Unapologetically child-free by Janaki Lenin

http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/chen-columns/unapologetically-childfree/article4837335.ece

When I was 13, I announced I wasn’t ever going to have babies. I could tell from my mother’s pained expression that I was being difficult. She suggested, “Why don’t you wait till you’re older before you make that decision?”

Just a few days earlier, I had declared with the air of a haughty artist, “Aesthetically, ears are ugly.” The only reason I remember moments like these are my poor mother’s reactions. Throughout my growing years, aunts handed me baby-cousins to look after during weddings and family gatherings. I was a girl and ought to have an automatic desire to care for babies. But I never felt maternal, no matter how hard I tried. I thought babies were like ears. Most Indian families I know are besotted with marriage and children. As soon as I turned 18, the nagging began, “When are you getting married?” Then I dropped Rom, the bomb, on them, and after the initial shock wore off, relatives nagged, “When are you having children?” Nobody thought to ask if I wanted babies. I didn’t desire them nor was I convinced there was a good reason to have them. I imagined myself in my mother’s position, and immediately baulked at the idea of bringing me up.

As an adult, I revelled in my newfound freedom. I had spent more than a decade dreaming of it. Having a child would put me under another kind of tyranny for at least 18 long years, if I was lucky. And I would have to be a tyrant, too.

My friends, however, wasted no time in making the transition from brides to mothers. They sent euphoric emails with numerous pictures. Puzzled, I asked Rom, “What’s the big deal? Anyone with ovaries can pop babies out, right?” With a look of mock-horror, he signalled me to hush up before imaginary neighbours overheard the blasphemy.

But my attitude to baby animals was different. I watched Rom and the Croc Bank staff fret over compatibility of reptile mates, the right conditions for courtship, and eagerly anticipate eggs and babies. Once they passed that gauntlet, they struggled to control humidity, temperature, fungal infections, mortality, and finding the right prey for the babies. If the babies survived past their first birthdays, there was much-deserved celebration all around.

Many parents feel insulted that I skipped motherhood. One matriarch tried hard to divine the problem. Throughout the rest of our stay, she asked about which fertility treatments we had sought. I tried to explain it was a deliberate choice; I may as well have been speaking Martian because I made no sense to her.

As is typical on trains, after demanding to know what I did and was I married, a stranger asked, “How many issues [children]?” “None.” “Why not?” “Because issues don’t have fur.” I went back to reading my book, while he spluttered on about how women are incomplete without babies. When I didn’t rise to the bait, he demanded, “Who will look after you in your old age?” I shot back, “And you have a pre-natal agreement with your children, right?”

A few people wagered I would change my mind if a baby parachuted into my life. I countered, “What if I don’t? Would you take the baby back?” Now I was being rude, they concluded.

Many misinterpreted my words as criticism of their choice to have children. No matter how I couched my explanation, there was no way of treading softly. People saw my rejection of baby-dom as a religious challenge. My child-freedom also poses another kind of challenge. For genes to survive, organisms have to reproduce. My poor genes watch helplessly as I happily and without regret consign them to a reproductive dead-end.

Ever seen a bumper sticker “We two; ours none”?

Childless, Naturally By Urvashi Butlalia -Reflections on not being a mother (Artlicle from Livemint)

Source: http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/jEGOb5320WMOVI1boGOfGN/Urvashi-Butalia--Childless-naturally.html

It has been two years since the man I nearly married and I decided to part. On a balmy evening, the leaves stirring gently behind us, we sit in a restaurant talking. The heartbreak is over, the friendship intact. We talk about what we shared, why we decided to go our separate ways and then, he surprises me by saying: ‘You know the one thing I do regret is that we would have had such lovely children, and you, you’d have made a fantastic mother, you’re such a natural.’ A natural? Me? What has he based this judgment on, I wonder, and what does it mean? It’s true that I love children—I did then and I do now, indeed I only have to see one on the road walking with or being carried by a parent and I ‘naturally’ veer that way. But does that mean I had what it took to be a good mother? I’m not at all sure.

