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Mothers at crossroads
2006-08-24 08:30:28
By Betty Okere
If it were my country on humanitarian grounds, I would command that mothers particularly the single ones, be given a lot of state assistance, because given the trauma they go through to feed, shelter and provide other needs to their offspring, they are left wasted by the end of the day.
It is difficult to generalize about single parents since they constitute such a diverse group. Firstly the fact that you fathered a child or carried a pregnancy to full term and kept the baby does not necessary make you a single parent. The operative word here is parent and not single.
As expected, there is a whole legion of Tanzanians out there using single parenthood as some badge of honour even when they have nothing much to show for it other than offspring dressed in new clothes.
Now don’t get me wrong. Raising a child single-handedly is no easy task especially if you are a black woman in a third world country and also jobless or no stable business to rely on.
We have no welfare system and the government is not exactly interested in getting into the daddy’s shoes to commit itself and be responsible to help such mothers.
And add to the fact having a child outside the traditional sacred union of marriage comes with undertones of promiscuity and irresponsibility.
Admittedly, this is a difficult burden but so is raising five children on a layman’s salary.
While all parents understand that fact that raising kids is tough, single mothers feel justified to howl even louder. Does this sound familiar?
A single mother starts the conversation with, ’’can you imagine, Joel (a three-year old menace) can turn on the TV by himself? That doesn’t make him Einstein.
Children have become property. It’s like owning a Beetle. You know the year of manufacture. You want to spruce it up, give it some alloy rims to impress.
In the evening, you gather around other bug-o-holics captivated by its beauty while you sit there almost apologetic that you have custody over such a precious commodity. All you talk about is your bug.
What it is capable of, what the expectations are, how much power it will pack and in some twisted manner, you believe people are genuinely interested in all that rambling about a car.
Now if you replace a Beetle with a child, you would have the traits of the whining single mothers who demand extra points for mothering a cute toddler.
It is a racket and quite a number of women have been pulling it off for a long time now.
Sperm donors are carefully selected based on specific attributes such as genetics, a strong family name or the ability to provide. Take it from me, women rarely fall pregnant by mistake.
Baby avoidance is not as complicated as it is made to seem but invariably men will always be lured into the guilt trap of responsibility.
With newfound financial independence, single parenthood appears to provide a form of legitimacy that cuts above even the much hankered after pompous wedding display.
In most cases, the mother had every intention of keeping the child to herself and once the role is complete, the man is shown the door and everything changes to ’’my child’’.
These children are placed on pedestals and displayed like tokens of achievement.
In the process, the young ones are routinely turned into spoilt brats who grow up assuming that the world owes them an existence.
They belong to one side of the family and anything to do with daddy is often followed by disappointment and distress.
In a desperate bid to compensate for the absent fathers, the single mother finds herself caught up in a complicated game web of revenge and deceit and the child becomes an instrument of manipulation. The reasons are varied.
Perhaps unconsciously, it is the women’s way of getting back at society for calling them ’loose’. Or maybe some vicious retaliation against the guy who said, ’’it wasn’t me.’’
Before long, the parent with custody will have recruited her family and friends into totally isolating the child from the biological father.
Male mentoring arrangements are hastily put together and the mother continues to pursue a relentless course to eliminate the father totally from the child’s life. The father’s worth is directly proportional to the bills he pays.
The ability for the mother to cover most of the expenses in a sense relegates the father to an insignificant biological link whose only other purpose will be in resolving burial issues.
Children are leverage pawns and if you can’t provide the child with the comfort the mother demands of you then you are only as good as the seed you provide.
The mother regards the child as her property mostly because she had to walk around with a distended belly for nine months.
Hatred for the father soon grows into an obsession and every opportunity to put him down is seized with relish. The mother feels justified to ’protect’ the child from its father.
Mothers have become so desperate in their possessiveness of the child’s attention and affection.
This may be due to an unspoken fear of abandonment that the child may choose the father over the mother given the opportunity hence the need to exert complete control over the child as a means of one parent gaining power over the other.
Now when the father wants to see his child, he has to pay a few bills first, get his usual verbal dress down and then book in advance for visitation privilages. When he calls, he will be summarily dismissed, ’’My baby is sleeping.’’
Woe unto the father who gets married to another women because he will be tormented for life.
The child is the mother’s instrument of castigation. They claim to love a child who they have turned into a device to compensate for feelings of emptiness inside.
Unresolved issues arising from the fleeting expectations of past love can become a life long obsession . The destructive features of a world without fathers are well documented and beyond challenge.
There is a lot of truth in the saying, ’’it takes a village to bring up a child’’.
Commutities mould children, not individuals. There is no place for the arrogance of single motherhood unless we want to foster a generation of brats with daddy issues.
The state of having single mothers in our midst should also be something to be reviewed because it is on the increase and is not African.
If it is because of death, we have nothing to say, but some customary institutions need to enacted to look into this embarrassing and sympathetic parenting.
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