Gentle parenting my parents

Like all truly smart people, because I have finally recognised my own intelligence, I reserve the right to change my mind about everything. Almost everything. Provided with new information and evidence, I have trained my ego to back off, accept I was wrong and evolve along with the new data I am presented with. It is because my ideas are not my identity.

However, over the past year, a massive shift has occurred within me regarding something I once believed was a fundamental aspect of who I am as a person. I owe it to a book, my girlfriends know about, and I suspect they think I am totally loco. But have I ever cared? It did its job, because I no longer feel sheer terror thinking of the prospect that I might never become a mother. It was such a core part of my identity that of wanting to be a mother that now nobody believes I am fine with the idea of never being one. I am being gaslighted as a result of the steadfast conviction I used to have about being born to become a mother. Please remind me from now on to never say never.

I have babysat since I was 14, I have helped raise my brother since I was 6, I see a baby and I melt and start to giggle, and I can confidently say that kids love me back. They can feel I have so much respect for these tiny giants who still have an inner world that isn’t corrupted by all the dirt of the world. They can tell I am not offended by their sincerity. Their wisdom profoundly moves me. My friends often send me pics of chubby babies; my favourites are pictures of fatty Asian kids whose arms look like tiny bread rolls. The smell of babies and their tiny feet sends me to heaven. And the fact that I no longer have a panic attack at the idea of not having my own one day, does not change that. Kids, I love you so intensely. I believe you’re one of God’s most beautiful creations.

But yeah, sheer terror is the right word to describe the feeling that would get to my bones when I even considered that prospect. Once, a very practical, emotionless man I was unlucky to know told me, “I got tested for fertility, I am very fertile, I wanted to know from the get-go if I should worry about this or not”. He said this as if he were talking about which taxes he is supposed to pay. This northern European practicality around some of the most sensitive topics of our lives is something that may never catch me, and I am ok with it. Then he urged me to do it too. I never gathered the courage. “What if I found out I cannot be a mother?”. I would need a drink after that thought. I would need to shake it off.

This was my starting point. For me, a woman’s life without the experience of motherhood was a half experience. Like just seeing a half-time of the movie. I am now convinced that motherhood for the sake of motherhood is a losing game. If motherhood eats entirely the womanhood, I do not want to be part of it.

I hit 30, and suddenly everyone seems to be an author on the Reproductive Sciences (RS), a peer-reviewed, monthly journal publishing original research and reviews in obstetrics and gynaecology. I went to dinner with a guy who went full-on doctor on me, after asking me if I wanted kids, and my “yes”, telling me I should freeze my eggs. He did not mean to be mean. But after you just told me you having kids is a must for you, you have recently cheated on your girlfriend, and now you are back together, why do you think you are in a better-suited position to advise on my love life and reproductive future? People who “must have kids” are heavy on the reproduction part way more than on the love part. I realised that while I used to be heavy on the must-have-children side, I was and I am not able to decouple the two things. I want to have kids because I truly love somebody, and it is unbearable to me not to extend what we are in the form of another person. But, it never fails to amaze me what confidence societal approval gives to flawed individuals, allowing them to give advice and look down on the flawed single individuals. I so wanted to shout, “We are not the same, we are not playing the same game”, and leave.

At this age, people go on a date and are in a hurry to scan the person in front of them. Partly it is because they know themselves and what they like better, partly because they are desperate to “close the deal”. Again, thanks to that book and the timing when it found me, I am experiencing a reverse transition. I have been desperate for the idea of being loved, picked, and chosen by a man my entire 20s. What a waste of my time. And of anybody who had to listen to me cry about how unlovable I seemed to be. It is no longer like that for me. I used to be emotionally and verbally slutty. I would go on a date and would tell my entire life to a man with the emotional capacity of a garbage can. I wanted him to know who I am, to accept it, to embrace it. To be fair, why did I want that from somebody else if I wasn’t able to do that myself? If there were a genie, my first wish would be “please erase from the memory of unworthy people everything they knew about me”.

