The pandemic has made Annika reconsider having children, but the pressure from her Indian relatives is intense. And sociologist Farha Ternikar breaks down cultural expectations around motherhood, and offers guidance for pushing back.
Annika Sharma is the author of Love, Chai, and Other Four Letter Words, and co-host of The Woke Desi podcast. You can learn more about her here.
Featured Expert:
Dr. Farha Ternikar (Ph.D. 2003) is an associate professor and teaches Gender and Society, Social Inequality and Gender and Feminist theory and is also Director of the Gender & Women's Studies Program at Le Moyne College. She is the author of the forthcoming book Intersectionality in the Muslim South Asian-American Middle Class: Lifestyle Consumption beyond Halal and Hijab. She is the author of the forthcoming book Intersectionality in the Muslim South Asian-American Middle Class: Lifestyle Consumption beyond Halal and Hijab. She has authored several articles on gender, race and religious identity in the Journal of Ethnic Studies, International Journal of Contemporary Sociology, and Sociology Compass. Learn more about her work here.
If you liked this episode, be sure to listen to When They Want a Wedding And Grandchildren But You're Not Ready and When Mamí Makes You Doubt Becoming a Mom.
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Juleeyka Lantigua:
Hi everybody. Today I'm speaking with Annika. When Annika got married, she and her husband thought they would have plenty of time to enjoy life as a couple before they had children. Then COVID hit, and all their plans went out the window. Through the pandemic, Anika has been evaluating motherhood and tensing up every time Indian relatives ask: “When are you having a baby?” Let's get into it.
Annika: My name is Annika Sharma. I am, by day, a communications project manager in New York City at Weill Cornell Medicine, and by night, I am a podcast host of a South Asian millennial podcast called, The Woke Desi, and I'm also a writer. My newest book, it's called, Love, Chai and Other Four Letter Words. And in our home we call our mom and dad Ama and Nana.
So we grew up in a college town. I grew up in central Pennsylvania where Penn State is. My dad, luckily had a little bit of insight into what we would be facing as we got older because he was a professor and he watched his college students deal with a lot of the different life issues they were facing. My mom on the other hand did not. And so it was definitely a traditional home. A little more strict, a little bit more structured around the same values that they had in the 1980s, in India.
As a daughter, there's certain expectations that stuck. I've been married now 11 months now and there's still a push for motherhood very quickly. That's the first question, I think for women everywhere, but also within South Asian culture in particular for, "Oh, your wedding was two weeks ago? That's awesome. What's the next step? When are you having kids?" I'm like, I'm sorry. I'm still paying the bills for my wedding. I'll get back to you on that.
I was 32 when I met my husband, but by the time I hit 27, 28, it was like, “Oh my gosh, girl, your eggs have shrivelled and died! If you are not getting married, you're not going to be having kids.” And it was just all about eventually having children and the push was real. And I kept thinking, I have two master's degrees. I have a book deal. I have a day job. I have a podcast. This is not high on my priority list at the moment. But that push was definitely a very, very...uh, carried over concept from our motherland, I think.
Annika: I always wanted to be a mom. I have always wanted to be a mom, growing up. I thought that it would happen younger. And then I actually ended up working in early childhood education and I was a preschool teacher and that age got pushed back real fast from 23 to 25 to 29. I just kept realizing, I am not ready for this. This is something I want, but I will never have an “I am ready moment.”
Annika: As I got married, and especially honestly through the pandemic, because both of those things coincided. It ended up really changing a lot of things about my life, including motherhood. Because I thought great, we'll have a year, we'll have to travel. We'll get our career lined up. We'll be in a really great place. And then we'll have a year to ourselves after we get married and then we'll have children and it's not a big deal. But we haven't done all the things in our lives that we wanted to because rightfully so, they're all on hold at the moment like everyone else. And that started pushing it further and further. And meanwhile, there's family pressure and this biological clock sitting on my head telling me it, the age is increasing every day and your eggs are decreasing by the minute and this is totally terrible.
People have randomly texted to see if I am pregnant yet. And suddenly a lot of my Indian American friends who I thought were very modern...I remember once I was going to step away and make some eggs for myself. It was two o'clock. I hadn't eaten yet. And I said, I'll be right back. I'm just going to go make some food. And they looked at me, you're really hungry. Are you pregnant? And I thought, no, I am eating for one. I'm eating very largely for one.
The other thing that I realized through the pandemic as well was that people weren't talking about the fact that they didn't want to be mothers yet because motherhood was shifting. My friends who were having children or had children were really going through a rough time. Sometimes operating on one income when they used to have two or they didn't have childcare, so one had to quit a job or they would send their kids to school and then someone would have a positive case and so now they had to take off for two weeks again, because everybody was quarantined. As I watched that, I kept wondering, can I be that sacrificial?
