I’ve been going back and forth about this project – whether to put words to page. Why not leave it be, marinating in my brain, served up half baked over dinner with Tee and in WhatsApps with likeminded friends. Surely this is just my obsession of the moment, grappling with a new reality, life in the trenches – the same thing that has me googling colic at 2am – and it will just sort itself out over time. Surely this is way too much navel-gazing about something that happens naturally.
I had a fast labour. Buddy lept out of me like my womb was on fire. Minutes after walking into the birthing suite, the midwife told me it was time to push and asked me how I’d like to do it. Umm. I hadn’t got that far in the book. Umm… Umm, umm, umm AAARRRGHHHHH (contraction). Decide! Umm… on my back I guess? Why? Because that’s what I’d seen on TV. It wasn’t the natural option, just the most familiar. If I’d thought about it in advance, I would have done it differently.
As is often misattributed to Einstein, insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Autopilot gets to you to the pre-programmed destination. We fall into old habits – not necessarily our own, but those modelled to us. In the most stressful, sleep-deprived period of our lives we will default to what they did – our parents, peers and yes, TV.
How we set up our home lives determines our work, careers, domestic responsibilities, relationship for the next 20 years at a minimum, but more likely the rest of our lives. It determines whether we will live as equals, have an equal chance at fulfilment. And how we will model this to our children. Whether we will raise our children to believe that one’s life prospects should be determined by the shape of one’s genitals. To me, that’s worth a bit of navel-gazing.
Equal parenting will not happen ‘naturally’. It will not just sort itself out. There’s a truism about life being a combination of luck and hard work. My working theory is that life is a function of:
- Privilege – the resources available to you
- Luck – the circumstances that arise
- Planning/ strategy/ intention – how you position yourself
- Commitment – how far you’ll go to make it work
I’m going to put effort into those I can control. So this project is about #3 and #4.
Let’s go.