Thirty years later. I am still single, I still love children. I’ve become familiar with the question: why have you never married? Don’t you feel you need a relationship? Are you not lonely? Don’t you want children? I’m not entirely sure I follow all the connections but the questions insert themselves into my head and I ask myself: do I want children? Am I missing something by not being a mother? Most friends I talked to actively want this, she wants to feel life growing within her, she wants to ‘give’ birth, she wants to be pregnant, to hold the child within her, to be able to give love unconditionally, to have someone to look after her (and her partner) in the future, to experience the joy of motherhood. I feel none of these things. Does that mean I am a cold fish? That I have no feelings? Am I fooling myself when I say I feel no active desire to have children—am I saying this because, in truth, I want them, but I do not want to seem lacking in any way so I imagine I don’t? It’s difficult to say. I’m constantly suspicious of myself though and worry: am I really the contented person I think I am or am I just pretending?

**********

My friend’s statement stays with me. It comes back to haunt me time and again. Am I such a natural? Then why is the desire for motherhood not growing inside me actively?

I think back to my friends who talk about being able to love unconditionally. I think, well, this is not something I am unfamiliar with—why do people assume such feelings then are only meant for children? My friends have children, talk of sleepless nights, of irresponsible husbands, unhelpful siblings, of school admissions, of careers given up, of grades and universities: I hear this all the time. And I hear the throwaway remark: ‘Well, how would you know? You’ve never been a mother.’

**********

I’ve just got my first job. It’s in a publishing house: my father goes to the general manager, a genial Bengali, and tells him that he had better look after his daughter. The general manager tells me this is the first time they have employed a woman in an executive position: normally they do not like to do this because women go off and get married and have children. He makes it sound like a crime. I promise him I will not do this. I keep my promise. Long after I leave my job. No marriage, no children.

**********

My mother and I are talking. I worry for you, she tells me, what will you do when you grow old? Everyone needs someone. If you don’t want to marry, why don’t you just adopt a child? But is that a good reason for adopting a child, I ask her, to have someone around when you grow old? And what’s the guarantee anyway? No, no, she quickly switches tack. That’s not why I think you should adopt. But just think what wonderful grandparents this potential child is missing out on! Good enough reason for adopting, don’t you think? I take her seriously. Perhaps she knows more than I do, I tell myself, and I start to search out adoption possibilities. For a while, I am quite excited by the change in my life that this promises, but in the end, I do not have the courage, or the motivation. I give up.

**********

I’ve set up my own publishing house, publishing books by and about women. I am fiercely passionate about this, it’s what gives me joy, it’s what involves me, I know this is what I want to do all my life. I want somehow to make a dent in the way the world sees women, to be part of that change. Is this madness, this obsession? Why didn’t I feel this way about children? Or am I just deflecting an unfulfilled desire? I’m told motherhood is a woman’s destiny, it’s what completes her. So what’s all this about publishing? But I don’t feel incomplete, or that I have missed my destiny. Is there something wrong with me?

**********

My friend Judith has been trying to have a child for many years. She’s deeply depressed, the relationship with her husband is becoming more and more tense. She’s gone through many miscarriages, they’re both desperate for children, but they can’t seem to have them. She and I talk one day, standing in the dark near a lamp post in a cold European town. Why don’t you adopt, I ask her? How can I, she says, I’m not at all sure how I will feel towards the child if she is not mine. But she will be yours, I assure her. She may not be born of your body but she will be yours. We talk. I am passionate about the joys of adoption, the importance of it, the fact that ‘naturalness’ means nothing in motherhood. Once home in India, I write her a long letter, persuasive, eloquent. She tells me that went a long way in making her decide. Today she has two lovely daughters, sisters, adopted from the same country, and she’s a best-selling author of a book on motherhood. Why was I so persuasive? I don’t really know.

