilities and be, as the same time, a father and mother. Two working parents may equally be a father and mother to the child.
The idea of a biological mother isn’t a violation of this kind of definition, because the biological mother has in fact biologically cared for this child while the child was in her womb. The practical issue of who the child will call a mother and who the child will call a father is irrelevant and completely up to the convenience of the parents, our main concern is rather, how a family is seen by the society and by itself. These roles are not static and limiting, they are dynamic and case specific. These roles are important because it reminds us of our real responsibilities, whose effective fulfillment will ultimately make a family happy and a better world.