Today, I was in a conversation with a woman on how difficult my pregnancies were and how I wont try again because I spitted endlessly till the last day, and how I hated meat and wont eat anything except waterlogged green leaf soups and croissants.
She said,
“I hope you tell your children all you went through to bring them to the world”
“I do no such things”
I replied, “nooo, they should know what you went through, that way they will listen to you and respect you”.
“I wont blackmail my kids emotionally like that. They didn’t “humbly apply” to be birthed. It was me who carried my two left legs, to go and lamoshwang with a man, amidst moaning and writhing in ecstasy until I carried belle”.
How would I now come and give them details of the pain of birthing them without telling them that they were conceived in conjugal bliss.
Why would I make them feel guilty for a decision l took. As if I didn’t know about the nine months aftermath of nights of frolics and snuggling, and necking and listening to sweet nothings.
I told her it was a form of emotional blackmail to make a child, feel guilty for a decision I took. She looked at me with mouth wide open. Told me it was a different line of thought that I had. She never saw it that way.
I heard a lot of such stories. In fact , it was the national anthem for mothers who birthed my generation. But I won’t say those words to my children. The primary reason we give birth to them is for posterity, our own future as parents.
We give birth to them for our own pleasure, not for their pleasure. So, making them feel like we did them a favor by birthing them and taking care of them, even though we know it’s for our gain that we brought them forth, reeks of subtle dishonesty. So, that age-long,guilt tripping line of;
“You suffered me while In the womb”
“Your head was too big and you tore me apart”
“I packed your shit”
I breastfed you for two years
“I wiped your bum”
“I sucked phlegm from your nostrils”
Especially when we want to make them acquiesce to every of our obnoxious whims
Must stop!!
Enough of the emotional blackmail. If you must give them details of pain in their delivery and care , please complement it with details of the pleasures of the night they were conceived.
Parents who take care of a child they brought forth, are only taking responsibility for the decisions they took in the heat of the moment.
The reason , I hate parents who are absent in the lives of their children only to appear later in the dusk of their lives to be taken care of, or to preside over their children’s marriages, armed with the “honor thy father and mother ” biblical treatise to come and eat from a field they tilled not.
Uche Eze Ann