**********

I’m with my friend Mona Ahmed, a hijra, at her home in Delhi’s Mehendiyan, an area with two mosques, a madrassa, two graveyards, a dhobi ghat and many houses. A man till the age of eighteen, and then castrated and now a woman after a sex-change operation, Mona tells me that she has always, always wanted to be a mother. I wanted to hold a child in my arms, to feel life against me, to learn motherhood, to bring the child up, she says. In her early seventies now, Mona fulfilled the desire to adopt a little over twenty years ago when a neighbour died in childbirth and her husband had no use for the daughter she had given birth to. Mona ‘created’ a family, herself as abbu, father, her hijra friend Neelam as ammi, mother, her guru Chaman as dadi, grandmother. The assigned roles though were a bit more mixed up. It was Mona who was the real mother; she was the one who nurtured Ayesha, gave her a name, a birth date, an identity. I chose the 26th of January as her birth date, she said, for I wanted that she be free like India. And I learnt how to be a mother, she adds, I went every day to the doctor, the pediatrician, and asked her to teach me how to feed the child, how to burp her, how to bathe, change, what to watch out for, how to develop antennae about when to wake up, and so on. Can motherhood then be learnt? Is this what there is to it? What about the ‘naturalness’ of it to women? What about someone like Mona—abbu, father, but actually mother.

**********

Mona’s daughter, Ayesha, comes to visit me. We talk about her life, a young girl, brought up in a hijra household, the father (Mona) actually her mother, the grandmother (Chaman) referred to as ‘he’ by everyone but Dadi, grandmother, to Ayesha. Can you imagine what it was like? she asks me. They gave me so much love, but a young girl growing up, she needs some things, she has questions to ask about her self, her body, who was I to ask? There was no other female, only these men/women, these people of indeterminate sexuality. I was so alone. Perhaps motherhood can’t be learnt after all.

**********

On a Thursday morning Bina, the daughter of the presswallah across the road, runs away. No one suspects anything till it’s afternoon. She’d gone to school to sit for an examination, perhaps she’s gone out with friends afterwards. But Bina is a ‘good’ girl, she does not go off without informing her parents, so as afternoon turns to evening they start to worry. Back at home in their community, they wonder whether to go to the police. They are afraid of scandal—suppose it is something innocent, the girl’s just gone off somewhere and fallen asleep, why make her disappearance public? But in the evening, they learn that a young boy, the son of a neighbour, is also missing. Suspicion begins to solidify into certainty. In the end, a report is filed. Two, three days later, both are discovered in a neighbouring town, and brought back home. They swear that they wandered away innocently—went for a walk to the zoo, then a film, then, frightened that the parents would be angry, they boarded a bus and went off to a relative’s house. Did you sleep with each other, the anxious parents ask in euphemisms, there is no straight way to ask youngsters if they have had sex, no real vocabulary. No, no is the vehement denial. The parents are relieved: they don’t stop to ask how the youngsters so quickly understand what it is they are asking.

A month later Bina is pregnant. Her mother and I take her to a nearby clinic. We try to tell the doctor that it was an accident, but Bina is quicker than us. No, she says, it wasn’t my first time with this man. We’re silent. Clearly she lied to her mother and to me. Her mother is devastated: I did so much for her, and this is how she pays me back? I understand her grief, but I wonder too—all that stuff about unconditional love, where did this notion of payback enter the picture? How do children pay back? Bina has her abortion, and remains persona non grata. The young man disappears from her life, and soon after marries someone else. Men’s peccadillos are easily tolerated.

Two years later, she runs away again. This time with a married man. His wife is unable to give him children, so he marries Bina, brings her into the household. She gives him two children, he is delirious. She’s now married, and a mother. Her parents are relieved and happy. Everything is settled. She’s a mother. No one will say anything now—besides her husband also has money. Legitimacy and wealth—a powerful combination. Later, she will finance her young brother to buy a car and begin a taxi service.

