Diary of a mothering worker. June 24, 2021.

Post 424.

OF ALL the issues that men could engage in the world, fatherhood is the one that has drawn the most impassioned demands for a “male perspective,” and stimulated men’s collective organising for voice, inclusion and representation. This is not surprising, as the just passed Father’s Day showed. Fatherhood has deep meaning for families, and for men, even when it involves contradictions and complexities. 

The recently-formed fathers’ movement in TT has grown out of anger at mothers over custody and maintenance issues in particular, but has a generalised and largely uninformed opposition to feminism. It is concerned about positioning men as the real victims of (mothers’) childhood abuse, (women’s) partner violence, (feminised) state discrimination and an ideologically sexist gender division of labour (which defines men as providers) – issues which Caribbean feminists have analysed for decades in ways far more nuanced than this movement stereotypes. 

There is actually a long history of Caribbean feminist work on care which argues that fathers are just as nurturing as mothers (and therefore that women are not biologically nor by evolution predisposed for unequal responsibility for care), and calls for more equitable sharing of housework and for better work-family balance (including paternity leave and daycare spaces in workplaces) since at least the mid-1990s.

Indeed, feminism’s core politics is that our sex (as well as gender and sexuality) should not define either our nurturing or providing roles, nor time spent on housework nor rightful access to headship, power and decision-making. 

It is also that care should be counted and valued as an ideal human quality for both women and men – whether in terms of childhood socialisation, sexuality, family, the economy, national governance, international relations or our relationship to the planet.

Finally, it is that patriarchal beliefs promote domination, hierarchy, violence and toxic expectations for women and men, and need to be transformed to improve all of our lives. This is an excellent foundation for men’s movements which want to move beyond the sterility of a battle of the sexes – which is a patriarchal framing where everything is understood in terms of war, even family and fatherhood.

In this context, it was great to read the just released “State of the World’s Fathers” report, produced by Promundo, which brings together the valuing of fathering with feminist politics of care. The “good news,” cites the report, is that globally, “Men are participating more in unpaid care during the pandemic.” 

Why is this good news? “Due to lockdowns all over the world, at a global level men have been present in the lives of their children more than at any time in history,” concludes the report. Men are spending more time on daily tasks of time management, food preparation, schooling and the emotional labour of fathering. 

This is a real-life basis for allying with feminist movements to have family responsibilities better recognised by national care and parental leave policies, workplace conditions, social protection programmes, and political leaders. It’s an opportunity for solidarity with domestic workers who labour in our homes, and nurses who care for our ill family, expanding the issues of care that intersect fathers’ lives.

“Globally,” writes the report, “women do three to ten times more unpaid care and domestic work than men.” In one study, 42 per cent of women of working age compared to just six per cent of men were unable to do paid work before the pandemic because of childcare. 

During the pandemic, both women and men reported an increase in childcare. Yet, in one study of 16 countries, women reported an increase of 5.2 hours per week and men reported an increase of 3.5 hours per week spent on childcare. This disparity is likely in local realities as well. 

Men consistently report spending more time on childcare than women say they do. This gap, and the aspiration it suggests, leaves room for collaboration to make care equality a reality. It is clear that many men want to spend more time nurturing.

The report recommends specific policy goals and target dates for achieving equality in unpaid care. It describes this as “nothing short of a global shift” which will enable housework and childcare to be roles more greatly associated with men and masculinities whether in schools or health facilities, cultural narratives and social norms. It also requires that recovery policies specifically address inequalities and impacts of unpaid care work, and have more equal representation of women and men in shaping such policies. 

So much more to say. For fathers’ movements, covid19 has highlighted both challenges and opportunities. 

 

Diary of a mothering worker. April 27, 2018.

Post 281.

For all its imperfections, the Guardian has been good to me. In 2012, Editor Judy Raymond offered to publish my diary about working motherhood. Since then, I’ve encountered many, mostly mothers, who were emboldened by someone writing about the quiet, isolated experiences and emotions that they have, but feared weren’t important or collective enough for public print.

Grandmothers have seemed to be my most regular readers. This often left me negotiating badass with good beti even while the radical example and words of older, wiser feminist foot soldiers, including those in hijab and those leading domestic worker unions, emboldened me.

