They should invent a form of motherhood that is not tiring

Every home I visit has stories. Stories of women making delicacies and passing them down to their daughters and daughters-in-law. One of the aunts has learnt how to make laddoos from her mother-in-law. Another one has learnt how to make coconut truffles from scratch. My mother tries to make aloo parathas exactly the way nani used to. And I am supposed to aspire to talk about cooking and cleaning the way they do.

At some point in my life, I am expected to compare notes with the women in my neighbourhood around Diwali and say, “yes, I am done with cleaning the living room, the other rooms are pending”, and they would respond with, “I am done with the kitchen and the living room”. As if there is a report card that will be sent at the end of the year, about whose kitchen is the cleanest. Who loses themselves to domesticity soonest?

The thing is, I can’t see aspirational value in Diwali labour or any form of domestic labour, because all I have seen of it is exhaustion. A thankless turmoil, women entering an age-old tunnel over the festivals and doing the same things that the women before them did, and somehow, still being expected to smile through it. Still being romanticised for it. All of this, while kids and men go about life completely oblivious to what festivals do to women around them. And it’s not like pop culture helps, we still see mothers in roles that are not important, because domesticity is a woman’s domain and domesticity is not important because it is unpaid. Because for years now, generations of women have done this labour and we are used to taking it for granted.

Would I still be this way if the women around me had hidden exhaustion as immaculately as norms of womanhood expected them to? Probably yes. Every generation of women is expected to do this kind of labour, and if it is not evident in one home, it is evident in other homes. It is as if there are tiny molds around domestic chores that all women have to fit. Sometimes, this fitting in costs integral parts of themselves.

They should invent a form of motherhood that is not tiring because there are days I realise with gutting clarity, that I probably had time to write or study because there were other women in the kitchen. Women who are mothers and aunts and grandmothers. Women who should have been thanked in winning speeches and acknowledgements of books because someone was able to write in a room, or work on a laptop, or discuss political ideas in the living room or gossip in other rooms or paint or come up with a strategy, because probably someone else was in the kitchen. Most probably, a woman. A woman working in the kitchen through heartbreak, physical pain or even through the loss of someone close to her because that’s what she is expected to do. It is a silent burden that needs to be dropped slowly, but steadily.

By Kavya Lakhani