Motherhood: A New Zenith Of Gender Inequality

It's hard to imagine that we all entered this world as the result of our mothers doing what I am currently doing for Alma. What the female body, mind and soul has to endure to become a mother is so common, it feels like it actually cannot be as hard as it is: why would millions of people do this? You could argue, society lied to women, and that nobody told us how hard it was going to be. But for me, that is not true. I had been warned. I had been told. Most of all, the sentence "you can't imagine until it actually happens to you" was used an intolerable amount. But there is no preparing, there can't be. Many have tried what I am doing right now, trying to put words to this experience. Shakespeare himself could never - mostly because he is a man. And this is the most surprising part I did not see coming, despite my voluntary decision to embark on this craziness despite all the warnings: it has never felt more crushing to be a woman. 

The first time I saw my gynaecologist after confirming my pregnancy, he (!!!) congratulated me to this life-changing metamorphosis I was going to experience. I told him, I would rather not have to. "Nonsense", he said. "Over the years, I have envied many mothers on how they can uniquely bond with their children throughout the whole thing. I am doomed to never make a similar connection!" I had only been through morning sickness by that point, the absolute disgust of opening the fridge with all its nasty smells and - not to be underestimated - the fear of losing the child. Or should I call it pressure? Because being an oven to your child that you hoped for isn't just a wonderful feeling, it's a crazy weight from day one. Although the worst was yet to come, I already felt the immense desire to punch him in the throat. It's hard to imagine from a female perspective that most men do not see that they are grossly overprivileged every single day in comparison to women - but to eradicate the sheer awfulness that is pregnancy, childbirth and everything that followed was one of the worst things a man has ever said to me.

I knew it would be hard, yes. And painful. They tell you you don't know what "tired" really means until you have a baby which is impossible to imagine because you could never practice not sleeping for longer than 3 hours at a time for a whole year. When I heard this stat that women need five years to regain a sense of self after childbirth, I didn't even understand what that meant. I know now: The pain has become my every day life, exhaustion is no longer temporary. Even on a good day, all I am for now is a walking mealtime. Anytime I am not feeding, I am thinking of feeding. Every moment she isn't sleeping, I need to think about her next nap. It is not dramatic to call this a loss of self: I will survive, my body works on the bare minimum. But she needs me. And you do whatever she needs, even at the loss of anything that takes care of you, because of that other thing people warn you about: unprecedented love. 

You laugh off that people you know don't recognize you in the street. It's not just that you can't shower or wash your hair, it's that your hair has actually fallen out almost entirely. With luck, you apply sunscreen to make sure one day you can look like yourself again. How could they recognize you? You are not the same person. I am not even sure I am Sina right now, I am really just Alma's mom. I'm not taking a break from my career because I want to, it's because I have to. I am losing months of progress and money to do this, and I need to stand by this decision because, unlike a man, I cannot have both a baby and career advancement (at least if I want to do a good job at either). The decision to not see my friends anymore is not made because they don't have children, it's because they have jobs, and my freedom of movement (if I even have any at all) ends at 6pm every day. At first I thought I missed going out to eat, a glass of wine, socializing. Now, even if it was available to me, I would hardly find the energy to do it. Alma is my life, and there really isn't anything else right now. 

If you're reading this and feel like I am hating being a mother, you're not wrong. What it takes is in no way something a single person should be doing alone. And yet, that is the reality for almost all of us mothers. "The men" go to work. They come home and believe they are tired from work. Walking through the park with the babies, sipping coffees, nursing under a willow tree, looks easy to them. The sheer weight of calculating sleep, trying to get them to eat, hoping for a normal development - all this is so invisible. Waking at night because the baby coughed is not an overreaction, it is a built-in mechanism that is designed to freak you out so the baby can survive if it's in danger. Men don't see it because they don't have to feel it. They are an added bonus for a baby, not an essential. Here and there I have seen posts on social media that is demanding more visibility for the struggle of men becoming fathers and I have never been less empathetic for someone's experience than men having to adjust to fatherhood. For once, they can do what women do every day: just suck it up!

The inequality of this experience is one of my biggest challenges in this. Although completely unfair, the resentment I am feeling towards my partner is so bad for me. I am jealous every night lying in ways I didn't know my body could hold to nurse my baby, thinking "I just want one night like him". His worst night with Alma so far would be my holiday break. It's not his fault at all. He wants me to wake him, but the fact it has to be me waking him is nature's biggest fuck you. Not everyone is blessed with a partner as amazing as mine, someone who truly wants to help me and be the biggest presence in our daughter's life, and yet everything he does still feels like it's barely scratching the surface. He takes on housing chores because if he doesn't, well, they are not getting done. I have nothing left. A load of washing and unloading the dishwasher is a productive day now. And even when he is completely exhausted after stepping it up on the weekends, I cannot help to think "but I do it EVERY day". Getting a mental break of 8 hours at any job sounds like a holiday (although I'm sure maybe that's a bit unfair of me also). 

