Tears streamed down my cheeks. The credits
were rolling and I was fighting the urge to call my mother. I wanted to
collapse into the folds of her sari and sob, like the many times before. But
this time I knew Amma would be bemused. Why would a 33-year-old cry over a
seemingly simple movie called English
Vinglish? Though I don’t recall taunting my mother over her English,
Sridevi, in the movie, personified everything that my mother is. The way she
wore her sari, pleats tucked into her hip, her minute idiosyncrasies and most
of all her courage of conviction. Like Sridevi, my mother fits the ‘perfect mother’ trope to the hilt- she
is nurturing, she holds fort while we are all away, busy living our own lives.
She is often our friend and guardian but mostly a parachute when we come
crashing down. We take her for granted, we project our daily moods on her and
like every mother she prioritises us before herself and like every Indian
mother, if she had had the opportunity to work (and wasn't bogged down by the
family and its extensions) I knew she would have excelled in that too.
30 years later came little Maya who gave
birth to me, her mother.
I fell headlong into the failings and
trappings of motherhood and till date struggle to meet the standards that my
mother set. But I am a different mother.
I love my space as much as I love my daughter. I often complain of being
stressed, a word my parents seldom used though they had more mouths to feed and
many more issues to deal with. Sometimes when I look at Maya, I get sneaky
little thoughts such as " what have I done?"
Trump is the president of America, same-sex
marriages are becoming common, but the myths of motherhood have hardly ebbed.
Parenting changes one for the better and worse, and while I am still learning
on the job, here is my list of little nuggets about motherhood that will
hopefully cause a minor dent in India's most loved and misunderstood motif.
1.Motherhood
is a choice
A
growing number of youngsters, including many of my girl- friends, who are
biologically fit and happy women, do not want to become a parent and that is
ok. Either they don't feel motherly or think a little human being is too much
responsibility to bear (fair point). Sometimes they simply don't feel it's
right to contribute to the exploding population. Nothing is 'wrong' with them.
It's a choice. Just as it was my choice to have a baby.
2. Mothers
come in all shapes and sizes, there is in no one prototype
Society believes that mothers come with a
manual. The ‘ideal mother’ is the one
you see in breakfast cereal commercials. She cooks for her children, monitors
their screen time, arranges play dates, hyperventilates about the nutritional
value of the pizza they gulp down or the stain in their clothes and constantly
strives (while comparing best practices with fellow moms) to improve their
quality of life. While there are several
women who have dedicated their life to being the ‘ideal’ and are happy to do
so, this is a stereotype and not a rule. Some mothers aren't ‘maternal’ in the
traditional sense of the term and it doesn't come naturally to them. It doesn't
mean that they don't love their child or that they have a faulty genetic
mutation. It definitely doesn’t mean that they are a bad parent either. To each
his own.
3.
Post-partum depression is real. Did anyone tell you
that as a new mother you can feel up to a hundred emotions the same day,
sometimes swing from being upbeat to downcast to downright repulsed? Women are
hardly ecstatic postpartum. When I looked at Maya for the first time, she
looked like a little Tibetan monk to me, with slit like eyes and puffy cheeks.
I wanted to say “Dalai Llama” to the next pesky relative who asked me whom she
resembled. It was hard to digest that I had made a little human. While I was
combating feelings of disbelief and gripping pain, the world was moving in
super motion, with a steady stream of visitors trooping in unannounced and
nurses barging in one after another and violently squeezing my breast to induce
breast-feeding. In the background the family was busy laying claims on Maya’s
nose, eyebrows and what not. Amidst all the pandemonium, I was sitting, alone, hit
by waves of confusion. Isn’t this supposed to be the happiest day of my life?
Then why am I sad? I was thrilled for sure. But I was not flooded with
affection for the tiny screaming monk. Am I weird? I pondered, wiping away the
gush of tears. Can I do this? I plodded around for weeks with almost no
recollection of how I lived prior to the birth of the little miss. Everything
was a hazy. Days blurred into nights and nights seemed longer than before. It
did not take hours, not days, but weeks for this conundrum of mixed emotions to
settle down.
4.
Love at first sight? Childbirth is often
romanticised. It’s a happy picture of the baby
being handed to the new mother, who clasps the child to her bosom and cries
happy tears. For me, the love for Maya was never instant. The floodgates didn’t
open on cue. Besides the fact that I
don’t believe in love at first sight (except when it’s cake), the chronic lack
of sleep, the waves of depression and the baby’s routine of crying, feeding and
pooping on loop for the first three months didn’t help the cause either. It’s
been 2 years now, and the more I get to know Maya, the more I get to know
myself and the greater I love her. With
each passing day I get to see a little more of her personality unfurl in front
of me, and it’s fascinating. Will she be stoic like the husband or bear my
sentimentality? I wonder. But mostly I hope she is like herself. Unique.
