The plight of the housewife and the second child. Part II

Well last time we had left the housewife in a lurch of indecision and its time to scrutinize her situation further before looking at rescue methods . To do so we subject her to further difficult situations that I have seen her to be put into by natural circumstances. The elder child passes out of class 12 with a reasonably good performance and gets admitted to a "good" college with triple E ( Electrical and Electronic Engineering ) or if the son is as good a vagabond as me then comes to CMI to study physics .

Nota Bene : My mother is not a housewife . She is a doctor .

Now this housewife in question has a whole day to herself with nothing to do in particular . Except perhaps if not for the placebo effect the ashamed-to-call-themselves-conservatives would like to label "home making " as a very important occupation .

I wonder how the home can be made by just the housewife contributing to it technically and the husband standing by for the "moral support " !!

THis housewife now has a further problem of haing nothing substantiall to worry except for a vague fear she herself doesnt understand and labels it for lack of words " the son's future " . She even does not have a definite knowledge of what an engineering course takes or what it imbibes the student with . On the face of it she sees a very confusing output that initially all go in with different branches but all come out with a job in some XYZ software company and becoming a part of the IT sector which is supposedly "booming" .

The child now exposed to the more vibrant life of an engineering college and hostel has lesser attractions for th home and proportions his free time ( which is almost always ! ) to the upcoming techfests . Training himself to be an enterpreneur who can do very well human resource management and financial management and can design robots . Not bad but the 2 vital questions that get asked here :

1. Isnt everyone else also doing teh same ?
2. How is the housewife supposed to compensate for this vaccuum in her life with some thing more precise than the wories about the "son's future" ?

Well our concern here is the second question . On the other hand the husband returns back home with a gloomy face and a frown in his forehead due to worries with his boss and obviously he finds lesser time for his wife now that the common link between the child is away from home and the worries look a bit more distant , on the telephone .

So the wife is now losing company from all sides . She is more and more feeling the need to have something more substantial to occupy herself with . She needs something to contribute to . She feels out of use . She feels left alone . She craves for the son to return home . She needs a proffession .

She regrets not being allowed to continue her education to the level of becoming a proffessional . She now regrets her parents agreeing to the marriage . She regrets all that has already happened in her life . She regrets everything .

She wishes history could be re-written . She knows it cant be . She feels desperate . Day by day she feels more and more helpless . She then develops a tendency for high blood pressure . Diabetes . Migraine .
All gets labelled as the post-menopausal effects . The husbands finds an oppurtunity to sympathize and to make a grand show of how concerned he is about the health of his wife . He gets her to the best doctor . The doctor gives medicines .

But the actual problem is never understood.

She has a psychological problem .

She feels a life lost for the purpose of others . First the father , then the husband and then the son . She feels a need for an identity of her own and she regrets that a financial independence arising from a proffession would have solved this problem .

She just regrets and regrets eat up life the fastest .

Now is the second child is the solution to this problem ?

Perhaps not a complete solution but it obviously could have led to a better state of affairs from the psychological point of view . The second child if possibly of the opposite sex than the first would also have in it a prospect of bunch of new experiences for the housewife as a mother .

A second chiled timed such that when the elder son/daughter has passed out the sibling still has the important phases of his/her schol life left . So that in theabsence of the elkder one the housewife has something substantial to occupy herself .

She atleast has the chance to tell herself that she is making a contribution to the society by being the instrument of moulding an individual for the society . She will have something substantial to do than to just worry about the "distant" son's future ( which she technically doesnt understand ) . She will have the opputunity to occupy herself with the daily chores associated with the growing and maturing of another child .

The feeling of being responsible for the good and bad for another upcoming living organism can surely be a fulfilling and more satisfactory experience that to be decorating the inanimate house for those piecemeal appreciations from the husband .

It has been a personal experience of mine that such housewives are far better off psychologically who have a secondchild with a good difference of age between the siblings . Another active elemnt in the house endowing her with responsibilities is not a bad compensation for the missing one .

But then this solution brings with itself further cascading issues . They are as follows ::

1. So will personal happiness of the housewife outweigh the national requirement of curbing the exponential population growth of the nation ?

2. What about those families which are not financially well off to be able to shoulder the financial requirements to bring up two children equally well ?

These new cascaded issues and those others mentioned in part I shall be dealt in part III onwards .