About 2 decades ago, a big change took place in my life. I became a mother. It was everything that I wanted to be. I felt very lucky that I was a woman, because men cannot be mothers.
Being a mother was harder for me because of my dual ambitions of motherhood and career, and because of sepearating from my husband. It was easier for me, because of the strong parental instincts of my parents who shared both my parenting and my domestic work responsibility, allowing me to travel abroad and accept difficult assignments which demanded long hours. The difficulty was my desire to be in both places at once.
It was hard to be single and without a ‘life-partner’. This was made easy again, because of friends and well-wishers, who chipped in with shoulders for bawling on or advice.. as I needed. It was made wasy by my friendly temperament and ability to connect with perfect strangers in remote places. People who smiled and helped and then wended their way onwards.
Now it is hard again. A child of 20 is not a child. It is a man who knows what he wants and how to go after it. Advice sounds like restriction. Attention feels suffocating. A mother is not a support but a dependant in more ways than one. The child has a second birth and it is as painful as the first birth, for the child and for the mother. But the cord has to be cut if the mother and the child are to survive and flourish.
While some support and love are required, more distance and more freedom are required. And as we enter this phase, I graduate from motherhood into kinship and friendship.
And I enter my ‘kanya’ status again. From single mother, to a single person. As I was for the first 25 years of my life, so shall I be for the last 25 years of my life.
It will be harder because my body is worse than it was in my teens, but it will be easier because my mind is better for the experience. I won’t have my parents to look after me or to make me do what they tell me to do. I can go places and do things.
It is actually my 4th life within a life. I was a daughter, a wife and a mother… and now I shall be a person, just a person.
