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piqer for: Global finds Health and Sanity Doing Good
Bangalore-based Rashmi Vasudeva's journalism has appeared in many Indian and international publications over the past decade. A features writer with over nine years of experience heading a health and fitness supplement in a mainstream Indian newspaper, her niche areas include health, wellness, fitness, food, nutrition and Indian classical Arts.
Her articles have appeared in various publications including Mint-Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, Deccan Herald (mainstream South Indian newspaper), Smart Life (Health magazine from the Malayala Manorama Group of publications), YourStory (India's media technology platform for entrepreneurs), Avantika (a noir arts and theatre magazine), ZDF (a German public broadcasting company) and others.
In 2006, she was awarded the British Print-Chevening scholarship to pursue a short-term course in new-age journalism at the University of Westminster, U.K. With a double Masters in Globalisation and Media Studies from Aarhus Universitet (Denmark), University of Amsterdam and Swansea University in Wales, U.K., she has also dabbled in academics, travel writing and socio-cultural studies. Mother to a frisky toddler, she hums 'wheels on the bus' while working and keeps a beady eye on the aforementioned toddler's antics.
Video: Meet The Women Who Regret Having Children (And Are Saying So)
If you think women who opt not to have children are judged and judged again by society at large, can you imagine how the women who are brave enough to admit that they regret having children will be looked at?
No, they are not talking baby blues here. Nor are they in a post-natal funk. These are ordinary women who are extraordinarily brave. For a mother to admit even to herself that she is not particularly maternal and does not enjoy being a mum is perhaps the most difficult thing of all. To do so and tell the world what it is like to deal with these complicated thoughts and feelings is like shouting about the unspeakable.
In this BBC video programme, three women tell the correspondent what it feels like to secretly wish for the clock to turn back. To listen to them is an intensely emotional experience – even if you are not a mother (or a father).
The common theme that comes across in these three stories is how utterly lonely women feel when they don't conform to the trope of ‘motherhood is challenging but ultimately rewarding’. One of them, Rachel, wonders if she may have found it easier to come to terms with motherhood if she were able to talk openly about how she didn’t like it. Another woman, Alison, stresses that she does love her children greatly but feels she was too selfish to have them in the first place. She says she begrudges their intrusion into her life.
Programmes like these make us wonder about the giant leaps our societies have to make to overcome the valley of myths that motherhood really is. Will it help lessen the vilification of women for the choices they make? Perhaps, but don’t bet on it.
