Open Letter - 17

Dear Society,

How have you been? I am fine and I hope this letter finds you hale and healthy. I am still lost in my last letter to you and have decided to talk to you a bit further about dependency and girls.

It happens with every one of us and there is nothing wrong to concede that the moment I posted my letter to you, I felt there is much more left untold. Since ours is not a social media correspondence, I could not send you an after-note in an instant. I tried to convince myself that when one corresponds through letter, one much trust one’s receiver’s ability to read between lines.

However, my interactive-media-routine made me disbelieve that anyone can actually read between lines. If there is something you want the other party to hear, you got to say it. There is no other way out. So, after one week of self-contradictions, here I am at my study table, writing to you the untold half of my previous letter.

If you still remember, I said it was your fault that our girls are not yearning to be independent. It is in this context that I want to make it clear to you that homemaking is not a thankless job as you keep stressing every now and then.

Home-making is an everyday routine of a family. It is like our everyday chores like brushing, bathing, eating and sleeping. The way we do them to keep our body clean and active, so are we supposed to scrape our dishes, clean our rooms and toilet, cook and run the laundry. They are chores as individual centric as brushing and bathing. We do not need nearly half of our country staying back at home just to do these chores.

It is time we stop teaching our girls that they are meant to spend a lifetime doing a thankless job as a homemaker. Our girls need to dream of a career too and we should not clip their dreams when they get to have one.

The way we train our boys to grow into independent men that are bound to feed a family, we should as well teach our girls that their place is not limited to the four walls of their homes.

Dependence is not a virtue and as long as we do not make it clear, we cannot expect to progress. Being jobless doesn’t just make a woman financially dependent but also mentally dependent on her companion to act as her window to the outer world. This is what makes women blind to bias against them as they always witness the world from a man’s perspective.

Leaving aside the women that do not make it to workplace, your attitude towards those that succeed to stand out is not as welcome as it should be. Besides their professional life, our women are being forced to accept domestic chores as their sole responsibility. This is further pushing them to stay away from workplace.

Dear society, if you want to progress, pay heed to my words and try to create an environment where men and women take up both professional and family life as an unavoidable responsibility. Mark my words, my child shall be adept at both dishwashing and team leading, be it a boy or a girl. My daughter shall not depend on a man to buy her groceries and my son shall not depend on a woman to cook his meal.

Hope you trust my counsel and mend you ways a bit.

Yours sincerely,

An Expecting Mother.