People will selectively use “tradition” to justify anything. Tell her that a double-income family is actually the true Igbo tradition because not only did mothers farm and trade before British colonialism, trading was exclusively done by women in some parts of Igboland. She would know this if reading books were not such an alien enterprise to her. Okay, that snark was to cheer you up. I know you are annoyed—and you should be—but it is really best to ignore her. Everybody will have an opinion about what you should do, but what matters is what you want for yourself, and not what others want you to want. Please reject the idea that motherhood and work are mutually exclusive.
Our mothers worked full-time while we were growing up, and we turned out well—at least you did; the jury is still out on me.
In these coming weeks of early motherhood, be kind to yourself. Ask for help. Expect to be helped. There is no such thing as a Superwoman. Parenting is about practice—and love. (I do wish, though, that “parent” had not been turned into a verb, which I think is the root of the global middle-class phenomenon of “parenting” as one endless, anxious journey of guilt.)
Give yourself room to fail. A new mother does not necessarily know how to calm a crying baby. Don’t assume
that you should know everything. Read books, look things up on the Internet, ask older parents, or just use trial and error. But above all, let your focus be on remaining a full person. Take time for yourself. Nurture your own needs.
Please do not think of it as “doing it all.” Our culture celebrates the idea of women who are able to “do it all” but does not question the premise of that praise. I have no interest in the debate about women “doing it all” because it is a debate that assumes that caregiving and domestic work are singularly female domains, an idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and caregiving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not whether a woman can “do it all” but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home.
SECOND SUGGESTION
Do it together. Remember in primary school we learned that a verb was a “doing” word? Well, a father is as much a verb as a mother. Chudi should do everything that biology allows—which is everything but breastfeeding. Sometimes mothers, so conditioned to be all and do all, are complicit in diminishing the role of fathers. You might think that Chudi will not bathe her exactly as you’d like, that he might not wipe her bum as perfectly as you do. But so what? What is the worst that can happen? She won’t die at the hands of her father. Seriously. He loves her. It’s good for her to be cared for by her father. So look away, arrest your perfectionism, still your socially conditioned sense of duty. Share child care equally. “Equally” of course depends on you both, and you will have to work it out, paying equal attention to each person’s needs. It does not have to mean a literal fifty-fifty or a day-by-day score-keeping, but you’ll know when the child-care work is equally shared. You’ll know by your lack of resentment. Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist.
And please reject the language of help. Chudi is not “helping” you by caring for his child. He is doing what he should. When we say fathers are “helping,” we are suggesting that child care is a mother’s territory, into which fathers valiantly venture. It is not. Can you imagine how many more people today would be happier, more stable, better contributors to the world, if only their fathers had been actively present in their childhood? And never say that Chudi is “babysitting”—people who babysit are people for whom the baby is not a primary responsibility.
Chudi does not deserve any special gratitude or praise, nor do you—you both made the choice to bring a child into the world, and the responsibility for that child belongs equally to you both. It would be different if you were a single mother, whether by circumstance or choice, because “doing it together” would then not be an option. But you should not be a “single mother” unless you are truly a single mother.
My friend Nwabu once told me that because his wife left when his kids were young, he became “Mr. Mom,” by which he meant that he did the daily caregiving. But he was not being a “Mr. Mom”; he was simply being a dad.
THIRD SUGGESTION
Teach her that the idea of “gender roles” is absolute nonsense. Do not ever tell her that she should or should not do something because she is a girl.
“Because you are a girl” is never a reason for anything. Ever.
I remember being told as a child to “bend down properly while sweeping, like a girl.” Which meant that sweeping was about being female. I wish I had been told simply “bend down and sweep properly because you’ll clean the floor better.” And I wish my brothers had been told the same thing.
There have been recent Nigerian social media debates about women and cooking, about how wives have to cook for husbands. It is funny, in the way that sad things are funny, that we are still talking about cooking as some kind of marriageability test for women.
The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina. Cooking is learned. Cooking—domestic work in general—is a life skill that both men and women should ideally have. It is also a skill that can elude both men and women.
We also need to question the idea of marriage as a prize to women, because that is the basis of these absurd debates. If we stopped conditioning women to see marriage as a prize, then we would have fewer debates about a wife needing to cook in order to earn that prize.
It is interesting to me how early the world starts to invent gender roles. Yesterday I went to a children’s shop to buy Chizalum an outfit. In the girls’ section were pale creations in washed-out shades of pink. I disliked them. The boys’ section had outfits in vibrant shades of blue. Because I thought blue would be adorable against her brown skin—and photograph better—I bought one. At the checkout counter, the cashier said mine was the perfect present for the new boy. I said it was for a baby girl. She looked horrified. “Blue for a girl?”
I cannot help but wonder about the clever marketing person who invented this pink-blue binary. There was also a “gender-neutral” section, with its array of bloodless grays. “Gender-neutral” is silly because it is premised on the idea of male being blue and female being pink and “gender-neutral” being its own category. Why not just have baby clothes organized by age and displayed in all colors? The bodies of male and female infants are similar, after all.
I looked at the toy section, which was also arranged by gender. Toys for boys are mostly active, and involve some sort of doing—trains, cars—and toys for girls are mostly passive and are overwhelmingly dolls. I was struck by this. I had not quite realized how early society starts to invent ideas of what a boy should be and what a girl should be.
I wished the toys had been arranged by type, rather than by gender.
Did I ever tell you about going to a U.S. mall with a seven-year-old Nigerian girl and her mother? She saw a toy helicopter, one of those things that fly by wireless remote control, and she was fascinated and asked for one. “No,” her mother said. “You have your dolls.” And she responded, “Mummy, is it only dolls I will play with?”
I have never forgotten that. Her mother meant well, obviously. She was well versed in the ideas of gender roles—that girls play with dolls and boys with helicopters. I wonder now, wistfully, if the little girl would have turned out to be a revolutionary engineer, had she been given a chance to explore that helicopter.
If we don’t place the straitjacket of gender roles on young children, we give them space to reach their full potential. Please see Chizalum as an individual. Not as a girl who should be a certain way. See her weaknesses and her strengths in an individual way. Do not measure her on a scale of what a girl should be. Measure her on a scale of being the best version of herself.
A young Nigerian woman once told me that she had for years behaved “like a boy”—she liked football and was bored by dresses—until her mother forced her to stop her “boyish” interests. Now she is grateful to her mother for helping her start behaving like a girl. The story made me sad. I wondered what parts of herself she had needed to silence and stifle, and I wondered about what her spirit had lost, because what she called “behaving like a boy” was simply behaving like herself.
Another acquaintance, an American living in the Pacific Northwest, once told me that when she took her one-year-old son to a baby play group, where babies had been brought by their mothers, she noticed that the mothers of baby girls were very restraining, constantly telling the girls “don’t touch” or “stop and be nice,” and she noticed that the baby boys were encouraged to explore more and were not restrained as much and were almost never told to “be nice.” Her theory was that parents unconsciously start very early to teach girls how to be, that baby girls are given less room and more rules and baby boys more room and fewer rules.
Gender roles are so deeply conditioned in us that we will often follow them even when they chafe against our true desires, our needs, our happiness. They are very difficult to unlearn, and so it is important to try to make sure that Chizalum rejects them from the beginning. Instead of letting her internalize the idea of gender roles, teach her self-reliance. Tell her that it is important to be able to do for herself and fend for herself. Teach her to t
ry to fix physical things when they break. We are quick to assume girls can’t do many things. Let her try. She might not fully succeed, but let her try. Buy her toys like blocks and trains—and dolls, too, if you want to.
FOURTH SUGGESTION