Parenting is hard. It is demanding, exhausting and mostly thankless. And as primary caregivers, it is often harder on mothers than fathers. You are responsible for your child’s well being- physical, emotional, mental and in most cases spiritual as well. You are constantly worrying about what your child eats, what he drinks, what he reads, what media he is exposed to, what sport he plays- the list is endless. But then, parenting has always been difficult. “It takes a village”, they say and they’re right. Only in today’s global society, you are the village.
When I was pregnant, I had this quiet conviction that I was going to have a boy. Once D was born, I was at a complete loss on how to raise him. I only had experience around little girls and I was completely flabbergasted on how to go about bringing up a boy. The initial months were easy- you just had to feed him and make sure he wasn’t too warm or too cold. As he grew, so did my disquiet. As a woman, I felt, I was more comfortable connecting with a girl than a boy. After all, all I had to do was teach her from my own personal experiences and those of my friends. I just had to teach her to keep struggling and fighting against the injustices meted out to her, in the same way I had been doing since I was old enough to understand being a girl put me at a disadvantage. I just had to teach her to not conform to society’s expectations from a girl, to fight against patriarchy, to tell her that being a girl did not make her any less of a human being. With a boy, I wasn’t sure where to start.
That was the time the MeToo movement started taking center stage and as I went about reading and doing research and wondering how to start parenting my boy, it hit me. Boys have never had to face any of the disadvantages that girls did. They were never told they weren’t good enough. Ergo, the challenges they faced were different. And they were complementary to the ones girls faced. I realized then that raising a boy wasn’t all that different from raising a girl. It is just that the issues they had to face were different.
The first order of business was trying to raise my son to be as gender neutral as possible. Which meant not conforming to the “blue-pink” madness when he was little to choosing his toys, the books he read and the messages he was exposed to. I’ve always let D pick out his own toys. I’ve never made a conscious effort to direct him to more “masculine” toys like trucks and cars. Granted he loves them but he also loves to cook and play house and I’ve never stopped him from doing those. I’ve never asked my son to “toughen up” and not cry. I’ve taught him in turn that everyone cries and it is yet another way to express emotion. The one time he told me that only girls wear pink, I told him no- colors are a personal choice and it’s not just for girls. He’s dressed up in skirts and tiaras and in superhero costumes. He’s sensitive and frequently needs to be held and cuddled and kissed and I’ve told him that’s a healthy way of expressing affection. He helps out with household chores- cooking, cleaning, folding the laundry, taking out the trash- all traditionally considered to be the forte of girls. I also make sure he sees his dad doing the same things so he understands that household chores aren’t divided based on gender. I’m doing this to make him self-sufficient and also to instill in him this belief that gender doesn’t define what one does or becomes. Hopefully, when he’s older and is bombarded with the kind of sexist messaging and imagery that is so prevalent in today’s world, he will remember these lessons he learned as a child and be strong enough to stand up against them.
This is a world of angry men and angry women. Women’s anger is righteous and stems from centuries of being oppressed, controlled and relegated to the sidelines in all walks of life. Men’s anger stems from a lack of control. It tries to silence the voices of others including women. For ages, men have been taught that they are in control of everything- from their destinies to politics, economics, society, and women. Why else would we still have men making decisions on women’s bodies? Every single mistake they ever made was justified with the nonsensical argument of “Boys will be boys”. They’ve had the world handed to them on a platter and have constantly been told that they could be anyone and have anything they wanted. The whole world was full of successful “men” for them to look up to.
But today, women’s voices are louder than before and it has led to a fundamental shift in the definition of what being a man entails. Today, being a man has come to mean being an ally to women. At least, that’s the way I prefer to think of it. And this means, instead of sticking to the age-old ways of raising boys, we need to raise them more like we raised our girls- to be sensitive, to be compassionate, to be helpful, and most of all to fight against the established world and social order that treats girls differently from boys.
Mind you, I want my son to be tough. I want him to be tough in the sense that he’ll stand up for what is right. I want him to be tough when he stands up against racism, bullying, patriarchy. I want him to be tough in the face of pressure from peers and from a society that will try to fit him into the stereotype of being a man. I want him to be tough when it comes to standing up for his beliefs and convictions. I want him to be tough enough to go against centuries of beliefs that make him the favored sex. I want him to be tough enough to fight eons of deeply entrenched patriarchal systems. I want him to be tough enough to shrug off the venom that will unfailingly be directed at him by a lot of his own gender when he chooses to be an ally for women. But beyond all this, I want my son also to have that innate toughness to choose the kind of person he wants to become- the courage to be his own person not shackled by anyone’s expectations including mine. That’s the toughness that I will welcome and strive to foster in my son.
I am constantly trying to raise my son to not be defined by his gender. And I know there are millions of mother’s like me around the globe trying to raise their son’s to be allies to their daughter and to girls around the globe. Hopefully, these little boys won’t be corrupted by the toxic world environment we see and read about every day and when their time comes, will be, along with the girls, harbingers of the kind of change the world so desperately needs.
PS: After reading this some of you might feel that a lot of what I’ve written has been generalized. Like the fact that all men have it easy or that all women are angry about their lot in life. Well, there are men who have had tough lives and women who are perfectly happy in patriarchal societies but for the most part, what I’ve mentioned here it true. My writing might also seem very straightforward but as we all know, there are no blacks and whites to anything in life. I’ve just tried to articulate to the best of my ability what I feel and what I’m trying to do.
The Inarticulate Wordsmith 