Yet another tug-of-love story has made the news, and I am not quite sure I know what to think. I know what my gut reaction is, as a woman and a mother, but then I remember that I should at least try to see the other party’s point of view, though I’ve got to admit it’s a struggle. I also don’t want to seem heartless towards the man, because believe me, I’m not, but it’s so difficult dealing with the notion that because men and women are equal under the law, then they are also equal biologically and socially as parents, which they are patently not. There’s a biological – not social – reason why far more men walk out of the family home leaving their children behind, and call it “leaving my wife”, than there are women who do the same. And when women – quite exceptionally - do that rare thing, they are very clear in their mind that they are leaving their children as well as their husband. While I know countless men who have walked out of the family home, I know of only five women who have done the same over three generations, and the fall-out from their departure was incomparably worse. It was worse not because of the departure of the chief care-giver and the practical aspects that entailed, but because the departure of one’s mother is terrible, at a primal level, in a way that the departure of one’s father is not. When the father leaves, the child perceives it as rejection. But when the mother leaves, the child soaks it up as abandonment. Abandonment by the mother mammal, in nature, means certain death. It means death even for human children outside nature and in some societies, and not necessarily Third World countries either. Young children are biologically hardwired to fear abandonment by the mother, and similarly, mothers (with very rare exceptions) are hardwired not to abandon or live apart from their children.

Reading the news yesterday, about yet another man whose girlfriend has run off their child, I did my best to see his point of view – and I could do that – but I’ll confess that most of my sympathy and understanding were with the mother. Anthony Busuttil, of unspecified age but looking to me like an older man, is campaigning for the return to Malta of his very young son, who is being kept in Prague by his (much younger) Czech mother. She walked out of their hotel room while they were there on holiday together a month ago, and effectively ended her relationship with him. She didn’t walk out of the room in front of him, but left quietly while he was in the bathroom. That alone tells me quite a lot, but we needn’t go into those personal matters here. Suffice it to say that when a woman feels the need to do that, there are issues which speak for themselves.

I don’t know Mr Busuttil from Adam, and he’s probably reading this and not taking kindly to it, but the gut reaction I mentioned earlier was that his behaviour since her departure – with all that publicity on Facebook, those scenes at the airport, and his continued demands that she returns to Malta with ‘his’ son give me some idea of why she couldn’t take it anymore and scarpered. It’s not as though she’s run off and disappeared. He knows exactly where she is – in Prague, her home – and there is nothing to stop him going to live there if he wants to see his boy regularly. He looks like a retired or semi-retired man to me, going by the age, and he has, in fact, said that he would be “willing to move to Prague temporarily”.

It was this which got to me. Why temporarily? Why not semi-permanently until his son grows up? His European Union passport allows him to live and work in the Czech Republic unhindered and unrestricted. But instead he is demanding that his child’s mother, to whom he is not even married – for reasons that are unclear, but surely that is a factor to consider as he stands there making his demands – should leave her  home country and come to live in Malta, away from her family and friends, without a support network and probably with no job either – purely so that Mr Busuttil can have the comfort and luxury of seeing his child whenever he pleases, without travelling or putting himself out in any way.

And that is why the title to this piece is ‘what about the woman’. In these stories, it appears that few stop to consider exactly why a woman should be kept away from her native country, her real home and her family and friends, for 18 whole, long years while her child grows up – effectively a prisoner of her child’s father – just so that the father can see his child in his own country, without hassles. If Maltese men want this sort of situation, then they know what to do: have a child with a Maltese woman. But if you have a child with a non-Maltese woman, especially if it is in a non-marital relationship that is not particularly solid, you can’t expect to keep the woman trapped on the island, away from everything that is home and familiar to her, just so you can see your child when you want to. Of course this particular woman wants to raise her very young son in Prague, now that she has left Mr Busuttil. That’s where she’s from. That’s where her people are. That is her home. It would be wrong to effectively imprison her in Malta just because she happened to get pregnant by a Maltese man. If he wishes to be a regular part of his son’s life, he can move to Prague himself. If he doesn’t, then well, that tells you something in itself: he loves his son dearly, but he doesn’t love him enough to disturb his comfortable life, up sticks and move to another European city. It sounds a little harsh, but it looks to me as though that pretty much sums it up. Oh, and when women with children leave like that, I think there’s generally a good reason for it, so there’s really no need to portray them in the media as ‘crazy foreign female dogs’.

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