Fatherhood? No thanks!

Jug Suraiya


Sartre, that exemplary anti-Dad, had it right: To beget children, nothing better; to have them, what iniquity. To give birth to children was not just a good thing but a necessary process if the human species were to survive. However, to have children — in the possessive sense that one has a job, or a car, or a career — is both different and undesirable.

A distinction must be made between fatherhood and motherhood. Motherhood is entirely natural; fatherhood isn't. Gender isn't destiny. But it is design. Women are designed to bear children — if they should choose to. Elective motherhood — single moms, lesbian moms, even conventional married moms — is fine. Obligatory motherhood, literally thrust upon women by a patriarchal society, is not.

Men are barren, in that they aren't designed to bear children. In this sense, fatherhood is based on a claim of dubious possession: my son, my daughter. Only too often, the emphasis is on the 'my' rather than on the 'daughter' or the 'son'. This possessiveness, this insistence on trying to make their children into moulded replicas of themselves, is born out of something more primal than mere egotism or selfishness; it is born out of deep-seated genetic insecurity. As sociobiology says, only mothers are real mothers, in that they know for sure their children are really theirs; all fathers are only putative fathers, whose children may really belong to someone else, carry another's genes.

To compensate for this doubt, men try harder to be fathers, to bring into this world, by the circuitous route of another's womb, replicas of what they hope are themselves. The poor guys can never be sure. And the less sure they are, the more insecure, possessive and patriarchal they get: no daughter of mine will marry into a different community, go out late at night, wear tight jeans; no son of mine will be anything other than a doctor/ engineer/carrier-on of the family business. If the operative words of motherhood are 'we' and 'ours' (We will have a child, it'll be our child), the operative words of fatherhood are 'me' and 'mine', the vocabulary of the patriarchal tyrant.

And the ultimate Patriarchal Tyrant, of course, is God, who according to Judeo-Christian theology made man in His own image. Looking at His handiwork, that doesn't say much of Him or His image. According to a more elevated view, God is not the Father of man, but the other way round: man created God in his image, and so is not the son of God but His father. In whichever case, between the two of them, man and his God, they've made awful hash of things. Baap reh baap , what an ungodly mess? You said it.