That's also something that culturally people expect. My mom quit her job when I had a hard time in eighth grade. All of the older generations of women in the community that we grew up, were kind of in and out of a job, depending what their children were going through.
People would say, well, you're going to come around. Well, you just have one, it'll be fine. You'll suddenly realize that this motherly instinct will kick in, or just have one before it's too late. You don't even feel comfortable a lot saying I may not want children.
Annika: My parents, and I never actually had a conversation about it. Typically, I usually go to them for advice, for insights, into how I should do X, Y, and Z. How I should move forward with life. And this was the one time that I didn't feel comfortable saying it to them because I knew they wouldn't hear me. And because they themselves were feeling pressure from other members of the family who kept asking them, so is your daughter pregnant yet? Are they thinking about children? They are culturally so inclined to believe that marriage is for procreation, that it wasn't even a conversation I could broach.
Annika: It took a whole summer. And then eventually when things started to re-open a little and I got to finally meet all of the children that my friends had during the pandemic who I hadn't met yet, it started changing things a little bit again, because I thought, okay, things might look a little bit more like it did pre-2020, and maybe, as my career started moving forward again, as things started reopening, I started feeling more and more comfortable with it and less about the pressure.
Now I've finally come around to the idea, and now I'm finally at peace with my decision, but it took almost a year to get there, and it was a year of silence and a year of isolation. Both physically and mentally to get to that place. I really had to find that within myself and then getting to the place where I could just say, screw it, I'm doing what I want. And anytime anyone would say, are you pregnant? I'd say, I don't really want to hear that question.
Lantigua: All I'm going to say is, Annika, we hear you. So many women feel the same pressure since we're little. But as adults, we don't have to talk about this personal decision with our loved ones if we don't want to. To help us figure out how, you know what I did. Called, in an expert.
Farha Ternikar: My name is Farha Ternikar. I'm an Associate Professor of Sociology and also the Director of Gender and Women Studies at Le Moyne College. I have a forthcoming book called, Intersectionality in the South Asian American Middle Class, Beyond Hijab and Halal, coming out November 15th.
Lantigua: You heard Annika's story.
Ternikar: Yes.
Lantigua: What did you hear?
Farha Ternikar: So, I heard that she got married recently about a year ago and she already has the pressure to have kids, but COVID happened. She's not... She wasn't quite sure she would be able to do all the things she wanted to do before then, but her parents are pretty traditional. It sounds like they immigrated in the 1980s. And so there's a lot of Indian culture from the 1980s that kind of has come over and stayed with the traditions that I think her parents want her to carry on.
Lantigua: Why is having children quickly after you get married valuable? Why is this important?
Farha Ternikar: Well, in general, traditional Indian culture, for women to get married by a young age and also have children, is part of what is seen as being a good daughter, a good woman, a good Indian girl, basically, right? Especially when we're talking about the 1980s. Things have changed, especially since the 90s in India. But there's this emphasis and it's in a lot of immigrant cultures, right? And lots of cultures, even if you look at white middle class culture, right. There is also this pressure. And then of course you have to put in the biology and science as part of that. And then there is, there's some science to back that in terms of the age issue.
Lantigua: So tell me what has shifted? What has changed? You said that parents from the 80s maybe have a stronger traditional sense of what the steps are.
Farha Ternikar: So, thinking about this as a sociologist, I really take an intersectional approach, right? So we've seen changes in terms of education, changes in terms of class, changes in terms of culture, in terms of women, both in India, as well as the United States. And so of course, changes in literacy, education and job opportunities and career have shifted the gender norms. And though India's gender norms compared to the United States' gender norms at any specific time may appear to be more traditional, we also have to remember how large of a country India is, how rural much of the country is. You know, it's a complicated comparison.
So all of these things correlate. Education, income, and class are really important in terms of looking at the rates of both having children, as well as marriage and, and ultimately decision-making, right? We're talking about gender norms and women having more autonomy and agency in terms of deciding if they're going to get married at all. If, and when they get married. If they have children and if, or when they have children. So a lot of it is cultural and societal, and of course there's a small piece that's biological.
Lantigua: So I was really interested in the household that she grew up in because her dad is a professor, but her mom is a homemaker. And her mom even left the workforce when Annika was in eighth grade to be a full-time caretaker for her children. So how do you think having a traditionally mother role in the household impacts the expectations for the first gen and the second gens?
Ternikar: You know, I don't think it does as much as it did before. I mean, because so many women that work full time right now had mothers who work, and then there are women who are opting out of the career, out of the job force right now, even during COVID and who have mothers, who still work. And so I think there is thinking about your mother as a role model, but I would also say mothers, as being part of family as a social institution, are one place where we are socialized in terms of our gender norms. So thinking about this as sociologists, I think mothers, family, friends, and media all play an important role in how we're socialized, in terms of what our expectations are as women, when it comes to working, working outside the home, being a stay at home mom, as well as, decisions around when is the right time to get married and things like that.
