Avishraa Reloaded

In most settled societies, when a young female first forms a household, she is likely to be either unmarried or to be only recently married to one husband. The task of actually making the land fit for habitation and usage therefore falls largely on her shoulders; depending on the location and state of the land before she took possession of it, this may be anything from minor repairs and cleaning to building a home from scratch, digging wells, constructing outbuildings, and making necessary furniture.

While extra labor may be obtained (often from males, either hired bands or prospective suitors) and any gaps in expertise filled by consultation with others, the fact remains that a young female must be prepared to be something of a handyman for her household from the very beginning onward, and much of her upbringing will have been devoted to teaching her to work with her paws in preparation for this role. (For the same reason, females are very strongly represented in trades such as excavation, construction, carpentry, joinery, pottery, and smithing.)

As the custodian of her property - whether she owns it outright or rents it - the female is responsible for ensuring that its usefulness and integrity is maintained. Within the household, this involves a certain amount of wielding of authority; it must be ensured that those who have chores and tasks to perform are in fact doing them and doing so adequately, and that those who are wilfully avoiding their work are disciplined. Where tasks arise that require cooperative effort by multiple family members, she will often be the one directing or supervising the work. Externally, meanwhile, she ensures that her claim to her land is maintained; this includes ensuring that the property's boundaries are clearly indicated, speaking to neighbors about issues of wider concern, greeting and questioning visitors, and evicting trespassers.

The female is, of course, also the one who bears children. While producing eggs is not as consuming of time or energy for takmin females as pregnancy is for humans, it still requires the mother to be careful of her physical condition, and - especially given the frequency with which a settled female may have children - may interfere with her participation in the more strenuous or dangerous tasks she might otherwise be involved in.

A common trope across takmin societies is that males are the more nurturing, selfless gender. While this is not an absolute truth, as anyone who has encountered one of the nastier bandit bands could tell you, it is nonetheless the case that much of the spadework of parenting - the feeding, cleaning, carrying, and so on - is often the province of the fathers of the household. Something similar is true for other situations involving caregiving and seeing to wellbeing; the husbands of the house are usually the ones to care for the sick and elderly, to feed domestic animals, and to track the health of crops.

The female's husbands are as likely as not to possess between them a diverse skillset, and indeed a practical female often takes this factor into account when choosing her husbands. Because many males have spent time traveling before marriage, the skills and crafts in which they have experience trend toward the portable. Hunting and animal husbandry are usually undertaken by the husbands of a household, as is simple textile work such as sewing and knitting, and decorative arts such as carving. While the process of raising crops generally involves the participation of all able-bodied family members, the husbands in particular are likely to have been involved in foraging, and may possibly have even previously been hired to do agricultural work; they are therefore often the direct supervisors of the crops.

Males are predisposed to be good with languages, and because they are highly social, they tend to be skilled at communication by the time they reach adulthood. When a family needs to buy or sell something, the husband with the smoothest tongue is often involved with the negotiations. Very often, since he is likely to be perceived as more friendly and less intimidating than his wife, the two of them will pair up in a form of good cop/bad cop: the wife will lay out demands and refusals, while the husband will appear to moderate them in a way that suggests that a better deal is being achieved than the other side might otherwise perceive.

There are many tasks which are not strictly bound to one gender or the other. This is especially true of large tasks where many hands are needed; the female's individual size and strength cannot always substitute for sheer numbers. The physical labor of planting and harvesting, or of constructing a building, often requires all the manpower that the family can gather.

Even though fathers more often tend to feed and clean the children, the task of cultural indoctrination tends to be shared, though the emphases are different. Songs and rhymes and simple stories are more often transmitted by one's fathers, while myths, etiquette, and morals by one's mother.

(As an aside: the high mobility of males is a major contributor to the fact that both takmar and xtauh are able to maintain cultural and linguistic continuity over wider areas than humans historically have. A human villager might never travel further than the next village over; a fairly large proportion of takmin males will have traveled hundreds of kilometers, and will carry all that they've learned from their own parents with them, passing them on to their children in due course. This tends to be a somewhat homogenizing influence.)