I began in Features, yet my sense of citizenship often led my diary to political analysis and advocacy. Slowly, as Ziya grew, I had space to think about more than sleeplessness, breastfeeding, baby steps and birthdays. Like most women, including ones whose educational and occupational empowerment seems to set them to achieve everything women could want, I worried about being a good mother, making ends meet and managing my career. This continues, even with just one child, having had to live with the loss of not having more.

Yet, I rebelled, writing in 2014, “Some days you spend whole conversations on love and sex. Other days you connect ethically and emotionally with other women over delays in passing procurement legislation, the state failure and corruption that has allowed illegal quarrying, and the social and economic costs of badly planned urban development. When women resist because representation remains our right and responsibility, some days our diaries will say nothing about husbands or babies”.

Still, the column wasn’t not focused enough on governance, in the style of my long-time UWI mentor Prof Selwyn Ryan. Indeed, I was composing fictional creation-stories, delving into the deeply emotional art of Jabs such as Ronald and Sherry Alfred, and Fancy Indians like Rose and Lionel Jagessar, and still mulling over marriage, fatherhood, primary schooling, connection to nature, and love.

I thought hard about genre and experimented with writing. The form of a diary is so often associated with women’s private thoughts and feelings, held close and secret with a small symbolic lock. Bringing this genre into the public domain was a deliberate act against male-defined Op-Ed expectations which position the oil sector, the constitution and politics as the serious topics of the nation.

For most people, managing family life, feeling safe in their homes, and negotiating aspirations and disappointments matter most and are the most pressing issues in their lives. The diary moved from Features, taking these concerns with it, and challenging divisions between public and private, and their unequal value.

The form also built on historical examples of colonial logs, and journals such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which I read as a graduate student, but with substance grounded in emancipatory, Caribbean feminist observations and Political Leader-less, worker and citizen people-power.

Readers wrote to me, wondering if I was a PMN, a UNC, a COP, a knife and fork Indian, too Indian, and too feminist. Amidst calling for an end to child marriage, programmes to end violence against women, and policies to protect women workers from sexual harassment, I wrote twenty columns in which lesbians were named as part of the nation and region, precisely because no one else would, because every woman matters, not just the ones that meet patriarchal expectations, and because these women, who were not allowed to exist in law, would here defiantly exist in public record as having the right to be.

I learned that to write a diary, which wrestles with life, love, rights and justice, is to risk repetitive, aggressive attack. I owe Editor Shelly Dass public thanks for skillfully stopping Kevin Baldeosingh from using the Guardian to legitimize his bizarre and obsessive stalking of me in the press, always to harm.

I’ve grown, as has Ziya, in these pages. I’ve learned to look around the landscape, appreciating all its heartfelt and difficult growing pains, like my own, in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Diary of a Mothering Worker departs from the Guardian, but will continue to walk good, gratefully carrying the lessons from Guardian and its readers’ years of nurturing wrapped in its jahajin bundle.

 

 

Diary of a Mothering Worker. June 9, 2015

Post 195.

Stone has been trying to figure out how to explain to Ziya that sometimes your best friend no longer wants to be your best friend, and though sadness is inevitable, there’s nothing to do but resiliently be yourself, let go and move on.

‘Is it a school day?’ Zi had asked when she woke up one morning this week. Because of her difficulties negotiating such a changed relationship, she didn’t want to go to school. Indeed, the social life of four year olds is like curriculum from the school of tough love.

This life lesson had been long coming. When Zi moved up school year, the little friend she virtually worshipped no longer clung to her also, and she’s spent the whole year slowly, reluctantly recognizing this.

On afternoons after school, we would hear endless stories. How her friend didn’t have any interest in playing with her anymore and had found a new best friend, how on another day they played all through lunchtime and she felt included and important again, how she also had to learn to play with other girls and find new best friends.

Below these stories was confusion and hurt, and we supported her teachers in emphasizing to her that all relationships change. Ziya doesn’t easily adapt though. She’s shy and self-conscious and, because of such awkwardness, can get deeply attached, holding onto the safety of those with whom she’s comfortable and familiar, investing more emotion, expectation and loyalty than is likely to be reciprocated, and quietly brooding over moments and feelings of rejection.

