Mummy for a mirror

I wrote this piece here. Cross posting it here. Also, head on over there are read more love for mums. 

***

I try not to make too much of a deal for mother's day, although last year I got my mum a pretty silver ring. Like I said, I try not to. After all, how is it fair to put your children in a position to do something for you, many times with them not wanting to because they don't believe in Hallmark Holidays? Because, hey, they didn't ask to be born, or nappy changed, or fed, or vaccinated or rocked to sleep. You were the self-indulgent, clueless cretin who decided a baby would totally complete you. 

But no point flogging a dead horse, is there, even if it's a mummy horse? Jokes apart, every single day, I make tons of decisions about my kids. I try not to make any at all, of course, but the fact that I'd mildly appreciate if they didn't grow up to be serial killers or Chetan Bhagats demands that I make some key decisions every day. I need to decide whether to tell them the truth all the time, I need to decide how to be on top of the game without letting them know I am quickly running out of skills and patience to beat them at it. I also need to figure out how not to give them a little smack -- sometimes more than -- once in a while. Apart from the other dozens of regular decisions such as what to feed them, how i can trick them into sleeping longer, what to do with them come evening time and it's too hot. 

And every day I wake up wanting to ask my mother if she'd be too uncomfortable if I made a shrine to her and garlanded the thing five times a day. And hire a priest to do Vedic rituals four times a day in her honour. And drown the shrine in gold and gems a la Tirupati. I know, with kids below the age of three I have no right to feel like this already but I do, so all you parents of teenagers, stop nodding your head smugly and saying, "Wait till they get older". Uh anh, I am not waiting. I can't. There's no time, see? Because between trying to raise them and thanking my mother to the nines of being as strong as she was in raising me to be my own person, I am losing hair, appetite and general focus that might lead me to sell the kids to a circus thinking the money they give me with their tricky, gypsy hands is more important than hearing the ear-splitting screeches of my screaming banshees. 

From having taught me to make my own decisions (which I am sure she regrets) to introducing me to the arts -- music, writing, reading, dance, colour, dressing up -- my mum deserves tremendous credit. I've seen where she could have done better but I also know she did the best she could. In my becoming a mother, I have blindly imbibed some things that I want to pass on to my kids such as music and light and independence. And yet, there are things I would like to not do with my kids that she did with me. That said, the first outweighs the second, of course. And therefore, I'll wish I am half the mother to my kids that my mother was to me. 

Happy mother's day.

Indeed, a mother for all seasons

Once you’ve borne children, you can never go back to feeling perfunctorily sorry for something terrible that happens to children. The kind of sadness you feel on hearing some child somewhere has had to suffer something terrible when you don’t have children of your own lasts perhaps a few days, or maybe a few weeks if you’re deeply empathetic. But then it goes away. Not because you are mean or don’t feel deeply but simple because your life gets in the way and these things that don’t directly affect you tend to gradually hide in recesses that keep safe the things you can’t explain or do anything about.

But once you’ve had children, no matter how un-maternal you may feel or consider yourself to be, every child’s misfortune is dramatically superimposed upon your own child, albeit momentarily. Every mother’s pain becomes your own. I might sound like Captain Obvious right now but it’s the truth. Just like you’ll find a whole bunch of heads turning in a roomful of mothers if a there’s a loud “Mama”. A hopelessly ill child, stories of infanticide, of mothers who have just discovered their perfectly beautiful children are not entirely “normal” and don’t know how to deal with it, abandoned children, orphans: the list is long as it is excruciating. I’ve lain awake at nights after hearing of two women having killed their own daughters in infanthood wondering if I could have helped them in anyway; if anyone could have done something; wondering how those mothers live with themselves for the rest of their lives, understanding that the children got lucky and it is the mothers who are the victims of lifelong hellfire.

I read a piece by Shobha Narayan, a journalist who refers to herself as a story tellers (as opposed to demographer) who wrote women from cripplingly poor backgrounds have lived such hard lives that they have no maternal instinct. That they believe and understand the lives of their daughters and themselves will be unadulterated misery if these babies are allowed to live. And so they suffocate their little bodies a few hours after they are born, or lace milk with poisonous extracts that kills the little things in an hour (Narayan mentions this in a heart-breaking way in her piece where she says women in Usilampetti in TN feed their children milk laced with an extract of a plant and the infant “sucks on it greedily”.) If you’ve fed your child, or watched a baby being fed you’ll know how intensely dear that whole picture is – of a child sucking hungrily and greedily at whatever it is being fed, trusting its caregiver to appease hunger. It broke my heart completely to imagine these women doing that within few hours of giving birth. And living with it the rest of their lives.

A dead child in a washing machine, an orphan baby left in a dustbin, fetuses stuffed in a bag, children sold to prostitution, hundreds of dead baby girls: I have heard all this and more this past week. I have had no peace of mind. Largely because I can’t do a thing about it but talk or write or cry. Also because, at the risk of sounding dramatic, my heart bleeds for the mothers. I see my beautiful babies laughing, growing, thriving; I see my husband and I struggling to give them the best, I see my parents helping us out in wonderful ways to make them comfortable and it humbles me. What is a greater struggle? To live with the knowledge that you child is better off dead, or to live every day cosseted in your little world believing everything is well?