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I have been a homemaker all my life, but I don't remember a time I didn't write or paint or study. So I've honed my skills over a lifetime.
I have been a homemaker all my life, but I don’t remember a time I didn’t write or paint or study. So I’ve honed my skills over a lifetime.
Most homemakers carry a small seed of shame, one that gradually blossoms into a poisonous tree each time someone asks you what you do and you don’t find the appropriate words. You mumble homemaker or stay-at-home mother and if the person asking the question is somewhat woke they launch into a lengthy platitudinous speech about it being the hardest and most important job and you want to scream, “Then pay me!”
But mostly the word homemaker is followed by a small, tense silence after which you are ignored, for homemakers can have nothing of worth to say, can they?
And here I am then, at 48, kickstarting a new career working with colleagues half my age.
I’m often asked why I didn’t write or crochet or paint before. Why I don’t have a book or two to my name or a mile long career. I know running a home, bringing up children, homeschooling them doesn’t seem like much of a career, who am I going to ask for references, my kids? But it was (and will continue to be) a very demanding career that I had to invest my whole body, mind and soul into, without a single holiday or PF or medical.
Homemakers after farmers are the most idealistic people in the world. We invest in a future that we know nothing about, that we’ll never get the credit for.
Every day of my career as a homemaker was an investment in the dream of a better world. Providing my children with a stable home environment and a strong, empathetic mother means that they turn out to be good human beings who at the least will not unleash any unresolved trauma on the world and will in fact contribute to making the world a better place. That’s the direct result of conscious, conscientious parenting. I insist therefore that I am as much a patriotic Indian as the jawan at the border.
I write, crochet, paint, because I like doing them, and fortunately, because I didn’t have to consider them as skill-sets for immediate material gain, I had the time to hone them slowly. Life helped, just as a river shapes a waterfall for thousands of years. No one hurries a river to get to its final destination.
Life is a very stern teacher and the hardest course you’ll ever take. But it’s filled with opportunities and if you are lucky, you’ll get a lifetime of time.
Parenting is so darn hard, there is absolutely no room for error, that everything else feels like a holiday in comparison. I feel very giggly to be paid for my writing (and art). No one even noticed when I was drowning, as a young mother with postpartum depression, but they congratulate me on what took me a couple of hours/days.
Skills don’t always come with a college course, though I’d never diss formal education. Actresses in Bollywood who retire for a time are often asked about their comeback story. And most of them become annoyed at that, saying they never went away, they were interruptions in the form of life yes, but they never stopped being actresses.
I don’t remember a time I didn’t write or paint or study. So these skills that I’m now able to monetize, are as old as me. The seemingly new bend in the river has been in the making for a long time.
Image source: a still from the film Listen… Amaya
Hema Gopinathan left a blight of a corporate career to homeschool her two children. A teacher trained in the Waldorf/ Rudolf Steiner pedagogy, a writer, an artist, a crocheter, Hema spends half her time in read more...
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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