**********

My friend from overseas is visiting. We’re talking over dinner. It’s her son’s birthday, she does not know whether to call him or not, their relationship is difficult, tense. She’s no longer with his father, he resents her because he feels she does not give him enough time or attention, she worries that he has not yet found a job. She calls him. Happy birthday son, she says. They talk, with affection, and then, suddenly, without warning, there is anger, resentment, almost a kind of hatred. I knew it, he says, you always do this, you always want to make me feel small. She tries to explain, he will not listen, she’s devastated, but struggles to keep the conversation open. It ends badly. Am I a bad mother? she asks me. Is it wrong of me to want a career? I have done what I could for him, I love him, but surely it is time he took his life in his hands? What do you think I should do? I have no answer.

**********

I’m at home. My mother, ninety years old, is unwell. She’s becoming weaker by the day, she’s unable to eat, she has to be helped to the bathroom. One day, as I take her to the bathroom and help to clean her up, she asks me, how will I ever repay you for this? And I ask myself, and her, why should she even think this way? She’s spent the better part of her life being a mother not to one but four children, surely we owe her something? That old payback thing again. As she gets weaker, I find myself structuring my life around her needs: leaving the office to come home for lunch so she is not alone, putting her to bed in the evenings, staying with her, her hand in mine, till she is peacefully asleep, bathing her, cleaning her, feeding her, taking her for a walk, spending time with her… in other words, being a mother to her. One of my friends comments on this, you’ve become the mother. My women friends and I discuss this, we find that all of us are in similar situations, mothers to our mothers, becoming our mothers. Was this what was meant by it being natural?

**********

We’re trying to fix a meeting for an NGO that I am on the board of. There are six of us who need to meet and we’re juggling dates. One of us, a man, says a weekend is better for him as his young son is getting married and he will not be free earlier. The other one announces that she is about to become a grandmother, and suddenly people start trading stories about being mothers and grandmothers, offering each other stories of how wonderful it all is. I pitch in saying I don’t know about any of this, and am told, don’t worry, we’ll make you an honorary grandma, no worries if you don’t have children. How true, I think, I have no worries of that kind. I will never have to worry about which school to send my child to, or be forced to think of her percentages when it comes to entering college. Or deal with the deeper anxieties that all mothers must have to deal with.

**********

But relief isn’t all. There’s also concern. I’ve just seen a friend totally devastated at losing her young son. Barely twenty, he died in a freak accident, she is inconsolable, she feels a part of her has been torn away, wrenched out of her body almost. This too is part of motherhood, this deep, intense attachment, this terrible, devastating despair when you lose a child. Could I have coped with this had it happened to me? Useless to speculate, but a sort of fear settles around my heart for all the mothers who lose children—surely, I think, there can be no loss worse than this. There’s relief too, perhaps a selfish sort of relief, at being childless.

**********

But there’s also concern, a question. For years I have identified myself as a single woman. It’s important to me this definition: singleness is, for me, a positive state, one

that is not defined by a lack, by something missing, by a negative—as for example the word ‘unmarried’ is. But with this children business, we don’t even have the language to define a positive state. I mean, there is childlessness and there is childlessness. How often have we heard that a couple is childless, that a woman who cannot bear a child is defined as barren. Why should this be? I did not make a choice not to have children, but that’s how my life panned out. I don’t feel a sense of loss at this, my life has been fulfilling in so many other ways. Why should I have to define it in terms of a lack? Am I a barren woman? I can’t square this with what I know of myself.

**********

I recall one of the authors we’ve published, a domestic worker called Baby Halder. She had her first child when she was barely thirteen. A child herself, she became a mother before she had time to even think. At some point, Baby, reflecting on her childhood, commented on how ephemeral, how brief it was. One afternoon, exhausted from playing host to her sister’s suitors, Baby slumped against the wall of her home and reflected on her life. So brief was her childhood that she saw the entire history pass before her in a few moments. I licked every moment, she said, as her cow licks her calf, treasuring it. For so many of our young girls, despite laws that forbid it, motherhood comes even before they have stopped being children. Is this right? Why is this thing so valorized?

