“Oh, you are a mother now, you can manage!”
“What does he/she want, you must know, you are his/her mother!” she was asked, when her toddler was crying.
If something is not going right in the kid’s life, it’s automatically blamed on the mother saying “She must have not paid attention”.
For some reason, in our culture, mothers are always loaded with the moral responsibility of a child’s upbringing since ages. A lot of expectations are put on her from the time that she has given birth. Lot of things have changed over the years, but deep down, it is still embedded in us. Being a mother is an out of this world experience. It is a beautiful feeling, having been the chosen parent who gets to experience the beautiful phase of pregnancy, having your baby grow inside you and live his/her growth phase by phase. And even after birth, this bond continues to grow. Now this is the part of motherhood, which is visible to all. What is not seen is the other side of this same story, the transition. This is not anticipated, definitely overlooked, sometimes even by the mother.
We all keep welcoming the new-moms into motherhood, but what we don’t realize is that she is bidding farewell to an independent woman in her. Independent, not career wise, but responsibility wise. She is going to be accountable for another life until her little one is able and independent himself. Once the child is in her life, rather even in her womb, a part of her is always going to be dedicated to her child until she is going to live.
The problem here happens to be that she herself unaware of the volume of this transition. All she has thought of for nine months is whether the baby is fine, how we are going to raise him; she is just planning a million things. But what she hasn’t thought of is of the changes that she herself is going to go through; the physical and the emotional changes. So when this transition actually happens, there is stress, there is sleep deprivation, so much of worry, so many insecurities, so many doubts. And she obviously feels apprehensive to share these at that time; because that is the time everyone would want to be happy with the little one. So this phase of a depression is often overlooked and suppressed.
I always wondered, why especially in our culture, women go to their maternal homes when they have to deliver. But then, who will better understand a mother that her own mother.
But with changing times, and families going nuclear, I think that there should be awareness about this topic in the men. And that’s when the fathers have to play the most important role, understanding the spouse, and helping cope up this transition and taking care of the little one.
Today, with women being career driven, and being fierce in absolutely every field, maybe that is one area where the men can actually give them a hand.
This was about the mothers in this generation, who have jobs, who have ambitions, or rather who have the liberty to be ambitious. With Mother’s Day being celebrated in India for about a decade now, there is a little sense awareness definitely. We sure can post pictures with her on Facebook walls and Instagram, or even treat her with a day off or with fancy gifts, anything to show our gratitude. But have we ever thought about the times when our mothers gave birth. But do we really know things about her; was she working before having me? Did she leave it all for me or for my sibling? Did she ever want to pursue anything that she could not because of her priorities? Are there any unfulfilled paths that she wanted to take? Can we make it happen now? Do we really know her journey the way she experienced it, or just some incidents here and these and the vague memory we have of our childhood? About her story? That’s what we really need to celebrate, her story..