All this hurry is like being interrogated, you say things that can be misinterpreted by the “policeman” you have in front of you. But what left a bad taste in my mouth was the fact that I found it rude. People are increasingly rude, and they do not realise it. They take liberties that you haven't tacitly granted them. Where are manners? Where is the gentleness you should grant to a stranger you know nothing about? Why do you feel so free to be so blunt about the body of another person?

What made men so comfortable with telling women they barely know (he had seen me once previously) that they should get their eggs frozen? Mister, I am not a lay chicken, and this subject is too sensitive to discuss with a woman you have no clue about. I have promised myself that the next time a man tells me such a thing, I will say to him, “Did you ever think of taking a vasectomy? You know, a woman goes through a lot of chemicals to take those pills, so you can come inside, without a condom in between?”. If they feel so free to make women uncomfortable, I believe they should have a taste of their own medicine. Vasectomy is reversible by the way and takes a session, and is not nearly as invasive and long as the egg freezing process. I am not advocating for vasectomy; I am advocating for some decency and manners here.

You might be saying to yourself by now, “God, women, Vilma, women like her, are so demanding, so difficult to please”. But I never state a problem without thinking of a solution. Next time you meet a woman, try to hold yourself from giving medical advice you are not qualified to give. Try to meet the eyes of the woman in front of you, try to take time to get to know her, as a human first, and try to suppress the fear you hold that she might not be a good investment if you do not know after your 15-minute interview that she is the one. Because the good question to ask is not “do you want kids?” The good question to ask, at some point, if you love her, is “do you want kids, with me?”. There’s a world of difference in that question. It is a question that bears more responsibility, than being chosen just as a penis owner. It is being chosen by a woman who truly wants a father for her child, not just to have a child.

I realise, after all, that no matter if I will ever be a mother to someone, I am quintessentially a mother and I will always be. Because I see a world that increasingly sees kids as a commodity, as a must-have, as a toy. Which I would only understand if we still were in a feudal reality, where kids had to help work in the fields. I see people having kids for all the wrong reasons, like boredom, like societal pressure. I am someone who is surpassing her selfish need to have a child for the well-being of a child who does not exist yet.

Recently, I heard the term “maternal feminism”, and I think I am one. I believe motherhood is the most important job a woman can have, the most transformative and the one where she holds the most power to change society. But I believe we have been played by at least the last 30 years of militant feminism. Women in the past have often been the father and the mother of a child, with men, at best, providing only materially. But women had a community, and children had a village that raised them as well. Today, a woman is asked to be at a demanding job and a mother too, without the tools to ever escape the lingering feeling of being a failure at both. A mother today cannot always count on a community. She is going through the most violent, demanding and beautiful transition, often alone.

Millennials, like me, and Gen Zs have been raised by women who saw motherhood as a sacrifice only. One that they were often happy to make. But I wonder if they would have made the same choice if becoming a mother did not grant you a stamp of approval. The idea that motherhood is a sacrifice a mother has to proudly wear made it impossible for a lot of women to ever say that they regret motherhood. And that is something I want to avoid. I could never bear that.

A lot of young women today do not want to have kids, not because they are spoiled brats who do not understand what sacrifice is. They know it better than anyone else; they saw their mothers often fall under that pressure. A lot of women do not want to become parents, because they have already been, most of their lives. Their childhood ended way before the childhood of those who judge them. Ask the elderly child, the firstborn of a woman who had no support. She has been aware of the money issues, of the betrayals, she has held the emotions of her parents, she has consoled them when she needed consoling, and she has taken care of administrative stuff way before 18. I could go on forever about what being parentified means. And most of us have been parentified because one of the two parents, sorry to say it, but often a man, has not been a dad. The world does not need more patriarchs; it needs, desperately, fathers. And women are no longer accepting men who want the title of one without being able to be one, as a partner. I believe this is correct. I believe we might end up having fewer kids, but we might have healthier ones.

Vilma Djala