Revisiting Myself: a Once-potted Plant with a Dictaphone?

Over the last few years, something has happened to me.

It has precipitated an aversion to anything beyond the most desultory engagement with my one time closest confidante, the written word. Once a dedicated foot soldier in the rhetorical revolution, hell-bent on infusing every moment with my unsolicited opinion, I am now a writer in retreat, afraid my self-expression will, if not make things worse, certainly not make them any better.

So I am tackling the questions a woman like me asks herself nowadays.

I have been doing it for over a minute now, and it has become apparent that I am not in a position to comment on when the Forum would get a new stock of Victoria’s Secret body sprays. Or whether there will ever be a new Buffy movie. Nor do I have any answers to why peas are a hundred rupees a kilo. Or what a ‘bad thing’ really is (living in a gun culture, I have told my three year old guns are deterrents to ‘bad things’ and now he keeps wanting to shoot his baby brother for soiling the sheets). I do however, have a question; am I really an intelligent woman?

I no longer think so.

I am a 30-year-old married mother of two. That sentence alone suggests I am more barmy than brainy. Marriage is an uninspired, irrational human attempt to make nature subservient to economics. Motherhood is a natural, restrictive blockade of arteries supplying blood to the female brain by menacing fats cells hijacking them to ferry breast milk the other way. Marriage smothers impulses that, if followed through, might catalyze works of aesthetic and conceptual value. Motherhood lays the corpses of those impulses gently to rest and then dances on their graves. The needs of various bodies come to dominate the life of the mind. Marriage and motherhood? Killer institution. Ripper Madonna.

Part of me would like nothing better than to burn the nikahnama, peddle the babies, and ride off into the sunset on a handy Vespa; free to discover myself anew, free to extricate the woman behind the flippant bravado of my earlier writing from the rubble of her domesticated life. But I don’t. Partly because my social environment has, despite all my efforts to struggle out of its cloying embrace, managed to staple me firmly to its fold. Partly because for all my whining I love those I sometimes feel enslaved by. Mainly because I know that were I to now shed the mantle of mother and wife and reach for the woman beneath, she might not be the ‘Djinn and tonic’ Shandana, she might be the ‘how hard is it to close the cupboard door stupid!” Shandana.’

I am no longer an intelligent woman. I am a nearsighted biological function.

I liked change better when it happened to other people.

I am not the only person who thinks ritualized monogamy and progeny are enemies of the free-range woman (like free-range chicken in that the eggs are smaller, the thighs leaner). A popular wire service recently carried news of the resignation of a legendary advertising creative director from his position as worldwide creative director of a huge agency. He was essentially hounded out of work because of comments he made when asked why there were no great female advertising executives. Neil French, the man behind the classic Chivas Regal tagline ‘if you don’t recognize it you’re probably not ready for it’, said women never made it to the top because “you don’t commit yourself to the job…you can’t be a great creative director and have a baby and keep spending time off every time your kids are ill.” He also described female creatives as “crap” and “a group that will inevitably wimp out and go suckle something”, but I’ll just ignore those bits.

French’s identification of lack of commitment to ‘the job’ struck a chord. Emotional commitments have always been more important to me than intellectual ones. I denied the reality of this when I was younger, presenting my exploration of personal physical freedom as evidence of my emancipation from the ‘daughter, wife, mother’ wheel I have seen my mother tread ceaselessly. But having children forced my ‘real’ priorities out into the open. I did want my parents to be happy. I did want my husband to have a nice, warm meal when he got home from work (ok so I had a cook make it, I still wanted him to have it.). I did want to pick up my son from school everyday. I had been assimilated.

How did the ‘weird’ girl who was always up for anything and laughed when someone suggested she would one day be ‘tamed’ by the marital ball and chain accept that? She didn’t. So self-censorship, or deletion of core personality, began.

The first baggage I said was my sense of invincibility, my ‘confidence’. I turned my eyes away from men who stared at me rather than staring them down. From someone who lit up and deliberately blew smoke in the face of gawkers at traffic lights, I became a closet smoker who’d think twice about smoking in public. From someone who thought nothing of working on a project three days in a row with only the most necessary change of clothes, I became the nervous pre-school mom discarding shirt after shirt to find one to wear to pick up the kid from school. From someone who would have left parents, lovers, friends, and husband for days, weeks, years to go experience something, I became someone who was parked faithfully in front of the TV by eight every night.

All the time I had free was used to unwind with mindless entertainment. Challenge myself with a conceptual task? Bugger that. Except I no longer said bugger. Or fuck. Or even shit. I said ‘oh nooo’. Why want to sound like a scatological seductress when one could sound like a green and purple dinosaur instead?

Women who have children and careers, I often told myself, are just putting too much pressure on themselves. Motherhood is such a difficult and time consuming job on its own, how silly it was to complicate it by insisting on a parallel life. Old friends, adolescent behavior, interesting writing projects, new experiences, why would I want to make my life even busier by adding more gunpowder to the explosive mix brewing in my head?

One day, after yet another attempt to just sit down and write ended with my having to chase my giggling toddler all over the flat trying to get my felt tip back, my head exploded. Apart from my carefully constructed veneer of benevolent calm (very useful at playschool meetings), it took out the cordless phone, a picture or two, a toy laptop, and very nearly my son. As I looked at him cowering on the ground, tears running down his face as he asked ‘what did I do Mamma?’ I remember thinking what he needed was for me to swoop down, scoop him up and croon ‘I’m sorry.’ Instead I grinned a vulpine grin, bent down and hissed into his ear “I’m Bad Mamma, and one day I’m going to kill you.”

The Djinn in the tonic had resurfaced after all. If I had let her out once in a while after the boob days began, a walk in the park maybe, coffee with a friend, random sex with a stranger, she might not have been so angry. But something had happened to her too.

By bottling up those parts of my personality that I considered ‘inappropriate’, I had become dangerously fragmented. Unstable. My enthusiastic dismemberment of the inner self had made me lose control and perspective. In my rush to best protect my children from the cruel, devious world by being their alert mother 24/7, I had forgotten to protect them from myself. Focusing on their health, wealth and happiness, I had been oblivious to the way my reproductive organs had secretly crept outward and upwards till they sheathed my body from tip to toe. I was now a vaginal bobby sock filled with shifting sands; a menacing uterine baton with a mind of its own.

It has at last become evident to me that I should not try to silence my MUB’s strident voice. At the very least, it’ll save my children an emotional scar or two. We have prepared a set of elaborate defenses (after careful consultation with Spiderman comics and Commander Safeguard episodes), but both my son and I know that when Bad Mamma next comes calling, the ‘superBijli’ and ‘stickyweps’ won’t hold her for long.