Responding to Elle's Post

I have often wondered what it is about the sound m. Why in so many languages in the world the word mother starts with this m sound. Mother. Ma. Madre. Mata. Maman. And a lot of the other variants we can think of.

I am not a mother.

I have been infantilized countless times in my life because I am not a mother.

My own mother, as her last weapon, often times, says to me, "Just wait till you become a mom. I will see how you feel when your own child behaves with you the way you are doing with me." I have told her every time, "Ma, I don't want to become a mom." I don't think she takes me seriously. It's just another sign of my not growing up, I guess.

I love kids. I smile at them in public places. And when I am in India, I touch them, play with them, make them giggle. I love kids because I see in them what this world can be. What I can be. What I could have. I love kids. My womb doesn't throb every time I see a kid, though.

I know plenty of "feminist" women who have written poems celebrating motherhood, and quite good ones too, while being crappy mothers themselves.

I don't equate my femininity with my capacity to reproduce. I shudder when my student says in class, now that i am a mom, i dont worry about my body image, you, know. i feel my body is now utilitarian. I shudder because I don't believe in utilitarianism. I don't believe women need to give birth in order to prove that they can be of use. I don't believe women need to be "beautiful" in order to be anything. I don't believe it's only motherhood which can somewhat replace that idea of mass-cultural beauty.

I don't get worried when I see that the most potent political alliance in my home-state West Bengal in India coins the slogan Ma Mati Manush(Mother, Land, Man) for the elections. After all, nationalism has a long history in using women as mother-symbols. I get hysteric when I see my leftist male friends, many of whom I consider my comrades, not feeling troubled by this coinage. I shed tears in silence when one of them calls me Euro-centric, coz I pointed it out. And then another says, you won't get it. you are not a mother, after all...guess what, by the time my mother was your age, i was 12.

I tell him, " I am not mother to anyone. I am teacher to many."

So, when Elle writes

outside and within some feminist communities, childfree women are under excessive pressure to conform to what is considered normative. Those who choose not to have children are regarded as suspect, strange, threatening. Their choices are dismissed as temporary or mean. Those who don’t have children, but for reasons other than choosing not to, are pitied, regarded as incomplete and barren--which has to be one of the coldest words I’ve ever heard used to describe a human being.

I find words of solace. solidarity.love.

And when she asks,

But how do you nurture and create community when things like this stand? When women are called “moos,” “breeders,” and “placenta-brains” and their children “widdle pweshuses” and “broods?”^^ When you cast your community as one in which women who have children and women who are childfree are diametrically (perhaps, diabolically) opposed and that mothers (gasp) are taking over the movement and leaving slack that others have to catch up? When it becomes clear that some of us are not welcome into your community? When your remarks indicate that you are, in fact, chillingly “independent of community?”

I know, here is someone who has raised the crucial questions in a far more competent way than I ever could have. So, a nod to this post. And a warm hug for writing this.

May we be never afraid of thoughts, debates, and impossible quests.