Recently a friend shared a Facebook
picture where a black (most probably Nigerian) father was learning to bathe his newborn while his
wife supervised. It was stated that they reside in Utah in the United States of
America. The original owner of the picture complained about what ‘our women has
turned us into’, referring to the fact that bathing a child is a chore strictly
for the woman and inferred the man was being emasculated by doing it. I could
not help wondering in which century he was trapped.
The continuous changes in the
structure of the society that has necessitated the isolation of the nuclear family cannot be ignored. People in search of greener pastures have had
to move so far away from their extended families that most times when you meet
someone remotely close to you by reason of coming from the same town or
village, you automatically become brothers just to feel that closeness to home
again or even for the mere reason of having someone to exchange words in the
dialect that is so unique to you in a place where people are easily lost in the
crowd. Some of us living in the diaspora
know what it means to meet someone who speaks your language, the connection is
automatic. But this is not the point here.
The consequential isolation creates
an environment where the man is forced out of his traditionally recognised
roles to help his partner meet up with tasks. In fact, it forces the couple to
live that word ‘partner’ in the full sense of it. The woman steps up her game
in contributing both financially and otherwise and the man also sees other
roles he must play instead of crossing his feet to watch television programmes
while the woman sweats it out, so he can live up to his head-of-the-family
title.
Our African culture frowns at this
but permit me to say that when we left our first homes and migrated to embrace
new cultures and societies, clinging on to such things in order to answer just
a name, hurts much more than it helps. The western society has already imbibed
this as a tradition and I would say it is because the nuclear family isolation
has been with them for a longer time.
A man helping to bathe his baby
does not in any way rid him of his very cherished title, rather it opens a
wider gate for him to show his strength and love in supporting his wife.
Unfortunately in Africa we only feel he earns that title because he is the
natural provider and has the right to
put the full stop to every decision. The
unwritten rule that was handed over to us insists that a woman and her new born
be nurtured for at least three months before she is left to carry on by
herself. For this, a woman counts it as
good fortune if her mother or
mother-in-law or even an aunt is close by when she delivers. We are the only
ones who can tell what we go through
after child birth and a man who is alone with his wife in a foreign land without
this form of help from their extended families, has a lot to learn in a very
short while. He learns there is a reason those three months were traditionally
instituted in the first place.
The bible reckons with us as ‘the
weaker vessel’ and even though many interpretations
has been given to that phrase, it refers to our physical strength as compared
to men’s own. ( All this modern bull shit about what a man can do, a woman can
do better does not sit well with me, because I know men who split firewood to
care for their families, I will dare a woman to go for it. I won’t try it
myself). Having said that, I will rather look at the original owner of that
picture (I do not want to use it here because I don’t know if the couple themselves
even know what the man, who must be their friend to have obtained a picture of
them in their house, has been up to with their picture) as ignorant. Women (living
in isolated nuclear families) who are naturally the weaker vessels give birth
and after a few days get up on their feet to continue the very tasking life of
caring for a newborn, with episiotomy or caesarean stitches, sleeplessness and
a strange form of weakness that descends on the person when she tries to do any
little chore. (I stubbornly went out to buy fruits two days after I was
discharged from the hospital. Two minutes walk away from my house and I could
have fainted on the road). So, if that man feels that a man learning to help
his wife is something to be ashamed of,
I can only hope that by a certain twist of fate he becomes pregnant,
goes through labour so we can see if he agrees to get up from the bed after two
weeks.
Pregnancy and labour and their effects on the woman’s body need be explained comprehensively to
the still-ignorant men folk who are only interested in toting their titles
around.
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