Dear diary,
In the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who I have come to consider a great teller of stories, “We should all be feminists”. If this is what will solve the issue of women feeling the shame imposed by society for various issues that have nothing to do with gender.
I had a conversation with a young lady that gave me the chills. Brought back memories. Memories of being asked:
When are you getting married? I used to give this a smile and moved on. Inside me, my answer was, not yet, am still having fun. But I dare not speak that out loud.
Your clock is ticking! I can’t hear it, how can you? You must have bionic ears. Looks like it too, very large ones.
All your age mates are married ooo! So, what is it, a race?
When are we meeting him? He-he, it could be a she, don’t make assumptions
Where is your better half? Better half? So am a half human. My mama, your relative must be half too, for having a half human child. Come to think of it, it would have been cool to be an alien. Scared the living daylights out of them. Crazy people!
And for some people who cannot stand the pressure, they fall. They accept marriage proposals from the wrong people and live in a loveless marriage till death do them part. So, we have all these people that should be happily married if their relationships were not square pegs in round holes.
Then, once we find our “better halves” which may end up being a not so better half, the next group of questions follow about the babies. When? When? When? The pressure, like flies and mosquitoes buzzing in our ears.
And when we have childless marriages, because the men are “perfect” and the women are assumed to not be, we are those with all the medical reasons why the babies are not coming. Hence, the men do not even go to get themselves medically checked.
And when these ladies fight so much, jump through so much hoops to get pregnant, they spend the time being nervous because it took so long. The pressure was too much. Now I am not a doctor, neither am I purporting to be one, but I do believe that the pressure causes problems to both mother and child. So, a vicious cycle begins. Some loss the child and here comes another drama.
When I spend the same number of hours at work like the men, my mom asks questions, “what about your husband? What will he eat? Really mother, not what will my child, your daughter eat, but what will he eat”.
When I travel too much for work, here comes the guilt, you travel too much. You are a mother. As if I did not know. Your babies are young, how can you leave them all the time?
But when he does not travel for work, the question is “is daddy around?” He has not traveled in a while?
My lady friend and I used to go dancing, once a month, leaving the kids home with their dads and the questions we got were: Are you ladies here by yourselves? Where are your husbands? They let you out by yourselves? That was the worse one. They allowed you to go out by yourselves? Wow, as if to say our being married was a pronouncement from the judge, (in this case a priest), sentencing us to life in marital prison, therefore we needed policing on a daily basis.
Dear diary, so even after being told as a child that we can do what the boys did, what they failed to tell us was that, its all a bunch of ***. So, some of us work hard to go against the grain, but find that this battle was just the beginning, and that meeting their expectations will not solve the problem, because we will always be incomplete, even with our “better halves”.
Yes Chimammanda, I totally agree with you, we should all be feminists, men and women both, that is the only way to see that the problem is not one of gender, but a human one. Being feminists, will be the start to the resolution of the gender inequality problem. That will be the point where it becomes a human problem as opposed to gender.
Take care diary, # TIS!
ADEL DIARIES 