In the past there have been Egyptian desert tribes in which the men fought constantly and the women constantly replenished the army through childbirth. That was their function in life. And just look at the following quotation from the Talmud: “It is written. A daughter is a vain treasure to her father. From anxiety about her he does not sleep at night; during her early years lest she be seduced, in her adolescence lest she go astray, in her marriageable years lest she does not find a husband, when she is married lest she be childless, and when she is old lest she practice witchcraft.”
These concerns about our children, especially our daughters, still remain, though the fear of their practicing witchcraft is no longer one of them. But if there ever was a cliché it is that ‘times have changed’. Our daughters are no longer content with being baby machines although women who are not happy just to be wives and mothers are still, even if secretly, regarded as pushy, driving or even phallic – and this last term is always reproachful: ‘Men’, I read somewhere, ‘may congratulate themselves upon the productivity of their own mental wombs, but they are displeased to come upon women with mental penises.’
Indeed, Freud may have substituted penis envy for passivity as the central characteristic of the female. He argues that his love for Martha Bernays (who was to become his wife and bear him six children) is superior to the intellectual freedom which John Stuart Mill had suggested for her. In Freud’s letters the following is quoted: “Am I to think of my delicate, sweet girl as a competitor? After all, the encounter could only end by my telling her, as I did seventeen months ago, that I love her, and that I will make every effort to get her out of the competitive role into the quiet, undisturbed activity of my home.”
Our children, our girls, too, want more out of life than previous generations of women, Women’s complete absorption by, and cultivation of, domesticity and little else is fast disappearing. Thank goodness.
An acquaintance told me: ‘I cannot pass by the sofa without glancing at the cushions from the corner of my eye. I have to stop myself from returning to arrange them. I fight it and move on… but even then, something drags me back to the sofa to pat those cushions and in the end I simply have to obey my impulse.’ I told her that this is obsessive-compulsive behaviour and that she should control it and use her spare time more profitably and in a more interesting way than pumping up cushions.
There are still women whose main concerns are entirely confined to the unfolded beach towel, the frantic polishing of mirrors, the moving the ashtray north, north-west.
Women no longer remain silent and subservient in the presence of men, shutting their mouths and chilling the beer, pretending they are stupid. They want interesting lives which have a wider scope than going to the supermarket and matching their living room curtains to their cushions. (They do these things anyway but other more interesting things as well.)
Even before our entry into Europe in May 2004, the more adventurous children were borrowing money from the bank – a service we never had in my day – and whizzing off to see some remote part of the globe. They no longer ask for our permission, they merely inform us. Yes, they want to go and have a look at endless mud huts, monsoons and malaria in unprounceable parts of the world. They are not particularly interested in cutting their birthday cake in our living room. They would rather you gave them some money to go and see Machu Picchu instead, coming back to tell us that a large proportion of our Gross Domestic Product should be going to the Third World and producing some ‘hair raising’ stories and pictures.
There is a great fascination with cultures other than our own. And I am thankful that my children have an insatiable curiosity and are not content with a humdrum and clichéd existence for a whole lifetime. They would rather explore some new place than spend money on expensive clothes and accessories. This wandering about has caused me sleepless nights and sometimes great anxiety but friends who know me well remind me that I was exactly the same, at a time when travelling was not so easy. But there is a price to be paid for interesting children. I would not have it otherwise. They also open new worlds to us and give us an excuse to move and go and see them.
We cannot protect them from everything. A friend with an only child told me that her daughter has decided to go and do some missionary work in Kenya: ‘Of course I am worried and try to prepare her for different scenarios. But I know in my heart that the unexpected can always happen, but do I have the heart to stop her? After all, life is an adventure. We learn from our own experience and not someone elses.’
Unlike our parents who were impervious to pleas for travelling abroad, even just up the road to Sicily or Italy, we have had to be more accepting of this way of life. In my day, you floated the idea of vamoosing to some nearby country months ahead to your father and the answer was invariably a ‘No’ at first. My father saw a conspiracy against his daughters in every niche and in every male. It took months of negotiations to even go for a day to Gozo and it was exhausting.
These days, when it comes to our children travelling, we take our courage in our hands and hope for the best. Friends whose only child trooped off to Peru for a long stay tell me: ‘We try not to worry!” And so say all of us. We receive e-mails from them (whatever would we do without e-mails when they are on the other side of the world?) and try not to think of all the dreadful things that could happen as they board ramshackle buses fit for the scrapheap, eat food of unknown provenance, and are in a situation when they might contract all kinds of diseases, sometimes sleeping in youth hostels the likes of which I would rather not imagine.
I now understand my father and his concerns only too well.
In my youth we only wanted to stay in Europe. We didn’t even know of the existence of Machu Picchu and travelling to Africa or South America, let alone India or China were simply not on our agenda.
But, as they say, the world is now a global villages. Higher education has opened the horizons for women too. The days when women had no appreciation of anything intellectual are gone. Many of our girls today are interested in anything and everything. Mrs James Joyce objected to her husband’s waste of paper during the composition of Stephen Hero. Joyce had an impression that she had more pleasure and profit in the landlady’s hens laying an egg than in all his inky deposits.
Joyce himself did not always conform. He threw his own manuscript of The Portrait of the Artist into the fire and his sister pulled it out again. In gratitude he bought her a new pair of gloves.
Worst still Haydn’s wife is said to have cut up his symphonies for her hair curlers.
After the death of my husband an English friend who lectured at our university tried to cheer me up by telling me: “Alright, he’s gone. It’s sad, very sad. But aren’t you lucky that thanks to him you saw so much of the world and had an interesting life. Did you want to stay here for the rest of your life as some of my bright female science students have done, just doing the social rounds until people are tired of you?”
From time to time I have told the young one that I wish she would marry a fisherman, from Marsaxlokk perhaps, and lead a tranquil life of happy domesticity and thus be almost round the corner from me. ‘His family would bore you to tears,’ she would say. ‘And you’d take to knitting… well you might finish that navy blue jumper you once started when I was 12 – at last.’ She didn’t marry a Maltese fisherman but instead a lovely young man and they now live in another continent. And yes, they too have opened new doors for me and from time to time, invite me to travel with them. And, after all, no, I would not have been happy had they restricted their lives to Malta. I have finally learned to let go and let them get on with their lives.