by Anupama Krishnakumar
She is a mother. Her children are her world. They make her heart go gooey like molten chocolate. They melt her stubbornness. They make her feel wanted. They bring a new meaning to her life. She cherishes their selfless love. She rejoices their innocence. She is enthralled by their achievements – big and small. She is ecstatic at the touch of the soft folds of their skin. She loves the beauty of their eyes, the tenderness of their pink lips, the softness of their cheeks. She gathers their little utterances like precious pearls. She basks in the warmth of their carefree hugs. She trembles for every little scratch in their bodies. She winces when they fall. She worries incessantly about their well-being. She is awestruck by the ease with which they let go. She rediscovers forgotten ways of life with them. She swells with pride as they grow up, one little step at a time. She turns back, now and then, and wallows in the memories, the footprints they leave behind. She is enthusiastic about leading them and equally excited about being led by them. She marvels at them because they are works of art – a divine creation she has been a part of and held within the confines of her womb.
She considers them the most beautiful and precious gifts of Nature. The beauty of that truth overwhelms her. And that is what makes her place them over everything else, more often than not, even above her own self.
Yet, sometimes, she wants to be what she cannot afford to be. She can’t afford it because the world has framed her boundaries with expectations. There’s this other ‘she’ lurking inside her, hiding nervously, chained by strange ideologies, desperately waiting to break free.
In another world, shorn of these expectations, she is a rebel. She loses her temper like a human is wont to. And that means not being an angel all the time but shouting at her own children when they test the limits of her patience. In this other world, she lives her life in her own terms. She cares for her children but she cares about herself and her priorities too without being branded ‘selfish’. She still seeks out small pleasures and can think of negotiating with her children for a bar of chocolate, for instance, and reach a compromise with them rather than sacrificing. She is still the girl who dreams incessantly and believes that these dreams will come true. She soars, soars, soars into the bright, blue sky, flapping, flapping, flapping her wings joyously and tirelessly. She looks down and sees her children waving gleefully at her, urging her to go up and up and bring down the stars for them. But above everything else, through all that she feels and all that she does, she feels light, her soul feels light, because she is not weighed down by the wretched guilt that chokes her heart in the other (real?) world, the moment she attempts to break free from the rigid mould of a mother. The guilt that plagues her when she is judged persistently for her motives and decisions, when she is scorned upon for betraying the motherhood-is-equal-to-sacrifice equation that the society has conveniently evolved over the years. It’s that guilt that’s her curse, the guilt that is in no way self-inflicted, but forced down her throat by a world that, instead of being by her side, has devised innumerable ways to slam accusations on the mother who has ‘failed in upholding her foremost duty’.
And that is the story of many mothers, perhaps barring a few who have been lucky enough to merge the merriment of motherhood with the thrilling experience of dreaming and achieving what they want, and just being who they are, without feeling guilty. But even she – does she get to escape the fate of being judged constantly for her actions by someone or the other? I do not think so. Unless the world strives to think deeply and seriously about its deep-rooted perceptions on motherhood including its unwillingness to view the mother as being separate from her children, and works to change its mentality, a woman, as a mother, will continue to witness the battle of the two ‘shes’ within her for what seems to me like forever, and the ‘she’ of the other world would, alas, be nothing but a futile dream. And that to me is definitely being unfair.
