REVIEW
Cultivating resilience
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Home Truths is a source of strength for all mothers, single or otherwise, writes MOUSHUMI MOHANTY.
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BEING a mother is tough. Being a single mother is tougher. For, that means adding the role of the breadwinner to the chore of running the household. But many women play both these roles and many others and get toughened in the process, according to Home Truths, a book on single mothers by Deepti Priya Mehrotra.
The book, which questions most known definitions of convention, is an insightful reading into the lives of 17 single mothers. Their narratives of dailyness reveal a subtext that is anything but mundane. They negotiate structures of power "even in situations of relative powerlessness" to create an identity for themselves by setting woman-headed households and nurturing children outside the "normal" two-parent structure. In fact, two of them have had children outside wedlock.
An interview-based work, Home Truths employs an engaging participant method of research in which Mehrotra is also one of the subjects, being a single mother herself. Studying her subjects from "within" lends her work an authenticity that an "objective observer" can never provide.
Mehrotra's subjects, who have been picked from a larger research project in which she recorded narratives of 26 single mothers — 14 from the working class and 12 from the middle class — reveal commonalities of experience. Most of the women in the book focus on survival — providing housing, finance and a stable environment for their children — and are overworked in the process. In being the providers, they turn prevalent notions of gender on their heads and also question the supposed security of patriarchal families. Most importantly, all of them skirt over the topic of sexuality and remarriage, a phenomenon in which it is difficult to extract the instinctual from what has been historically/socially instilled. All the subjects said that they would focus their lives on their children rather than get married again.
Interestingly, while Mehrotra lists the similarities between these women's experiences, she does not do the same about the differences in her analysis of the narratives. However, the dissimilarities, which are class-based and lie broadly in the areas of survival and community support, come out in the stories large and true.
The quest for survival takes a very different tone when the subjects are middle class women. For most of these women, finance is not so much a problem as coping with the absence of a man in the household. They learn to do things on their own. As the author says in her narrative: "When I set up on my own... I began to live on my own, and carry out various so-to-say masculine tasks. I learnt to get the plumbing done, deal with labourers doing repairs in my house... "
The working class women, on the other hand, have to tackle with the dual concerns of coping and finding employment. Largely uneducated and with almost no training in any profession other than "women's work", they have to resort to being domestic helps or labourers. As a result, these women-headed households are often quite poor.
When Mehrotra's working class subjects go out to work, other women in the community look after their children — a resource that most middle class women seem to lack. Based in nuclear households, some of them are left completely alone if they do not want to fall back on either their natal or husband's families.
Working class communities still retain vestigial remnants of female solidarity of yore that proves to be extremely useful for single mothers.
One of the subjects, Sapna, relates how Prema, her neighbour, used to look after her children when she went to work. Unfortunately, the scourge of urbanisation is slowly and steadily doing away with the Premas of the world. Such systems of care need to be nurtured at a larger level in the form of high-quality day care centres to help mothers take charge of their lives better. "Since mothering is essential to society, there is a need for others to share the pains and costs of mothering," asserts Mehrotra.
A useful resource, Home Truths could become a source of strength for all mothers — single or otherwise. Here is a book that says that they are not alone, that there are other women who have trodden the same path and risen to positions of strength in their own ways.
Home Truths: Stories of Single Mothers, Deepti Priya Mehrotra,
Penguin, Rs. 250.
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