Could the world be re-organised in a manner where priority is given to how it can be accessed by those most vulnerable, those most in need of support and assistance?
What if world politics, architecture, culture and society evolved through the prism of child welfare? Representation Pic
Travelling solo with my 18-month-old to Dubai and back felt like some rite of initiation. Under regular circumstances, for most people, taking a flight involves taking a cab to the airport, checking in, going through security, immigration, finally boarding, alighting and the rest in reverse order. Given the remoteness of where I live, getting to the airport involves taking at least three trains and a total travel time of at least five hours. Imagine putting a child through this ordeal and then expecting them to be patient for the next six hours on the flight. I combatted this by heading to Bergamo the day before our flight and staying the night in a hotel. It was an additional expense, but if it offered both of us a good night’s sleep, it was worth it. I am getting increasingly good at keeping my inherited middle-class guilt at bay when it comes to making decisions that feel crucial to my well-being.
Ever since I returned from the trip, I have been feeling a sense of ease, an equanimity. I narrowed the reasons for it down to being in possession of a sense of closure. Until recently, I had always found myself wondering about my choice to be so far from my family. Would it not have been better for me to be back home in India for the first year of our child’s life? I used to fantasise about having more access to help, relying on a support system cultivated over the years, and not feeling anxiety about asking someone to lend a hand. Being in Dubai, a place one could jokingly refer to as one of the cleanest states in India, helped me come to terms with our choices.
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The intense September heat made being outdoors impossible. This felt challenging to our routine, since, on a daily basis, our child spends less than three of his wakeful hours indoors. When there’s an unprecedented heat wave where we live, it is hot everywhere because of the lack of fans or air conditioning. In Dubai, because air conditioning is omnipresent, the extremity of the difference in temperature between indoors and outdoors feels insufferable. Over the week we were there, I ate superbly and enjoyed spending time with my family, but my body felt sluggish because of the lack of movement.
Although our toddler didn’t mind having his playground time substituted with mall time (he never tired of going up and down the escalator twenty thousand times), he did end up with a fever and a nasty cold that took more than a week to shake off.
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I felt relieved to be back. I felt a sudden appreciation for all the things we could do outdoors, even when it was cold or raining. We had eschewed easy access to airports in lieu of sprawling meadows and pedestrian-friendly zones, and child-friendly libraries, parent-organised play centres, and five parks within our immediate vicinity. All the small luxuries that parents who live in big cities struggle to access.
Because the birth rate in Italy has dropped so significantly, we are offered money by the state to compensate for the lack of the ‘village’ to raise the child. Don’t get me started on how women isproportionately bear the brunt of it all, even in developed countries.
Parents around the world are always getting a raw deal. Capitalism thrives on the labour economy that parents enable but does little to offer them a decent quality of life. Political machineries have consistently toyed with our notions of what constitutes ‘a good life’. One could argue that so many of our present living circumstances are defined by the urgency of our desire to escape certain realities, like the joint family system, which could have been a great set-up for child raising if it wasn’t so patriarchally informed.
What if world politics, architecture, culture and society evolved through the prism of child welfare, with a view towards enabling the ideal conditions for children to thrive? What if we re-organised the world so that we thought, first and foremost, about how it can be accessed by those most vulnerable, those most in need of support and assistance? Would all lives then be considered equally grieveable? It doesn’t surprise me that in so many ‘developed’ parts of the world people with wombs who have more bodily agency are choosing to be childless, leading to declining birth rates.
The war machinery that is enabled by the logic of nation-states makes children the most precarious victims of every war crime. My heart goes out right now not only to the people of Gaza who are bearing the brunt of Israel’s brutal, inhumane retaliation against the recent attacks by Hamas, but more so to the children, whose futures are being stolen from them. How many more children need to become casualties before we collectively agree that at the heart of most political conflict today is the senselessness of patriarchal-capitalist-neo-colonialist notions of violence and retribution?
Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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