Actor Aishwarya Rai is quoted saying that motherhood is so blissful that even the attendant exhaustion is "a blissful exhaustion". Perhaps Ms Rai has enough domestic help, and therefore enough restorative downtime, for bliss. Or maybe she is a totally hands-on, bone-weary parent, and still finds it blissful. But if you talk to enough parents, neither of those options seems like the rule.
A recent article ("Stop the Lies About Parenting") counters that there's no bliss in the exhaustion. Being a parent is mind-bogglingly difficult, and the bliss narrative is twaddle, handed out to unsuspecting young people who will have the wind knocked out of them by the realities of child-rearing. The article points to the largely unspoken corollaries of parenthood: depression, mundane routine, uncertainty, anxiety, self-loathing, disappointment, and the irreversible relentlessness of it all.
Did she really say that? Did she really say that we don't always love, adore and want to sacrifice our all for our little darlings? That they're often a pain in the posterior, that looking after them can be boring? That the emotional cost sometimes outweighs the emotional benefit? That we are rarely sure of how we got into this mess, and never sure of how to navigate it? Yes, she did. Plenty of online comments censure her for this heresy. If this is heresy, what is choosing not to have children at all? (It mustn't be a choice. You must be "trying", or unable. Q: Poor thing, who will look after you when you're old? A: You had children as medical insurance?)
Nothing gets people's knickers in a twist like the subject of parenting - except, maybe, the subject of religion. You could argue that parenting is held up as a kind of religion: you are encouraged to believe, as an article of faith, that having children is a wonderful thing, a natural milestone, the thing that completes and justifies your own sorry little life and makes it worth living by, in fact, displacing its meaning onto another person. This is especially true for women.
Reproducing is seen as a fundamental human right, regardless of the aptitude or competence of the parents. A mix of patriarchal economics and biology makes it a right that people exercise unthinkingly, and the bliss myth is what sells it to the fence-sitters. But if you don't consider it self-evident that you will enjoy structural engineering, why would you consider it self-evident that you will enjoy raising children? Given that one can't really stop being a parent in the way that one can stop being a structural engineer, or at least not as easily, it's amazing how many people leap unhesitatingly into the lifelong fires of parenting.
My guess is that if people - especially women - were not simply brainwashed into thinking that having children is a sacred and wonderful trust; if they were instead made to apprentice at the side of a new mother for a few months to give them a taste of what it's like, many, many of them would say: Thank you very much, this is not for me. Or: I expect my partner to help a lot. Or: Pardon me, but anyone who thinks I must do this and hold a full-time job and look hot and keep my marriage exciting is out of their ever-loving mind.
The sheer drudgery of caring for infants and small children - relentless changing and cleaning, stupefyingly boring feeding, brutal sleep deprivation, crazy-making repetition - is not for everyone. The emotional toll is levied over a lifetime, right beside the rewards. Nobody claims that parents do not love their children, or that they do not do their best by them, despite all this. Nobody claims that even parents who hate the drudgery would give up their kids. But many of them might have thought twice about having them in the first place.
Parents sometimes mutter imprecations amongst themselves, but the conversation handed down to prospective parents mostly elides the warts of parenting. Why, in this day and age, are people not more fully aware of what they sign up for when they throw away the contraceptives? Many really love having, and rearing, kids. Many others discover, too late, that they really don't. How about allowing people to make an informed choice?
Whether women decide to become mothers, and once they are mothers, whether they decide to "lean in", should be a choice made on the basis of individual temperament, not on the basis of some pointlessly competitive myth. If you can do it all to your satisfaction, and want to, and enjoy it, more power to you. Rock on. But people who do not choose this, or think that having kids is a mixed bag, are not weak or deficient. They're just not buying the myth.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
