Understanding My Parents: Pressures of Motherhood and the Motherhood Penalty

My parents got married at 25 and at the time, they were considered to be married pretty late. Since they were a love marriage and they got married so late, the pressure was building to have a child as soon as they were declared husband and wife. My mother often repeated the fact that her mother and her mother-in-law wanted a grandchild. They were itching to grow the family even more. From what I do remember of my grandmothers, they were the type of women who enjoyed cooking cleaning and doting on their families, especially their grandkids, so I completely understand why they would pressure my mom for a kid. However, my mother didn't want to have a child immediately after getting married.

Unfortunately, about three months into the marriage, my mother became pregnant. She remembers how frightened she was. “I knew I wanted kids, but I always wanted to develop my career” was how my mother explained her reluctance for kids at the time. Trying to lighten the mood, I started laughing, saying, "Wow, I didn't realize I was an accident." Here was where the topics began to get very serious, however.

When my mother said that she wasn't pregnant with me, I didn’t realize what she meant, but she looked back at me and said that she was pregnant and had a miscarriage. This was before the Government of India officially prohibited telling the parents the sex of the fetus and when my mother was further along in the pregnancy, she came to know that it was a boy. Unfortunately, around the 12th or 13th week of the pregnancy, she began having stomach pain and problems and underwent a miscarriage. “I couldn't decide whether it was a boon or not,” my mom said, but she decided it was for the best. After that, my grandparents stopped asking her about children and she finally felt as if she had control over when she was going to have kids.

A year or so later, my parents decided to move to Delhi where my dad got a better job. It was here where I was conceived. This time my mom actually laughed saying that she still wanted to wait, but after settling down, I was not a bad thing. My birth was nothing special or extraordinary. Everyone was happy that my mother was pregnant and when she was seven months along, she moved back to my grandmother's house to give birth. After I was born, my mother stayed home with me and quit her job.

Fast forward two years, my dad moved to Houston, TX to work at the office there. It was here my mom truly felt the pressures of being a mother. In India, living in a city with a lot of families, the burden of raising me was not solely put on her. She told me we lived walking distance from her aunt and uncle and spent the majority of the time with the family. However, after coming to America, my parents knew no one. I also knew very little English and with no one to take care of me, my mother had to put her career aspirations on hold for the time being.

I explained to her the concept of the Motherhood Penalty. I asked her why my dad didn't take a bigger role in taking care of me. In this entire story, the pressure of having children and taking care of them, there was almost no mention of my father. My mother explained it well. She told me that when they got pregnant the first time, with my brother, my parents discussed how they were going to split the responsibilities. At the time, my dad had the higher paying stable job, so it was my mom who took on the brunt of other responsibilities. “Our goal was to get to America and Daddy had better chances of getting there.”

My mother always wanted to have four kids, but after moving to the US, kids just weren’t an option. When we first came, my dad was working 12-13 hours a day and my mom had trouble taking care of me. Because of that, my mom wanted to learn about birth control. However, finding out information for birth control at the time was really hard. She couldn't find a doctor she felt comfortable with and while she did know English very well, she had a huge cultural barrier. The support system of aunts and uncles and grandparents were gone and she was all alone with me and my dad.

Luckily, my parents made friends fast, but the motherhood penalty never left my mother. Because they both decided that my father would be the primary financial supporter, my mother always took the jobs that gave her the best flexibility. When I was younger, we never splurged on anything and I was raised doing chores to help out at home. I started going to daycare from the age of 3. However, my mother never stopped wanting to have another kid. My father, on the other hand, did not want any more kids, but the fact that I wanted a sibling made them decide to have another kid. (Apparently, I wrote them a long poem about being a lonely rose who needed a sibling to be happy.)

When I was 6, my sister was born. By now, we had bought a house in the suburbs and both my parents were stable in their jobs. My grandmother on my mom’s side was able to come and stay with my family to help out with my sister and I. I began seeing some clear similarities and differences between how my sister was raised and how I was raised.

Personally, I thought was my mother’s biggest problem was dealing with taking care of a child in this country by herself. In India, when she was growing up and when my dad was also growing up, they lived in a big family with a huge support system. Coming here, she lost that ability to rely on family to support her when she wanted birth control. She had to read and learn everything by herself. She never was able to fulfill her job potential either, but her family was always first. Everything she did and every decision she made was to help my sister and I become independent and learn to take care of ourselves. She would drive miles and miles to a job she didn't even like because they gave her better vacation hours and work-from-home hours. That is the penalty a woman in this corporate world makes to have a family.

When I told her about the concept of the Motherhood penalty, she looked almost understanding. But she completely disagrees with the concept. “Every woman knows what it takes to be a mother.” She says that she chose to do all these things for us and she doesn’t regret it. Although I disagree with her on that, I can't help but think ahead to what I will have to do when I have kids.

I find myself thinking very similarly to my mother. I do know that I want kids one day but I never thought that I would have to go through so much to have a child. After hearing my mom talk about it, I realized that as much as I disagree with this motherhood penalty and have serious problems with it myself, how do I combat that? One thing is for sure, I do not want to give up my career. I am grateful to my parents for doing the hard work and bringing my family here and setting up this huge support system for myself and my sister.

My mom told me the only thing she wants me to worry about is getting settled. The one thing she told me she wanted to do before having children was getting her job secured. Luckily, because of her experiences, she is very liberal when compared to other Indian parents when it comes to sexual health, especially birth control. I’m glad to have had this talk, not only because it has brought me and my mother much closer, but also because it has given me a better perspective on how I need to prepare myself for the future. I can learn from her mistakes and make her sacrifices worth it.