**********

Nothing is simple though. The newspapers have been full of the story of a Bengali couple in Norway—the Norwegian authorities have taken their two children away from them. If reports are to be believed, one of the children has something called ‘attachment disorder’—he starts banging his head against the wall when he sees his mother. The papers speak of a tense, conflicted, sometimes violent relationship between the mother and the child. Finally, the mother is deemed unfit to look after the children, and they are handed over to their uncle. Back at home in India, the whole thing acquires other dimensions altogether—politics and nationalism enter the picture. The issue seems to be how Norway can decide on what is right and what is not for our children. In Bengal, the Child Rights Committee decides to give custody back to the mother. None of the reports in the papers says anything about whether the mother is competent to look after the children or not, or indeed how the children are being affected by this constant backing and forthing.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this case, what concerns me is a different thing. On a membership-based email network called feministsindia, there is a general sense of relief that custody has been awarded to the mother. There seems to be an assumption that the mother is the ‘natural’ (back to that natural stuff again) guardian, the best person to look after the children. It’s not the rights and wrongs of this particular case that worry me—my knowledge of them is, after all, only based on newspaper reports.

What concerns me is this: as feminists, we’ve questioned everything about the ‘naturalness’ of motherhood but here we are, in a way almost unquestioningly accepting that naturalness, not even entertaining the notion that mothers can be violent, that they can be incapable of looking after their children, or even unwilling to do so. I wonder what is going on here—was the response of the Norwegian authorities a culturally insensitive one? Or was it that they believed, as often happens, only the father’s version? Were all media reports of the mother’s supposed violence towards her children then totally wrong? Or are we, as feminists, reaffirming the motherhood myth? Where does the truth lie? Is the relationship between a mother and a child always a wonderful one? I have no answer to these questions.

**********

So what do we have in the end? The ‘naturalness’ of motherhood? The ‘curse’ of childlessness? The dread of barrenness? A life filled with lack, with loss of what might have been? Or just another way of living? A choice, happenstance, circumstance, call it what you like, but for me, it’s a happy, contented, fulfilled life, despite—or perhaps because of—being what is called ‘childless’. For those of you who’ve doubted yourself about this, let me assure you, it’s a good place to be.

Urvashi Butalia co-founded India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women, in 1984. She continues to publish and promote books for, on and about women in South Asia as the publisher of Zubaan. She has edited several collections, and is the author of The Other Side of Silence: Voices From the Partition of India.

Is Childfree The Way To Be? Article in the TOI by Sharmila Ganesan

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Is-childfree-the-way-to-be/articleshow/19081221.cms

Bad news in this country could refer to a variety of things but 'good news' usually carries just one meaning. Sooner or later, this euphemism for pregnancy sneaks into the lives of every married couple as a question posed by one and all. To be able to answer them in the affirmative, some women fast, go around trees, visit astrologers and plead with doctors. Then, there are women like Anu Santosh.

"We have no desire to become parents as we are very compatible and complete on our own," says Santosh, a 36-year-old entrepreneur from Powai, about her decision to remain child-free after six years of marriage. She dismisses the age-old spiel that a woman is "complete" only after she bears children as the invention of very satisfied mothers. Santosh is also part of Childfree By Choice India, where child-free couples from all over the country have been sharing views in India.

This slowly swelling breed of women who've decided to remain child-free are not just the stereotypical feminists, says Delhi's Amrita Nandy. A doctoral candidate from JNU, she recently spoke to several non-mothers across the country, few of whom were from Mumbai, for her research on 'Motherhood and Choice'. "These are chiefly very successful women who take their identities and purposes of life very seriously," says Nandy whose sample included well-placed bankers, writers, media professionals, lawyers and environmentalists who felt that bringing in a child would add to carbon footprint.

