What it means to be radically virtuous

When you have two partners with the same amount of investment in their children’s lives, and who regularly practise acts of care, forgiveness and humility, you have something close to a recipe for happiness. Representation Pic/istock

Last night, we slept to the soundtrack of a downpour. I have a special enthusiasm for spring rain, because the increased humidity drenches the allergy-inducing pollen, making it possible for me to be at ease without needing to sneeze as often, reducing my cumulative levels of exhaustion at day's end. I have leaned into my new bedtime of 9 pm. It is around when our infant passes out after an hour and a half of intense cluster feeding. I've come to understand that this is his longest stretch of sleep. If I lie next to him, he will sleep until 1 am, which means if I ride the wave and pass out too, I get four hours of uninterrupted sleep, the bare minimum stretch a human needs to feel functional. When I woke up at 1 am to feed, I heard the raindrops pattering on the roof. I could already imagine the new tendrils shooting forth. We'd had various degrees of precipitation for the last four days and the landscape was already altered by the fact. The mountains are blushing chlorophyll green, the vineyards, too. The earth feels activated by the combination of rain and higher temperatures. It feels laden with life. The birds have returned from their southern expeditions and the day is rife with their song.

As I was waiting for our infant to finish feeding, I thought about the rhyme my mother-in-law taught our toddler in German. ‘April does what he wills,' in English, doesn't work so well, but you get the gist. This led me to revisit the first line of Eliot's poem, The Wasteland. I realised I had taken the alleged cruelty of April for granted, over the years, and had stopped questioning it. Last night, I recollected that it had to do with lilacs pushing their way through dead land, ‘mixing memory and desire' and ‘stirring dull roots with spring rain'. These opening lines of a poem that continues to haunt me since I first encountered it as a grad student in my literature classroom at St Xavier's came gushing back. I remembered that they come soon after Eliot's invocation of the Sibyl, a Greek character blessed with immortality without eternal youth, who says, eerily, she wants to die. The poem is nestled within this landscape of death, rebirth, regeneration and again, death. That's why it is so ghostly, because it is an echo chamber of fictional voices, a collage of sorts.

Thinking about the poem against the lulling background of spring rain, I began to re-examine many ideas that I internalised under the guise of virtues that I left unquestioned for years. For instance, growing up Catholic in a patriarchal environment, I learned that humility was an ideal. But I thought of humility as a form of unbridled submission, a kind of powerlessness, and I struggled with embracing it while clinging on to my learned tendency towards defensiveness. Because, growing up, the fear of punishment for presumed wrongdoings was so intense, it seemed, from a survival perspective, like denial was a more effective strategy than admission of guilt. We were all expected to be honest, but there was seldom any rewarding of honesty or even recognition of it. We mostly said sorry and apologised because we were told to and not because we truly felt remorse. Like in the case of humility, there were so many values that I imbibed through a patriarchal filter. I thought of independence as not needing other people. I misunderstood forgiveness and allowed people to walk all over me without asserting any boundaries. I thought of generosity as giving even when there was nothing left in reserve, and not from the precipice of abundance and of taking the time and energy to always replenish before exhausting one's capacities.

Feminist parenting, with its intentionality, has been instrumental in transforming my practice of all of these virtues. Being mother or becoming mother has been the most humbling, grounding experience, because every day I confront the limits of my endurance and have to find the strength to endure nonetheless, to not lose my temper, to accommodate from a space of love and to remind myself that to discipline a child is to work with love and to serve. I feel like I have had to renounce so much of the conditioning that was hardwired into my brain in order to make space for more radical versions of all of these virtues and graces. Firm yet kind, this is my mantra as a parent, and I remind myself of it each time my boundaries are being tested. For the first time, I have my partner truly by my side as we co-parent, as he continues with his parental leave, and I am also learning that there is nothing sexier than co-parenting. All that I had heard before about how having children destroys the romance between partners who lose their chemistry in the mundane is really bollocks. When you have two people who are on the same plane, who have the same amount of investment in their children's lives, and who regularly practise acts of care, forgiveness and humility, you have something close to a recipe for happiness - which, I have learned, is not the absence of grief but a constant attraction towards joy in the face of every adversity.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She posts @rosad1985 on Instagram
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