Khadija Magardie
BODY LANGUAGE
One of the funniest “girlie” scenes in a modern movie was in the 1992 hit comedy My Cousin Vinny. The movie revolves around mechanic-turned-lawyer who has to defend a relative accused of murder. In the now legendary scene, Marisa Tomei’s character, Mona Lisa Vito, is complaining to her boyfriend, Vinny (Joe Peschi) about yet another postponement of their wedding. She whines, “My biological clock is tickin’ like this,” loudly and rhythmically stamping her foot.
The biological clock has been the fuelling fire for the sitcom humour that we see on our television screens almost daily. Especially if the heroine is one of those feminist babes who ran away from her husband, or boyfriend, in order to “find herself”. In some cases, this “finding herself” means that she wakes up one day, in the midst of her independence, to find she is single and baby crazy – with no man in sight.
One of the growing list of “new-age” feminists, Danielle Crittendon, writes about this in her latest book, What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman. She questions why, despite all its successes, “feminism hasn’t been able to banish fundamental female desires from us”.
Since it first burst our bra straps, feminism has been, rightly or wrongly, inextricably linked with notions that home and family are the quintessential “ball and chain” of woman’s struggle to be recognised as a person in her own right, and not as a mere appendage of her husband or children.
Indeed, in some places, such as the Arab lands, a woman is defined as umm-ul banin, or “mother of the children”. Some of these women do not have names at all, and are merely umm so and so (mother of the, usually male, child).
What Crittendon, and indeed I, feel is that feminism has been a dismal failure in terms of suppressing the longings and passion for children that exist in every woman at one time or another, regardless of whether she chooses to ignore them. And in trying to tell us women that “being at home with baby” is nothing more than a millstone around our necks, it has only served to intensify our choosing them as “attractive life options”.
By and large, feminism has been mistaken by women to mean donning earplugs when the biological clock can be heard, or even if the alarm goes off. A glance at the writings of the greats of yore, such as Simone de Beauvoir, would indicate that this is one of the foundations of the feminist ethic. And this has fuelled the mistaken belief that being a feminist is not compatible with defining the major pleasure in your life as being a mother.
Babies do a lot of things to the life of the modern woman. For one, their crying, messiness and costliness can reduce even the most iron-willed of women. Not to mention what they do to the temples of our liberation – our bodies.
Babies, even when they have passed infancy, wreak havoc on our sex lives, if not to cause a temporary engine failure, a shut-down altogether.
No woman, or man for that matter, has high regard for a wail from the cot during inopportune moments – no matter how cute the baby is. They also have a knack for doing this at just the wrong time, almost as if it is deliberate.
This is not to even mention the unavoidable droops that they bring about in our bodies. Breasts shrivel until they are no more than empty, flaccid paper bags. And no amount of slimming or gymming can ever get rid of that lower abdominal blubber that bears an uncanny resemblance to sheep’s tripe – even worse when it is covered in stretch marks. Alas, the more babies, the more cruel gravity becomes.
So why do we do it? Why do we voluntarily choose the equivalent of letting a complete stranger into our homes for more or less 20 years, to invade our privacy, sleep with our wives or husbands whenever they please, eat and drink at odd hours (at our expense), let loose their bladder at whim, do considerable damage to our pockets and, perhaps above all, to be so damn noisy?
Because, despite their garishness, I think every woman who surrenders her life, partially or wholly, to raise a baby, is surrendering to what is not “feminine” habit or behaviour, but human. And despite those times when we really don’t like our own or other people’s children, and bat them away as if they are a particularly nasty bug, children are an extraordinary extension of our own humanity, something we never cease to be in wonder of. Who can resist their little socks, or look at their tiny hands, and not be amazed that we, too, were like them?
Motherhood is not an oppressive instinct, which we should seek to suppress if we want to be “good feminists”. When it is imposed, yes, it can be detrimental to the fundamental principle that women should not be defined in terms of or controlled by their reproductive functions. But we have been taught, by and large by the women’s movement, that we should not surrender to “feminine instincts”, as they are stereotypical. In order to “find ourselves”, we need to free ourselves of the fetters that society defines as “womanly”. In order to do this, we pop the pills and postpone pregnancy until we are sitting in a restaurant one day and we find our hearts heavy when we see a baby in a stroller.
Nobody is saying that a woman cannot be fully thus unless she has been a mother. But we should stop defining motherhood as drudgery, and something to be avoided until we are ready to “settle down”. It is not a “last option”. Sentimentality and babies do indeed go hand in hand, and to say we should not be emotional on this issue would be to deny the reality that the pleasures of holding a baby in your arms, is, for most women, more gratifying than a degree scroll or the keys to the corporate washroom.