Mom

This is a really confronting subject for me, but I know if I don’t write about it, I’ll never truly be able to heal in my own way. Writing helps me not just abstract a gazillion thoughts in coherent language to make sense of things but also connect with people who’ve had similar experiences which tells me I’m not alone.

I have never truly had a good relationship with my mother. You can trace it all the way back to her own childhood. She never had a mother of her own so was parented by mostly her grandparents and when she was of a marriageable age, she was betrothed to wed my dad.

My dad is luckily a wonderful human being so while the marriage was arranged, comfort could be drawn from the fact that it was arranged to a great man since this isn’t always the case. I was born when she was in her early 20s and while I can empathize with the ordeals of becoming parents at a young age, I will never be able to compare my 25-year-old self with the 25-year-old woman in the 90s given the conditions of the world that shape who you are were starkly different in the 90s.

I believe the backdrop of her life until she had me played a dominant role in shaping her as a parent. She wasn’t particularly maternal and that could be traced back to her own childhood of an absent mother figure for most part of it. She never truly knew how to embrace this role but maybe in her own way she did. She never struck to me as particularly curious about her own kid — she just really went with it. My father had a dominant role while growing up and maybe she found comfort in being his shadow. She never embraced a deep daughter-mother bond and was more than okay watching me from the fringes. While I am trying to understand the dynamics between us, it still hurts me to this day that I don’t particularly have any fond memories with her or can recall anything of value she might have taught me. I yearned for my mother’s love since I was young but never truly got it. She always had it though since I saw glimpses of it when she’d meet her brothers. She evolved as a daughter, a sister, a wife, and a mother within a patriarchal structure which subdued her to a point that she never encouraged a lot of endeavors my character was particularly inclined towards. I grew up curious, rebellious, adventurous and exceptionally driven to leave a mark on this world. I was and have always been very different from her so while we couldn’t really relate to each other much, I’d like to believe that her wild woman took birth in the world through me. She subconsciously subdued her wild woman but she found her voice through me which gives me comfort.

My mother has been so detached from me that I remember the days of sleeping in the bedroom next to her and wanting to end my life and ruminating about this for days at an end and she never had a hint. If she did, she never had the courage to confront it. It drove me mad to see how ignorant she could be. This still defines our relationship — when I speak with her over the phone, she’s never able to tell when I’m angry or sad or if she is, she’s never taken the initiative to voice it which keeps our conversations short and surface-level. I’ve come to like it even.

This void of unfulfilled motherly love led me to become close to a lot of my friends’ mothers. I loved being in their company, watching them be mothers, watching them love and if I received even a tiny fraction of that love, I’d be happy for days at an end. This also had drastic outcomes for my character. In my late teens, I was shaping out to be an extremely demanding person. An example of this is (which is a moment that goes in my Hall of Shame) when I was turning 19 or 20, Abhay didn’t have much planned for my birthday. I threw such a big tantrum on how I was not special for him if he hadn’t even planned anything and even when he tried to do something, I wasn’t satisfied. These arguments were quite a common sight in our relationship back in those days (for those of you not aware, Abhay and I started dating back in 2015). This came from this void where I didn’t think I was enough so always needed the people I loved to continuously prove to me that they loved me. This truly once led to my relationship being over with Abhay but somehow, we salvaged it, and the rest is history.

This is one of the major reasons that set me off on the path to self-discovery. I saw how I was reacting impulsively to the conditions I was born in, displaying patterns sometimes similar to my mother, stuck in a never-ending loop of anger towards her which found its way to the surface in very unwarranted ways. I was frustrated at a situation I had no control over and instead of changing my reaction to it, for the 25 years of my life I tried changing her. I still fall for it sometimes but have intrinsically understood that I’ll never change her. We will never understand each other and will never share the same values but that’s okay. It led me to where I am. The void made me seek out deeper bonds with other women and maybe that would not have been possible if it hadn’t been for the unrequited love. I found myself being mesmerized by strong female leaders at work, developing deep relationships with them, forging meaningful friendships with females who inspired me which steadily developed into a compassionate camaraderie for women which helped me overcome the emotions of jealousy which are often rampant in our conditioning.

As I write this, I’m a few weeks away from going home and putting theory to practice. I want to be able to forgive her, not just for her, but for me. I’m so tired of the ball of anger that inflates within me when she does what she’s always done for the past 27 years. I want to be able to pay gratitude to her innately for bringing me into this world and sometimes, that’s more than enough. I’m not there yet but I’m getting there.