Freaky Friday
It’s inevitable! Your worst nightmare will come true! One fine day, you’ll wake up and realize you have turned into an avatar of your Mum. A freakishly similar one at that! It normally makes an entrance with your first signs of middle age. As you cover more of those grey’s, you’ll be saying the exact same things your Mum once would have. All those words you scoffed at, mocked unrelentingly, ridiculed, laughed at, chided her for and narrated repeatedly to countless others; will be uttered by you complete with the exact same pitch and tone laced with a hint of judgement, derision and all that motherly love. Your kids and husband will rag you for it incessantly and that ‘karma’ thingy that I spoke of in my very first post, oh she’s a naughty one to watch out for! If it hasn’t happened yet or say you haven’t noticed it yet, this current lockdown will definitely take care of that. Give it another 2 weeks of this COVID madness and bob’s your uncle.
To demonstrate my theory I begin with the mother lode of all motherly paranoias. Please bear with my stellar/not/puns, I’m a little rusty with my writing. Bet you’ve heard your Mum go, “careful, the tumbler is going to fall”, and it’s extension into, uhm, pretty much everything else. Quick fast forward to today and do you hear yourself go…. “don’t run you’ll fall”, “don’t shake the table, your plate will fall”, “drink your milk fast, your milk will spill/fall”, “don’t spill water, I will fall”, “ don’t jump on the bed, the bed will fall”? Suddenly gravity is the only-force-with-you and it defies all laws of physics in its application. The bed will fall??!?!…seriously what was I thinking?
Next on this list of idiosyncrasies(look I’m not that bad, I do accept it for what it is), is the obsession with dabbas. Tiffin boxes, casseroles, tupperware, jaadis, thookus et al. “Did you bring the dabbas”, “ where is the dabba I gave you, 3 months and 2 days back”, “we should buy these dabbas for navratri pooja favours, it’ll be very useful”. To add to all this dabba drama is my Dad(like we didn’t have enough players roped into this already) calling to say, ‘bring back all the dabbas, your Mum has 8 boxes on her Amazon cart”. Lucky for me Amazon wasn’t delivering non-essentials then.
Unlucky for my husband, though, is me going, “did you lose your lunch dabba”, “where’s my Vaya?”, “I’m out of dabbas!”. Long story short, same obsession, different package. Our priorities really do change, don’t they?
The next narrative is what led to my light-bulb moment where I realized I was slowly manifesting into a version of my Mum. Growing up, have you noticed how the Mothers at home were never satisfied when you did the grocery shopping? I’ve endured countless complaints and my Dad about eight times more. For this post lets briefly assume that the Dad’s didn’t buy random unnecessary things and stuck to the essentials. You know, keep everything else constant to prove your hypothesis funda. Back then it was really annoying. Why did you buy this, we have too much of it, there’s no room in the refrigerator, this will get spoilt, this is old stock, that is a bad brand, you won’t like this, I don’t like this, why… why… why?
Today I went… why did you buy bok choy it’s my no-cooking-day, now I have to use it else it’ll spoil. Why would anyone buy fine noodles, this isn’t organic, who would use so much Nutella(turns out I would) and so on and so forth. In my defense all I asked for was tomatoes. And surprise, surprise tomatoes did not turn up.
In my wonder years of yore I did not quite get it. I so totally do now. With all the extra stocking up to prevent multiple trips to the grocery store and to limit contact, it’s that much harder now. As my friend and I discussed a few days back, we are at peace with a sparse pantry and empty fridge. I sleep well those nights without worries of wasting what has been purchased.
The incidences of history repeating itself in a terrorizing form are aplenty. I’m however ending my post here lest my Mum reads more of it and says “I told you, now you know how it feels”, a little too gleefully and rubbing-in-your-face-ish .
Would love to hear of your experiences.
