Mothers

Here in Ganda, people find it absolutely inconceivable that I don’t have any kids. Especially after finding out I’m 31!

So the question that mostly follows is: so, are you a nun? There’s plenty of Brazilian and European nuns who walk around wearing jeans and no veil in Angola. And as the answer to that is "no", people start eyeing me a bit funny and plainly don’t have the courage to say “there’s something wrong with her” or “white women are weird”.

A few years ago I was chit-chatting with a girl on a Sunday afternoon, who happened to be the same age as me: 27, at the time. She was carrying a one-year old on her back, wrapped in traditional cloth. She told me it was her youngest. And that there were another 6…

I couldn’t help asking myself what I had been doing while she was spending her youth being pregnant: studying, travelling, going to the movies, reading books and working or just being silly, mostly. And despite my huge admiration for someone who would bring up 7 little ones through war and hunger and once that was over, through diseases and poverty, there was some kind of (feminist?) voice in me that started sobbing and grinding its teeth. Is it really a value if a woman is mother first and foremost? Is it really acceptable that before being proposed to, a young girl needs to get “tested” for fertility? Is it truly mother instinct when a woman despairs about being unable to get pregnant? Have we truly “lost” something when renouncing a huge family in favour of a couple of kids we worry if we can get through school and uni? Is this place really some kind of lost paradise we should fight to get back to or should we be happy to have freed ourselves from it?