They say there is a biological clock ticking inside every woman.
The one that makes us look at children and go "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw...", the one that drives women crazy when they pass the age of 30 and makes them want to find the "right guy" to get married and have children.
I have a friend who has organized every little detail of her wedding, except for the groom. My friend is single.
Is there really a clock ticking inside of us?
It is true that there is a biological age limit for women when it comes to having children.
To me, though, it seems like there's a clock ticking inside of us not because we were born like that. It is more like Hook's clock ticking inside the crocodile; we swallowed it by mistake.
Society makes us swallow this ticking clock of the "birth instinct" ever since we're little girls.
Historical records show that the idea of the "mother instinct" was introduced, and forced upon women, only after the western society was organized on a capitalistic basis. Women had to be turned into reproduction machines in order to produce working force, in a Europe that was in great need of working hands. Along came the ideas on "femininity", that are still so deep in our society's collective mentality that are taken for granted. Women had to be kind, weak, not talk much, be the silent mothers and wives that would take care of theirs husband and feel this unconventional motherly love the moment they set eyes on their new-born babies.
How many women suffer from guilt and postpartum depression just because they realize that this is not the case? A new mother that I know confessed that she started really loving her child after it became a few months old, when it had formed some kind of "personality" and a more real bond started developing.
At my previous job I would sometimes overhear conversations in the kitchen of colleagues talking about their children and husbands. One of them said that she would rather live alone and not with her husband, because although he is a really nice guy and a great dad, he is boring.
- Then, why did you get married?- asked her friend- I thought you wanted to have children.
- I wanted the children, I didn't want the husband!
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A ticking clock is setting the pace in our lives, both for men and women. The way our whole life is organized around the clock, although many times a useful social convention, is so unnatural that it took two centuries and a lot of violence to convert the peasant into the punctual worker.
Am I the Peter Pan that doesn't want to grow up? If so, why do so many people call in sick for work so that they can just spend a day at home, children don't like school and adults suffer from insomnia and stress? Do we all have issues or is it just not normal to live like that?
I was working at a call center where I had be at work, having turned on my computer and logged in the system and receiving my first call at 9:00am sharp. We had a total of a one hour break (bathroom breaks included) and sometimes we had to book them in advance for the whole week. A stopwatch would count our bathroom break, our lunch break, our cigarette break.
"Unlike Milton’s Adam, who, upon being expelled from the Garden of Eden, cheerfully set forth at the prospect of a life dedicated to work, the expropriated peasants and artisans did not peacefully agree to work for a wage. More often they became beggars, vagabonds or criminals. A long process would be required to produce a new work-discipline. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the hatred for wage labor was so intense that many proletarians preferred to risk the gallows, rather than submitting to the new conditions of work."
Silvia Federici- The Caliban and the Witch
Tomorrow I'm setting my stopwatch at 20' and I'm running. This is the only clock that instead of stressing me it pushes me to move forward, to keep going. Maybe it's because I set it myself and every time the alarm goes off I feel like I won another battle; a battle against time, against fear and the things we're expected to do, and the things that people don't think we can do.
I was having a beer with a girlfriend.
"If you had to choose between having children and raising them alone (provided that you had the ability to do so) and having a partner for life, what would it be?"
I chose the partner, and so did she.
