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Is Motherhood The End Of Alone Time? Asks Rega Jha

This solitude vs. parenting dichotomy hasn’t classically existed for men. Plenty of fathers have disappeared into rooms of their own without feeling guilty or exceptional for it.

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My Nana and Nani had four daughters and decided to raise them “like sons”.

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Ma and her sisters were expected to study hard, make money, and navigate the world independently – in addition to getting married, having children, being their primary parent, the sole household manager, and often caregivers to both spouses’ parents.

“Like sons”, in 1960s binary-speak, actually meant like sons and daughters both.

It’s a mandate unique to girls born in cultures where women are expected to participate in previously-masculine domains, but men aren’t expected to pitch in to ease the load of conventionally feminine duties.

While I grew up, Ma was a college history professor, then founded and ran her own business for a decade, then taught fashion design, and somehow, the whole time, was also constantly coordinating tuition and dance class pickups, putting Dettol on our scraped knees, improvising scraps into school play costumes, teaching us how to cover our textbooks in brown paper, turning leftover lauki into bread-pizza topping so we’d be tricked into eating it, and being our first point-of-contact with any demand.

“My stomach hurts.” / “I need to buy chart paper.” / “What’s for dinner?” / “Where’s that book I was reading?” (There’s a joke that used to go around online that the process o

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