Their reasons could range from the financial shackles of home loans to the desire to travel. Fifty-four-year-old Jyoti, a PR professional born and raised in Mumbai, was so resolute in her decision to be child-free that she went under the knife in her late thirties to negate the possibility. As the eldest of four girls, Shetty, who currently stays in Pune, says she had seen the repercussions of being part of a large family. "The oldest gets ignored and the priorities change and parents have no time to give attention to all," says Jyoti. In the current scenario of inflation, Jyoti feels this is a wise choice to make.

Freedom is the most cherished consequence of their decision. "I can never in my worst nightmare imagine being disturbed with mommy stuff when I'm reading, napping, talking to a friend or having a conversation with my spouse," says Ritu Khabia, a homemaker married to an air force officer. "I mean imagine spending your whole life-energy caring for brats who won't have time for you later when they get engrossed with their own life."

The society, though, does not fail to remind them of the pitfalls. One of Ritu Khabia's friends told her that her marriage wouldn't work in the long run in the absence of children. Another woman almost bullied Khabia into producing children by saying, "if your marriage is strong, you will have children". When Jyoti had approached a gynaecologist to have her "knots tied", the doctor chastised her: "You will regret it as kids are an old age crutch."

Some reactions come in the form of silent judgements. Anu Santosh, who recalls a colleague remarking that women who don't want kids were "off their rockers". Even her family is convinced Santosh and her husband will change their mind eventually. "If we do, I am pretty sure we will adopt and not have our own.Would it then be fair for me to call mothers with biological children selfish for not caring for the helpless?" asks Santosh, adding that she knows that a lot of mothers would find this accusation absurd. "Perhaps then they can learn to mind their business."

Glass ceiling or “maternal wall”?
Amrita Nandy

We mothers are often told “you can have it all”. What they do not tell us is “you can have it all… just not all at once.” I feel deep love for my child and a gnawing frustration with my ‘self.’ And sadly the two are linked
—a blogger who quit work for full-time child care.

The angst of this woman reflects the age-old tussle between work and motherhood. Living rooms, office corridors and increasingly Indian ‘mommy blogs’, websites, Facebook and Twitter have become popular sites of such throttled expression by “working mothers” (a term so widely used, it does not even sound odd till you try “working father”). So potent is the Cult of Motherhood that stay-at-home mothers report feeling less capable and wasted for not working, the working ones feel guilty and selfish for not being home with the kids and yet each camp disapproves of the others’ choices. While the ‘flexi-jobs’ phenomenon promises to ease women’s burden, but one hopes it does not inadvertently perpetuate women’s care-giving roles.

Of all the women with full-time jobs, it is the mothers, especially those in the private sector, who seem to be the worst-hit. Besides high-pressure work and long hours is the ‘intensive mothering’ wave that seems to have gained credence among certain circles. Dr. Ravinder Kaur, Professor, Sociology and Social Anthropology at IIT Delhi, states “It is largely the aspiring middle class that is involved in this…they are doing what has been called "concerted cultivation"-- the focus is on upward mobility through various strategies one of which is making children, especially sons, successful in their careers”.

On the other hand, human resource professionals gingerly admit a slight apprehension about mother employees: “During interviews, we like to know if women have care takers at home for their kids so that there is clarity about job requirements on both sides. It is not that we do not want mothers but they may not prefer such high-stress jobs”, shares a senior recruitment manager at an MNC. But it is no secret that ‘good jobs’ go to ‘good workers’ often defined as those who work fulltime (read long hours) and full force.  Culturally normative obligations of a good mother seem disjointed with the obligations of an ideal, committed worker. In The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued, Crittenden has argued that mothers are discriminated against in terms of wages in some Western workplaces; Joan C. Williams, a researcher at the Washington College of Law calls this the “maternal wall”. 

