Gender Agenda newsletter: Boy-moms don’t cry

(This article is part of the Gender Agenda newsletter. To get the newsletter in your inbox every Sunday, subscribe here.)

By now, the discussion around Adolescence has died down, and our distracted world has moved on to other topics that enrage and outrage. But as a boy-mother, I just can’t get it out of my head. 

A criticism of the Netflix series was that the final episode should have been about the family of the girl who died; it was instead about the parents and sister of the 13-year-old boy who killed his classmate. As a boy-mother, I disagree. Of course that story should be told — perhaps in a sequel — but Adolescence was a story about a family grappling with a reality most of us don’t imagine we will go through. There is the flawed father who loses his temper and who through conversations we know was distraught at his son not being able to play football.

And the mother. In the final episode, there’s a scene where the mother is hanging up her coat as she comes home. It is her husband’s birthday, and they have just been confronted with public humiliation and ostracization from the community. You feel her crumbling, but then she pulls herself together and puts on her face.

It shows what most parents of children who make big mistakes go through: anger, guilt, shame, fear. Parenting teens is all about the bewilderment of not knowing what is happening in their lives, while trying to fight your own battles, and doing your best for your child. With sons, this ‘best’ is double work.

When a boy is born, some mothers feel a secret relief: this child won’t have to go through all that I had to — the constant threat of sexual abuse and its onus put on the girl, the load of care, the weight of emotional and physical labour. He will be free to walk the streets, unlike me, in a world made for him, we think. Just by being born a boy, he has carved out for himself a piece of the privilege pie. The rest can be handled.

But the rest, we realise later, is harder. Because helping someone born into privilege see the other side is double the work. So, ‘Put the clothes for wash’ or ‘Take the trash to the main dustbin’ are not simple instructions a busy mother gives to her boy-child; they are thought-through decisions so he never thinks daily chores are beneath him; so he will not ‘help out’ his partner, but they will be equal in work and love.

This training of the boy-child for feminism (equality) is not work shared with anyone else — it is a mother’s job. A father does not carry this additional parental load, no matter how many meals he cooks — the fact that he is entering the kitchen gives him an invisible halo.

A boy-mom is always trying to control the situation lest her son say or do something stupid, because deep down we’re petrified that he hasn’t really understood the full message of feminism: the dismantling of systems that put one gender over the other, socially or economically. She wonders how much of patriarchy has rubbed off on him, how patriarchal she is herself. But she’s also petrified that her son won’t succeed in the gendered roles that still exist for men: of earning well enough to do better than what his family did, for instance.

A study on orcas in the journal Current Biology, speaks of the “cost of sons” that this Vogue article quotes. It found that in these killer whales “Sons, but not daughters, reduce their mother’s subsequent reproductive success.” It spoke of how “caring for adult sons is reproductively costly” incurring a “lifetime maternal investment”. I agree.

Toolkit

Women Uninterrupted is a podcast about difficult conversations with women across generations, who have made an impact on communities. This week, meet Indumathi, a waste-worker entrepreneur or Seema Gupta, who operates a drone service centre for farmers. Now in season 7, it is one of The Hindu’s most popular podcasts, anchored by Anna Thomas.