Praying for a BOY!!

In 2012, Nirbhaya was an eye opener for me. I realised that despite living in a country, where our immediate former President was a lady, we still lived in a world where in the race of hormones, testosterone seemed to get an upper hand. While Arnab Goswami handled verbal wars with political & religious leaders, many I knew faced smaller battles from their own people. It ranged from  "was she wearing jeans ? maybe a skirt?" ..... "women nowadays think they can do what they want" (yes I've heard that one!) ..."Good girls don't venture out so late at night" ....to  "boys will be boys".

While these are everyday tidbits you'll hear from the neighbourhood aunty who sits on the stool with her friends soaking up the winter sun, it dawned on me that we have been blaming men for being oppressive to women for no real fault of their own! 

We women, ourselves, are responsible for this big imbalance of thought in our world. The male species had only been emulating what they had been taught by their own parents....and more precisely, their own mothers.

Despite streaks of rebellion in our growing years, my mother ensured a firm hold on my sister & me. We were constantly reminded to sit with our legs crossed, to not argue, to also have an ambition and choose any career we wished. But again we were to keep in mind that at no point were our actions to bring any dishonour or disrespect to our father. 

Marriage taught me that letting my husband wash his own plate, prepare his own breakfast (and mine too) or insisting to teach him sew his own button made me an incompetent wife. Thankfully my husband felt otherwise so it became our little thing to share chores. But there are many out there who aren't as open to such an arrangement.

So now when life's taken the next turn and made me responsible for another life in the making, I've been busy praying for a daughter whom I can teach to be confident and chase her dreams irrespective of what anyone says or opines. A girl in whom I can instill the courage to ensure her own safety because again, Boys will be Boys. I'll never want to teach her what she can and can't do. What she can and can't wear.

And then it struck me...who defines this one line? That boys will be boys?  Is it not the parents who teach their sons "Boys don't Cry"? Why should one day, my daughter have to fear the opposite sex as a potential threat to her?

Why are comments like " A Man's Place is not in the Kitchen" so common?  Why do we teach our men to assume that their sisters or wives will clean up after them? Who teaches them to have an "upper hand" when dealing with the wife? Who teaches them the meaning of  "BE A MAN"? And who defines the meaning of The Weaker Sex?

When will we focus more on raising them as better humans who share just as much responsibility in daily life as their wives do? When will our sons stop sizing up each woman on the road from head to toe and back? When will they stop being seen as potential threat for every girl's safety?

and I realised, the answer to my questions, was in me. When I teach my son to be a respectful human at home and outside, the women around him will know that definitions of being a MAN are different from what they've known till now. 

When I teach him to satisfy his own food cravings and fix his own broken buttons his future generations will also be raised knowing that God indeed made us to complement one another and not to pull each other down. 

The change in my world comes from what I teach my son. I have the power to make my world the way I've dreamt it to be. I am now praying for a Boy, to finally raise the Man of my Dreams.