Mothers.....

Mothers.....

Maa, Amma, Aai, Mamma, Baa are some of the different ways in which children call their mother. The one thing common among these different ways of calling is the softness associated with the word mother. Shakespeare has rightly said, the rose by any other name would smell as sweet. And so our relationship with our mothers is always sweet.
Maybe mothers are more special because our bond with our mother begins nine months before our birth. This revelation dawns on most women when they themselves become mothers.

For me too it was no different. I still remember the day when I was able to see the foetus growing in my womb. Faceless, bodyless, yet a part of my own being. Technology has made things so much easy for modern day mothers. It is possible for them to keep track of every single development of their child.

I can never forget the day I saw the spinal cord of my child during the course of a sonography. I have never felt so excited as i felt then. It was the most beautiful image I have ever seen, straight , clear, every segment, delicate yet strong. After all this was the path to our reflexes and thoughts leading to our brain. All at once , I had been enveloped in so many emotions which included gratitude to God, a feeling of wonderment at his creations, a sense of belonging to the bundle of joy that was growing in me. I could barely contain my joy. My touch transformed thereafter for everytime, I touched my stomach I started feeling one with my child. An inexplicable bond had been established.

It was therefore impossible for me to consider termination of pregnancy when during one such visit to my doctor it was announced that my foetus may not be normal. I was adviced to ascertain myself with further tests before taking the decision of going ahead. For me however, my bond with my child as a mother had been established and there was no looking back.
Maybe that soft and tender feeling of mothering my foetus gave me strength or my strong and innate belief in God that eventually all things would be alright made me hang on.
Till today I derive strength during my most difficult moments from that single source that everything happens for the good. However motherhood with all it's challenges became possible due to the constant support of my family.

Modern day working mothers and even home makers knowingly or unknowingly have to bear the brunt of guilt tied with responsibility for bringing up a child. Many homes or work places are not conducive in providing the required support. So women end up being glorified super humans or get dubbed as being bad mothers.
Though the glass ceiling may have broken, in reality women are still sruggling to find their true place in the economy specially in the high end value chain of agriculture or any other industry. So they may be agricultural labourers but will not be considered as farmers.

Just the other day during a brainstorming session for inclusion of women in the high end value chain of agriculture, an anecdote of mothers regretting their own financial growth as their sons were going out of hand with upmarket gadgets was quoted as if to reaffirm that the proper development of a child rests solely on the mother.
Mother's day should therefore not become a single day for glorifcation of mothers. Society needs to think and work ways and means to balance life. A mother is certainly not someone who has to live upto the expectations of every single person around the world. She is as human like every other man and has a desire to grow. This growth is certainly not possible in isloation and can happen only when the family actually functions like a unit.
Mothers of the previous generations certainly sacrificed their lives and time for us staying at home. I still remember my mother being home for us all the time. We may not have had "intellectually stimulating " conversations with her as is expected from mothers now but she was always there in the background standing tall like the Gibraltar rock to provide support during any unforeseen circumstance. So she never hesitated to sell or pawn her limited pieces of jewellery when cash required to send our brother to IIT or for my sister's marriage or for any of our needs. Many mothers must have done that and may be doing many other things to support their families just like their fathers.
Parenting is therefore a unified effort of parents as mother and father in the family.
Surprisingly buttressed wrongly with the concept of the ideal mother are real women, who maybe wives or sisters of other men and are mothers too. More often than not they are at the receiving end of jokes or lewd conversations or get attacked in cases of domestic violence, rape and molestation. Motherhood certainly does not come to their rescue then. The softness and warmth of a mother who has given birth to a child and who would never want any wrong to be done by her child boy or girl is conveniently forgotten. The most important thing a man or any father can do for his children is to teach their children to respect and love their mother. That would be the best tribute to woman as an individual, a human being and of course as a mother.
This maybe a distant dream but certainly not utopian. On Mother's day let's rededicate ourselves to the cause of an unadulterated, undivided, equal and unified society.