In their tireless efforts to give their best shot in every role, women resort to various strategies. Some make care-giving arrangements with elderly parents or in-laws. Middle and upper-middle class women hire nannies. A 38 year old banker in Mumbai says “My parents look after my son during the day but they are unhappy that I spend little time with the child. A full-time job gives me everything but time. But they condone and approve of my husband’s longer absence from the house while I am made to feel guilty! Why do I have to choose between work and child?” Her 10 year old son has a whole team to people to look after him—maternal grandparents, a cook, a daily tutor to help with homework and studies and a driver at his disposal. Yet, guilt is a big issue among working mothers. A Gurgaon-based HR professional with 13 years of full-time work in the petro-chemical, engineering and BPO sector shares her approach to the conundrum: “When my kids were toddlers, I would accompany them to the park only on weekends. The questions and comments by other mothers implied that I neglected my kids. I used to cry a lot. Over the years I have learnt I must live for myself too. I decided to have a flexible job only when my kids were adolescents because I think the more they grow, the more they need you”. No wonder the tagline of workingindianmoms.blogspot.com is “Problems, Stress and the Guilt They face”. Women’s Web, an online magazine for Indian women, even ran a “Mommy Guilt” contest! The prize: A copy of the book Mommy Guilt: Learn to Worry Less, Focus on What Matters Most & Raise Happier Kids.

It is often assumed that outside the competitive environs of the private sector, work pace is slower. Teaching is particularly thought of as a ‘softer’ job for women who intend to marry and raise a family. Meenu, a senior teacher at a Mumbai-based school shares, “That school teachers have it easier is a myth! I start my day at 5.30 AM and end it at 11.30 PM despite having a part-time domestic helper at home. I may be home a couple of hours earlier than a full-time worker but then I have to do far more. There are more expectations from school teacher mothers because we are seen to have more time”. Sarita, an Assistant Professor in a Delhi University College, is a single/unmarried adoptive mother, thinks that “All mothers -- married or not -- are ultimately single mothers. Care giving is seen as a woman’s job”. Speaking from her experience of mothering and academia, she states that it was not very difficult for her: “I have flexibility and not nine-to-five regime and have many more holidays. My colleagues helped me by re-arranging the timings of my classes”. So can flexibility be the panacea?

Yes, thinks the team of “working mothers” at Fleximoms, a career advisory for women who wish to work flexibly. At a community meeting organized by Fleximoms in Gurgaon, BlackBerry-toting women who had quit work to be full-time care-givers at home discuss challenges, issues and solutions. From a twenty-something mother of a three month-old baby to a 50-year old Chartered Accountant, these women are looking for jobs and “lost identities”; they admitted “feeling brain-dead at home” and “fuming about the luxury of sitting at home”. They had doubts over “part-time” work, its pay patterns vis-à-vis work load and the non-serious, almost “recreational” aura it carries. Fleximoms Co-Founder, Anita Vasudeva, clarifies that ‘flexible’ jobs “unlike part-time jobs, connotes a larger spectrum of innovative possibilities ranging from flexible hours/days/ or projects weeks to working from home and so on. The idea behind Fleximoms is to bridge the vast gap between the untapped pool of skilled women professionals and businesses’ need for experienced workers at remote locations. And it seems to work for some like Linda, a senior advertising professional in Bangalore. She quit full-time work for child-care even when she was perched to fly higher in the professional ladder: “I did not want to neglect my kids. Been working flexi hours ever since…it allows me to do it all, including singing in a concert and direct a play! I am happy”.

While flexi hours do end the tortuous grind of daily jugglery for women, it seems at best an interim solution. Hoorahs for the maternity leave and the paternity leave have long died down. We did not take to crèches very well. Some look down upon all non-workers and mothers sadly continue to be counted among them. Housekeeping and care giving are still seen as women’s work but women have started to demand help and their space. Whatever happened to “work-life balance”, a term often bandied about in corporate town halls? Time for gender roles paradigms to shit. Flexi-roles anyone?

(Some names have been changed).
++++++++++