Anyone who knows me knows I love Grey’s Anatomy, the greatest fan to ever live if I’m being honest??. I eat, sleep and breath Grey’s and from the number of fans I’ve recruited, I deserve a hefty pay from Shonda Rhimes. Cristina Yang is my spirit animal, she’s a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon who has little regard for anything but her craft. What I’m about to say is so cliché, it will bore you to death but she fell in love with her mentor, Preston Burke and a few days prior to their wedding, Preston’s mother, Mama, pays Cristina a visit at the hospital and this is what she says, ” I hope you intend on picking a less demanding specialty like Family Medicine so you can have time for your family” and I still remember Cristina’s face when she heard those words?. She was married to surgery, she clocked more hours in the operating room, more than any other surgical resident, the hospital was basically her home. Preston Burke was an equally brilliant surgeon, loved surgery as much as she did yet changing the trajectory of his career was not an option.
When you walk around the hospital with a white coat, people call you ‘sister’ to mean nurse while your male counterparts get a respectable ‘daktari’. When you are not married by the time you hit thirty, people start calling you a ‘rescue mission’ but when a guy does the same, well, they’ll say he was building his career and his life before settling down, besides life begins at thirty or forty, whatever makes you sleep at night. When you say you don’t want children, you get mocked, people do not realize that you can be a functional human being without being a mother, motherhood isn’t for everyone. When you spend more hours at work than at home, they call you a bad mother but the guy, well, he was fending for his family, that should cover for all the recitals that he missed. When you don’t do house chores, they call you a rebel. My good brother, did you want a wife or a house help, let’s be clear. Cooking, cleaning, those are basic human skills and not gender roles and if you think otherwise, don’t bother telling me because I won’t listen. When you do something impeccable, they’ll say ‘ That’s such a big achievement for a woman’ like we were meant to stay within certain limits. When you speak up, they’ll say you’re too loud but here’s the thing, you’ll always be too loud for an audience that never intended on listening.
There’s little that we can do about full grown men who still think women should stay at home with the children, we can talk and protest against inequality but it’s difficult changing a rigid person’s perspective but what we can do is raise a generation that knows that it’s okay for girls to play with cars and boys to play with dolls. When you’re done eating, it’s not the girl’s responsibility to clear the table, let the boy do it and when they come from school and the boy leaves his school clothes and books everywhere, make him clean his mess, don’t let the girl tidy up his room. Teach him to be a responsible person, that’s how you raise a generation that does not blame a girl for being raped because she was wearing a skirt that was an inch shorter. Let’s teach our girls how to shatter glass walls instead of wearing glass slippers, let’s teach them that it’s okay not to want a big white wedding, in any case it’s the marriage we should be interested in rather than the wedding. And don’t come to me with the ‘if I clean the dishes, she should fix the bulb’ talk because I will slam your head against the wall.
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