Caption: A file photo posted on the Facebook page of Kamla Persad-Bissessar with her holding a baby

 

TRIGGERED! My flabbers are fully ghasted!

Did our prime minister really imply this week that a woman’s life would be incomplete without motherhood?

I quote from a statement released by our noble feminist icon Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar on Monday in response to Cabinet approving amendments to the Maternity Protection Act:

While you may have achieved your career goals, life without a family and children may get very lonely as you get older.

Without familial love, money, and achievements become worthless when loneliness envelops your older years. All humans need love and companionship to achieve their fullest potential; women, in particular, have an inherent drive to nurture and care.

Come again?

Persad-Bissessar encouraged women to embrace motherhood:

I urge you to consider the opportunity to become a mother. One of the most beautiful feelings in life is the happiness and joy you experience when you return to a home of happy children.

As a mother, it is nice to return home after a day’s work to your children… but very rarely is it all happiness and rainbows. It’s homework, its dinner, its planning, its patience you don’t always have, its worry and its often breaking up full on MMA fights.

It is putting their needs ahead of yours, it’s stressful, it can be draining, it sure is wildly expensive and requires a lot of time. Time you may not always have.

And, honestly, it isn’t for everyone and we need to accept in society that some women just don’t want children and nothing is wrong with that.

I have childless friends, either by choice or by reproductive circumstances, and they live full happy lives. There is no loneliness, because they are surrounded by friends and family who love them for them. They are surrogate mothers to many children; they are the aunties who are loved the most.

Their “fullest potential” is not determined by whether they busted out a little fruit of the womb. Frankly, this is most insulting to women and men who struggle with fertility, because it isn’t really their fault.

Every woman’s full potential is something determined by them, and they shouldn’t be made to feel incomplete based on their reproductive choices.

Another issue I have with the prime minister encouraging women to go forth and multiply is, while these amendments, which include paid breastfeeding breaks and the safeguarding of one’s job while they are on leave, are a great step forward, they only cover a very limited time in a child’s life and do not address many of the hardships mothers face, especially mothers who are single, or mothers of limited needs.

Persad-Bissessar highlights yet again the disconnect between the nation’s leaders and average citizens… in this case the majority of women and mothers in our society.

Let’s look at childcare, something that is vital for all working parents.  I will put money on the probability that Persad-Bissessar had either hired childcare or familial support. She wasn’t dropping her baby off at daycare or babysitters every morning, praying she would pick them up safe and sound. She wasn’t cutting back on basic expenses to ensure she could afford childcare or applying for welfare grants.

Education, I am sure with her and her husband having high paying professions, neither of them struggled to fulfil booklists. I am sure their son never went to school without new shoes and uniforms at the start of the year. And I am sure they never panicked about affording transportation.

Healthcare also I am sure was not a problem. I am sure she never had to depend solely on the public health system or had to miss days, even weeks of work to care for a sick child, losing pay and putting her employment status at risk.

If you want to encourage motherhood, then you need to look at the systematic problems that hinder mothers. You need to ensure proper mental health programmes specifically for mothers are accessible, because mothers burn out and postpartum is a nightmare. You need to look at expanding daycare and early education programmes, especially in rural areas. Improve women’s health services. Services for family counselling and the encouragement of parental support groups within communities.

But most of all, you need to look at the economy. Jobs, the stabilisation of the cost of living, the creation and support of new industries. Hell, the provision of more job training programmes for parents… not just mothers.

Can’t be out here encouraging women to get knocked up when they have no jobs and please remember not everyone is big and has sense. So, you will get women listening to their great leader and think “Hmmm, I don’t have a job, but I need a baby cause it sounds nice, Ill apply for grants and ting after.”