Motherhood for me has not been a flooding
of love, but more like a gentle fragrance that slowly wafts into a room and
immerses one in it, silently, eventually.
5.
Mothers are lonely creatures. Giving up a job,
nursing a hungry baby behind closed doors, and skipping lunches with friends to
run after an amok toddler can be exhausting and incredibly lonely. During my first trimester I was diagnosed
with Hyperemesis Gravidarum, which in
simple terms refers to extreme vomiting, including losing the ability to drink
water without throwing up. Kindred with the best intentions of-course showed me
a news article that said that pregnant Kate Middleton was suffering from the
same. Great. Yet Kate was standing outside the hospital, all glowing and her hair
freshly blown. Years later the same Kate Middleton while speaking about mental
health mentioned how as a mother she often felt lonely and isolated. I caught
myself nodding then. She may be a princess, the Duchess of Cambridge, with
hundreds of people milling around her, but she was fighting the demons, the
same ones many of us do, everyday.
6.Every
mother's constant companion is guilt.
She
is afraid of not fulfilling the million expectations that tug down her neck.
She is scared of falling short. Not like a ‘Best Mother’ Trophy is waiting.
Breastfeeding was my biggest of woes. Feeding the baby was extremely difficult.
The milk was not coming in and when it did, the baby was not latching on.
Dwindling supply, nipple shields, sore breasts, lazy baby, sleepy baby, dream
feeds, and the whole paraphernalia.
Every relative who scorned at formula feed and every article with
pictures of robust breast-fed babies acing their milestones added to my guilt
and I was officially depressed. Overnight my identity changed from the
confident teacher to failure mother. It finally took a kind-hearted lactation
consultant, (never knew such a job profile existed!) to put an end to the
tears; to tell me that some babies do not enjoy breastfeeding, that
breastfeeding is not natural, but a learnt art.
7.There
is no super-woman.
We must give up our obsession with the ‘super- woman’ trope. Celebrating the
super-woman, the multi tasking, omnipresent goddess, who aces her job whilst
building the perfect home is an unrealistic and unreasonable expectation. Such
women are barely super, and only suffer from severe burn out. Hold the
compliments. The ‘superwoman’ would prefer the division of chores or help in
running errands instead.
8.The
ideal mother stereotype hurts many
It hurts not only the mother, but the
children too. Children whose mothers don’t fit the stereotype often feel
remorseful, and cheated by life.
9.Mothers,
take a break.
The journey of a mother is a journey of
worry. It starts the day you hear the heart beat on the Doppler. From then it's
a series of counting kicks, nit-picking on the food they eat, choosing the
school, the friends they make, what they do behind closed doors and what they
do when they walk out of those doors. I am 33 with a decent human as a husband
and a healthy baby, but this ordeal of worry for my parents still hasn't ended.
I am no Zen master, but maybe mothers can cut themselves some slack every now
and then, or take the ‘chillpill’ as
your child may suggest. Parenting is an endurance sport and is not worth
squandering time over constantly beeping parent Whatsapp groups that are infested with tiger moms and ninja dads
who love to feed off your rising blood pressure. No, the classrooms don't have
to be air-conditioned, your kid will learn to read aloud too and it's ok if
they don't have a play date this weekend. Maybe they can stare at a wall or
draw on the floor. We never had all this and we managed fine.
10.Motherhood
is fun and fulfilling but it doesn’t hurt to have a plan B.
You can sing all the rhymes to her now and
she will gape at you in complete admiration. But there will come a day when she
will tell you, quite nonchalantly that you sound terrible. That for the every
nth time of putting her to sleep and the quiet tiptoe to freedom, there will be
a time when the teenager will want to be left alone. The little green shoes
with pink roses that she waddles around in so proudly will give way to the day
when she scorns at the dress you buy her. They grow up too fast and times
change too soon.
I know that, that day, Maya will teach me a
valuable life lesson; the important difference between letting go and holding on.
The nest will get empty. But when mine does, I am hoping the multi faceted
avatar of mine with varied interests will not only know how to keep myself busy
but enjoy it too.
-Originally published in thenewsminute.com on 14th May 2017
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