All this, people told me before. Nobody reading this will have never heard of it, but still, most childless women have this hope that for them it will be better or that maybe, just maybe, we are all just being dramatic. I know. But it really is this hard. I now understand that look women with their strollers gave me when they saw me pregnant; it's instant solidarity. I cannot hate mothers anymore. Even Melania gave birth, I now respect her. The fact most women go through this in life makes them the stronger sex to me forever and ever, it is some superhuman shit, even if so many of us actually have this superpower. None of them are male. They don't have superpowers. They can't do this. And what's so painful about it is that they can't even understand. I realize, they do not choose this. It's not a man's fault he will never understand. But it makes doing this without envy, without a strong resentment towards the lack of suffering from them, impossible for me. While my love for my partner grows with every day we are doing this together, the hatred towards his sex as a representative of injustice grows daily as well. One day, my beloved daughter will also have to learn that her y-chromosome we were so excited about actually really screws her over, and I hate that. But unfortunately, I cannot see how we fix this without having men have babies. But we all know they could never pull it off... 

Grieving The Other Lives: What People Don't Talk About When Having Kids

Sadness, in my life, had a very prevalent spot in growing up. I often felt sad as a teenager, would cry myself to sleep over memories. Nostalgia broke my heart before I even knew what that word meant. Often music sent me back to a memory of my childhood, a time I missed so much because I always felt that "things were good back then". Dramatic teenager, I know: shocker! Music then reminded me of places, eventually my deceased father, and then, when I got older, entire stages of my life that had always felt better once they had passed than when they were lived. This sadness I felt over it - I keep thinking now - wasn't sadness about what had happened; rather, I was grieving times that were never going to come back. Like the loss of a friend, I knew some times would never be returning to my life. They were over. So, I suppose, it was never sadness in the first place, but grief. Now that I have a baby, I feel this more than ever.

I probably have never been less sad in my life than right now. My daughter has definitely done to my life what everyone is expecting from procreation: a new sense of meaning, love with absolutely no boundaries and the complete loss of caring about anything that mattered before. I am not actually wanting my pre-Alma life back -  but I have not yet fully processed the grief over losing it. That life is gone. It will never be back. That is quite hard to accept. The thought makes me cry despite the absence of sadness. I am feeling a sense of decay, that life is a mere collection of memories that we will one day have to let go off into oblivion. All I have of my old life is memories, and one day I won't even have that. Sadness arises over the feeling that even my daughter will one day be a memory I don't get to remember anymore. And this hard but so wonderful stage of life I am in right now will pass just like the others. 

Pregnant corporate Sina hanging with millionaires

When I was starting this "postpartum journey", as the internet mommy community calls it, I was hit relatively hard - which I expected. I never thought having kids was the only thing I was born to do and despite wanting the baby, I never thought it would be the only path to happiness. So the memories of the past lives haunted me. I knew that forsaking the various other paths I had built in order to find happiness throughout life in case I never find the love of my life would not be altogether easy because these paths had not failed me so far: I was a happy person well before I had Alma. While pregnant, I considered if it was foolish to seek more happiness via such a drastic change when I was already very satisfied with life - but that's not what life is about. You don't stop in one place and hope to stay there. I wanted to move on with life and gamble with the existing happiness because the hand I was dealt made it pretty promising that there was even more happiness for me to explore. 

Suddenly, from one day to the other, the old path no longer exists. Everything that made you happy before is in some way gone - or at least no longer really relevant. You make new plans, even dreams. What you chased before might no longer apply. For a large part of my life I had sought to live in the States - and later, return to the States. And of course, my decision to not go back was already made in November 2016, however, suddenly the reason for making that decision won reelection and pretty much instantly started destroying the places I had often wanted to seek my happiness in. I was grieving the end of my teenage dreams in such a drastic, world-politically significant way that it wasn't just the "smart choice for the family" that made me abandon chasing it. But when I had Alma, I suddenly thought about how I thought it would go, and how it actually went. And the differences made me grieve the life I had planned despite the fact it never existed.

Many people have to bury their dreams, and I had a relatively high chance of having to do that, given that my teenage dream was to pursue a filmmaking career in Hollywood that would win me an Oscar (a path, I believe, that actually wouldn't have ended up much harder than the one I did choose trying to have it a bit easier in life - albeit maybe not with a consolation prize as sick as my current life). Maybe it is even the fact we only get one life and I will never have the chance to live anything but what I experienced so far that makes me so prone to these emotions. 8-year-old Sina was dreaming of having a family, but she wanted a colonial Boston townhouse and have her kids be picked up by a yellow bus. The reality is that she grew up in the 90s, where it was taught to her such things were possible. And now, she is 36 years old, will never be able to afford a house, let alone in Boston, and that country she once idolized might actually not exist once her kids hit school age. 

       Not quite so glamorous      

Both can be true: I miss my old life, my autonomy and commanding life to lead me to my own personal dreams AND I would never change anything I have done to get where I'm at. Being Alma's mom wasn't my ultimate life goal, it is not the only dream I ever had and her arrival does not symbolize to me what it does to so many: the arrival of meaning, arriving at the destination you long sought. My path continues, and in a way I am still dreaming of that Oscar nomination, and getting to thank my daughter in my acceptance speech. But I also must realize that my dreams come second to providing the best possible life for her (which, again, a certain orange monster is having a pretty damming effect on). Despite being the best thing in my life, she is just one other thing - besides me. There was a life before her, and the dreams associated with that have had to change now. I have new, better dreams. I want a family home for her, growing up in freedom and democracy, her becoming just as happy as I am lucky enough to be. This dream doesn't work with the old dreams. I can't pursue these new dreams simultaneously with my old ones. And so I have to let go of one set of dreams... and it is with absolute pleasure that I choose Alma. But I'll need a few more weeks to get used to it.