I never knew that children were so emotionally complicated and sensitive. Or, perhaps, I never knew I’d have to develop the skills to navigate anxieties so early, balancing on a thin line between indulging and devaluing such momentous trivialities. It never occurred to me that I’d have a child who takes so long to adjust to new situations, new children, new everything. I’m sure neither did Stone.

When you are making a baby, you just focus on its health and normalcy. You assume your child will be exuberant and confident, smart and hardy. You hardly anticipate or consider their potential idiosyncrasies, paranoias and neuroses, and you don’t expect them when they are four.

Zi is more fearful than I imagined possible for children now encountering the world for the first time. One night, waking from fitful sleep, she cried out to us that she was scared. ‘Scared of what?, we asked. ‘Scared of everything,’ she said, and I wasn’t surprised.

At parties with children from her class, I watched Zi play by herself because she didn’t know how to integrate into group play or was the only one afraid of the height of the play structure or waves at the seashore. We began to take her to her parties early because she could handle beginning with one or two children, but was overwhelmed arriving when too many were already there. We’d encourage her to find a kind friend or older child who would look out for her, and were grateful when she soared away with them. Stone and I had to learn more patience, and he explained his own experience of losing a best friend in the transition to QRC.

On Zi’s teachers’ advice, everyday we talk about who she played with at school, and what they did. When she told me they formed a ‘Supergirls’ group last week and how all the girls were in it, I felt that it had taken a year, but our wallflower had begun to more independently blossom.

Like us, our children’s hearts puncture and heal, their days are full of ups and downs, their discomforts may be perplexing and their abilities take time to grow. And, it’s not just Zi as so many other parents know.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. June 18, 2013

Post 102.

Having not grown up in a two parent household, it’s a whole new experience for me to reflect on Ziya’s experience of living with both her mother and father. Understandings of how children connect to their fathers, which should be obvious to me, are only now part of my own learning as I observe the ways she relates to her parents and constructs her idea of family.

Her connection to me as her mother is intense and intimate, even overwhelming for us both. That has resulted not only from the kind of quality time I’ve consciously devoted, but also to from more than two years of continuous breast-feeding and, therefore, physical attachment. Yet, when we are reading books, and I point out the mummy lion or hippo, or when I tell her about my plans to take her on an outing, she’ll insist on looking for the daddy lion or asking whether daddy will be going on the outing too.

In her world, both mummy and daddy are present and necessary, and they are together. While she loves spending time with each of us, she loves spending time with both of us more. This isn’t the kind of daddy-struck adoration that seems to characterize girlhood. She’s invested in our nuclear family beyond the influence of socialization and even my own expectations of her capacity at two years old.

Dads are a vital and irreplaceable part of children’s lives, but some part of me thought that mummies could also be enough if they gave their all. Politically, I also don’t want to reproduce anti-woman views that argue that all families should have a mother and father living together, and that each must be playing some rightful role, for children to grow up fulfilled and functional. Heading their own household by choice or necessity, and with dads participating to various degrees, women have raised happy, productive and contributing members of our Caribbean. Dads can do the same too, on their own if they have to. Moms and dads don’t have to live in the same house to wisely cooperate for their children’s best interest. Even daddy-struck girls can figure out how to get on with life in the midst of separations, and how to renegotiate love across new family formations. Don’t doubt that they, we, survive and thrive.

Nonetheless, I see how Ziya would be confused, unsettled and heart-broken at the loss of having both parents with her. It makes me think back to myself at two and the complex, formative emotions that I forgot existed in me then. It makes me realise, not that break-ups are bad, because they can definitely be for the best, but how much adult partnerships define children’s sense of self, safety, stability and social space. When Ziya wants to know where the daddy hippo is or decides that two of any animal represents a mummy and a daddy, it’s a visceral statement that your relationship profoundly matters and is accountable to someone else besides the two of you.

Seeing us through her eyes has made me more greatly appreciate the role Stone has to play, whether we stay together forever or go separate ways. That role and its significance is his responsibility, not mine, to treasure, nurture and ensure. Still, I mature as a mother from recognizing that Ziya will have different feelings about and experiences of motherhood than I did. I improve as a partner from openness to learning anew about fatherhood and its value. Ziya is not the only one growing. She’s making us, as individuals and as a family, grow too.