Ode to my Mother

 

Of lately, my mother sends me poems about motherhood,

struggles of ageing, ignorance by adult children,

Or the fear of being sent to an old age home after being treated like a slave.

Her messages come promptly like an alarm set to ring,

reaches my inbox after every single fight or disagreement we’ve had in the day;

Most of the messages being a Whatsapp forward,

I acknowledge her fear in silence and kindly neglect those texts.

Today morning fell to the pattern, after we fought about her irking me for something small,

Annoyed and unsettled by the feud, I left in between, stomped to my room upstairs and locked myself in to work for the day.

Punctual like the little cuckoo residing in my cuckoo clock, her message reached me within seconds after I settled in.

But strangely, unlike all the times when messages were glanced and recycled, this one grabbed by attention,

because the title shouted unique.

Quoting my favourite author, ‘Kamala Das’, it was a synopsis of her poetry, “Middle Age“; A poetry written in melancholic tone, agonies of a middle aged mother,

her pain when feeling neglected by her own children.

It threw me off my guarded front, into my own deep pool of thoughts,

and I started to wonder where our relation had started to stray off.

Middle age is where it all begins,

Where the story of life has been read to half, and then what lay ahead was nothing but pages of uncertainty.

Retirement awaited her in few months,

and I believe she is afraid of being idle after years of spending a busy life,

filled in with work and her family, responsibilities of her kids growing up,

taking care of my innocent and workaholic father, who knew the emotions of the soil more than the emotions of his wife or kids,

loving them from whole heart, but failing to express it like a writer in loss of words.

Father had retired peacefully, I remember, his life was all about working in office till then, now working at farm from morning to night,

sleeping dead tired at night, seldom failing to make idle conversations with his wife.

I believe she dreads what awaits her, the days being spent at home, barely engaging for her,

Missing her children, living in different cities, far from her, building their own lives.

Then there is the fear of old age, abandonment and death,

the three so intertwined that you don’t know what kills your mind the most.

And I realise she is alone in that turbulent storm,where a single fight makes her question her existence.

A slight deviation in her expectation from me,

instils a strange fear and million doubts in her.

All these lurking in my mind, I wonder if I should write my part of story and let her read,

A daughter so different from the pictures, her mother had painted in her canvas with many colours.

Unlike hers, mine was just black and grey and slight tints of white.

I think about her seeing that picture and then I stop.

Last time, I tried to show, she never stopped crying that the night.

Was it her fear of the destruction of her expectation of me;

Expectations: the vile villainous emotion that pushed me to make choices out of her desperation,

Decisions that I live to regret, struggle to cope with.

Or is it me growing up, a woman in her late twenties,

Grappling to fit in to the norms of normalcy,

laid out by the society,

which my mother believes in, like an ardent devotee,

and I, contradicting her in each of my steps.

I wonder, if those messages she sent, are meant to take me back,

back to a time when she saw dreams for me, and I tried hard to fulfil.

And then in a cross roads, where our dreams took different paths,

when I realised that I am not meant to take the path she wants me to,

I simply walked away from them, or walked away from the dreams of her.

I wonder whether it was then that we went adrift to different to shores like

two paper boats in a river.

Engrossed in my tumultuous thoughts,

I barely hear her calling me out to join for breakfast.

As we sat down together, while sipping my coffee in silence,

I listened to her talking endlessly about the gossips of the small town with a lot of interest,

with no sneer or random comments of the fight we had, an hour before.

I wonder if it is the middle age or if it is just me,

that makes this woman, so happy and joyous now,

been pushed into fear and judgements about her future days of life that lay ahead, uncertain.

-durga