How to raise your son differently? Well, don't!

My mother, an otherwise mostly self-critical person, would take pride in a very few things that she did right in her life. One of them being, having raised her two daughters like sons. But as years went by, I have had trouble in processing this little adage, which is very commonly used in India to portray gender-neutral parenting. In saying that, we are inherently pitting one gender against the other while keeping the latter as the “benchmark” of raising a child. That said, I would give credit where it’s due because my mother was raised in a society with even wider gender gaps, and making any effort to shrink it should be lauded.
 
That I was raised in an environment where my father prepared and packed our school lunches every morning and my mother haggled with contractors and plumbers for getting things done for home improvement, makes it imperative that I carry forward the torch of gender-neutrality, or something to that effect.
 
In a divine conspiracy, I did become the mother of a boy. And in an instant, I saw the flipside of what my mother didn’t -- but with some undercurrents of nouveau-feminism. So while there were the typical “baby boy” celebrations in some quarters of my extended family, there were also those restrained congratulatory tight smiles from my fellow “modern” co-workers. 
 
Being the mother of my baby boy also deemed that I had a greater responsibility of tipping a tightrope – of raising him to be gender sensitive and protecting him from the barrage of gender stereotypical constructs in popular culture; to encourage him to open doors for anybody who needed it (and not just for women); to raise him to be chivalrous but to also to make him understand when to back-off; to emphasize that “no means no” but also make him adept at the game of wooing. In short, to raise him a feminist but, and I quote a dear friend, “not turn him into a pansy”.
 
But with only two years of motherhood behind me, I find myself inept toward imparting wisdom on how to raise a boy appropriately in a world with shifting ‘gender’ sands. I believe, what would be appropriate is to first reflect about how and what traits one would want in their child as a grown person, irrespective of what gender they belonged to. That is generally a good starting point.
 
Parenting is like leadership and like all good leaders, one needs to set the right examples. Misogynists are not raised in isolation and while there is no stopping the female objectification, and I must begrudgingly admit, that sooner or later, my son too, will be engulfed by the labyrinthine world of one-click porn, what I can assuredly provide my boy is a cohesive environment where men and women of the family share chores and have detailed discussion on various subjects without any of them being a taboo.
 
One needs to first bring about the right changes within to make them reflect in a child. So here’s what I want from myself as a mother of a boy: to be a mother first – irrespective of the gender that my child happens to be. Because sociological constructs aside, motherhood doesn’t make a choice between a girl and a boy. Its struggles and frustrations remain the same; the scares; the firsts; the fits; the hits and the misses remain the same; and the glorious moments of polished porridge bowls remain the same.