ODDLY enough this week I’m going to get paternal even though we are months away of Father’s Day. I guess this week has been filled with baby daddy talk from teenage pregnancy to some mothers who denied fathers the right to access their children?
Sukoluhle Nyathi
Then on my timeline a young woman casually remarked: “Why do men think a child is only theirs by virtue of being a carbon copy of them?” Then I also added fuel to the fire by saying grandmothers love to further intensify that belief when a child is born by going to great lengths to point out the similarities to the dad, even if it means claiming only the hairline belongs to the dad.
My mother said this was because culturally a woman was not considered to have “ownership” over her children. The children belong to the father. A woman’s role was nothing more than a suitcase to carry the child to term and nurture it during its formative years. Roles which any mother will profess are significant yet motherhood and mothers are often undermined.
It is for this reason that you don’t get names that associate the mother to the child. Yet there is a proliferation of names that aim to strengthen the relationship between father and child like “Ngangobaba”, “Ntombikayise” and “Thanduyise” or the little suffixes like Junior.
I guess the issue of paternity is and will always be a bone of contention not to say that it is totally unwarranted. I have heard chilling real life accounts whereby men have reared children that have turned out not to be of their own seed.
Or where a man has gotten two women pregnant at the same time; adamantly refuted paternity of one child (who was actually his) only to accept the other child whom they thought to have sired which turned out not to be theirs. This I believe is where women get the last laugh because come what may, there is never a doubt a child is theirs.
However, with men this is always a lingering issue, one which led a man to take his son for DNA tests at the age of 15 only to discover they were not related.
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You know I say if you have raised a child for 15 years without a doubt that child is yours. It takes a few seconds of mind-blowing passion to plant a seed that forms into a child, but years of undying devotion to be a father to that child.
I don’t believe you need to have necessarily have sired a child to be his/her father. Just because biologically the same blood flows between them and the children — that is just about where the relationship starts and ends. It’s the act of nurturing over many years that makes you a father.
Many of the social ills we face today are blamed on the lack of father figures in the home. There are so many women now playing the role of mother and father. What happened to the real fathers? Instead, we have men who sow their seeds in many fertile wombs only to turn their backs and walk away.
These men have chosen to discard the responsibility that comes with fatherhood.
These men have decided they would rather not be fathers for the most frivolous reasons like the timing weren’t right or they just wasn’t ready!
And this is where it really gets unfair. Men have that option. They can just walk away from the growing pregnancy.
They can vehemently deny and dispute a pregnancy. Yet women will always bear the brunt and carry that burden for nine months.
Which is why I always say to women; just as we have the capability to carry life and bring it into the world we are also equally capable for preventing the formation of that life.
We have often heard the phrase it takes two to tango, but sometimes there’s only one person doing a solo long after the music has died and it’s usually the woman.
The advent of the pill and other forms of birth control has empowered women to can take responsibility of their reproductive health.
It’s not enough to expect a man to take responsibility for contraception in a situation which he can easily divorce himself from the act without even blinking.
It’s also time men stopped fathering a generation of unwanted children. Let’s have fathers who go beyond just providing a surname to a child but fathers who assume the full role and responsibility that comes with fatherhood . . .
Sukoluhle Nyathi is the author of the novel The Polygamist. You can follow her on Twitter @SueNyathi