Lantigua: So one of the things that I also experienced when I got married was my mom getting pressured and getting asked, and Annika experiences that too, where her parents are being asked. What do we do with that?
Ternikar: I think it's one of those things that, it's culture, right? The trends change. There are those that will try to appease their family expectations, but there...and there's those that don't right? And it's kind of a little bit of a pushback, right. And I just think it's a negotiation that what goes on, right. And parents and grandparents have cultural expectations, but as gender norms are shifting, those expectations need to be renegotiated.
Lantigua: All right. So let's talk about this negotiation. How do we enter into this negotiation? How do we set the terms?
Ternikar: I think it's setting up what your expectations are, if you are the person getting pressured, in terms of, what do you hope to accomplish? What are your life goals? If it's career, travel, community service, as well as having children or not having children. Kind of letting your parents or grandparents know that this is part of an entire plan for you. It's not just, you are going to be defined by multiple roles as a woman, right. Women have multiple statuses at any one point. They're daughters, they're mothers, they're mentors, they're caretakers, they're educators. And I think that's an important part of that. kind of clearly maybe communicating that. And then maybe that would help with the negotiation.
Lantigua: So I loved at the very end, Annika just started to say to people when they asked if she was pregnant, I don't want to hear that question. Honestly, I laughed when I was talking to her, but I also was like, right on. But that might come across as really rude. Really disrespectful in some cultures. So what, what are some other strategies for deflecting, ignoring, or just putting a stop to these, what can be really annoying, questions?
Ternikar: And I mean, I think the best strategy is just asking a question back, right. Because, well, how, how are you doing and what about your niece or your daughter or your mother, or your sister? What are... And I just...because I do feel like women have this pressure. Everything from, when are you going to get married? If you're divorced, when are you going to get remarried? When are you going to join match.com? When are you going to have kids? To, when are you going to buy your own house? I just think deflecting is asking a question back, and I think you also have to take the temperature of who you're having that discussion with, right. And every daughter has a different way of relating to her parents and her grandparents and different techniques for dealing with conflict, as well as negotiation.
Lantigua: Is it important to get your parents to become your allies in your position? Meaning, try to convince them, so that then they can do some of the deflecting for you, or they can just even stop the inquiries on your behalf when you're not around. Like, is that important? And then how do we accomplish that?
Ternikar: I think it depends on how close you are with your parents. Right? I mean, I do feel that there is a stereotype that all Indian families are close. Immigrant families are closer. But that's a also not necessarily true. And so I think the closer you are with your parents or your mother or your grandmother, I think it's easier to get them as an ally and then they can help deflect. But if that relationship isn't already there, and I don't want to assume that it is because as we see how much families are changing in the United States I think there's not a one size fits all, even in terms of negotiating and trying to create an ally within the family. I think it would have to be individual by individual case. I always come to all of these kind of case studies thinking about this in terms of class, education, gender, race.
Ternikar: And then also like my own work also thinks about, sometimes religion matters. If we're talking about Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, that could also play a part, both in terms types of conversations families have. Decisions to have larger families, smaller families. And so, that's why I think about this as a sociologist. A family, that family is a social construction, and we're seeing families shift in American society. And a lot of the traditional patterns that we thought of in the 1950s, and even then in the 1980s, going back and looking at our sitcoms of the 1980s, right? From, Who's The Boss, to, Cosby, to Step By Step, whatever we watched. Our idea of what is an American family? That's why I would say when we're talking about the American family, are we talking about white middle class heteronormative families? Are we talking about ethnic families, immigrant families? And of course I know today, we're talking about Indian families.
Lantigua: Thank you so much.
Ternikar: Thank you guys so much.
Lantigua: All right. Let's recap what we learned from Farha.
Think like a sociologist. There are many factors and societal messages that shape your family's ideas around motherhood. Knowing what some of these are, can help you understand why their perspectives are so different from yours.
Explain the whole package. When talking about having or not having children, it helps to do so within the broader plans you have for your life and how being a parent may or may not fit into them.
And remember, deflect readily. When all else fails, and you just don't want to get into it, ask a question. Really. Any question that steers the conversation away from the topic.
: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for sharing us, for listening, for just tuning in and being part of our community. How To Talk to [Mamí & Papí] About Anything, is an original production of LWC studios. Virgina Lora is the show's Producer. Kojin Tashiro is our Mixer. Manuela Bedoya is our Social Media Editor. I'm the creator, Juleyka Lantigua, on Twitter and Instagram we're @TalkToMamiPapi. Please follow us and read us on Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. By everybody. Same place next week.
CITATION:
Lantigua, Juleyka, host. “Everyone’s Asking ‘Are You Pregnant Yet?’”
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] About Anything,
LWC Studios., November 1, 2021. TalkToMamiPapi.com.