His accidental mother
Being a mother can be challenging for some women
Once upon a time, there was a girl who was a great babysitter. She was happy being with kids. In fact, she worked with children also. She knew she would be a great parent. She was so full of confidence and looked forward to being a mother herself but when she did become a mother, something happened. She couldn’t bear to be with her child. So her mother took away the boy when he was just a newborn. They reunited after a few years and now the boy is 12 years old.
You’d think that like all great Bollywood movies, everything ended on a positive note. How wrong could you be though? If you look at the boy now, roaming alone on the campus like an abandoned puppy, you’d wonder why did she adopt him? That’s what I always wondered and then one day I invited him home to play with my much-younger son, thinking that his mom is coming late and he can go back to dinner time. Only, he ended up having dinner at my place that night, and at 10:30 pm, I called his mother to “inform” her that her child is at my place, in case she was searching for him.
The boys became such good friends after that they often shared toys, meals, playtime, and I became quite sure that he is an adopted child and she has stopped caring about him now. How else can you justify a mother leaving her child at a stranger’s place for 2–3 days and hardly ever calling him? How else can you justify the fact that the boy is wearing ill-fitting clothes all the time and is always hungry?
Sometime back, I spoke to her and she told me she is leaving her son with her mother in Jaipur because she got a job in Hyderabad. But her plans changed. So now she is living in XXX city in her own flat. The boy? He is living with her mom. Same city but different houses. So will you bring him to your flat once the renovation is over?, I asked her then. “Oh, I am finalizing plans to put him in a hostel by next year. He will learn so much there, even horse-riding. And I will be totally free to travel for my job then”, she told me.
I have often wondered since then if it is okay to offer to adopt someone’s child if she is always trying to abandon the kid? Is it morally wrong to do so? And to be specific, how wrong can this be? I look at the child and the only thing I feel is pity. All my life I have felt that my parents didn’t love me but a mother like this puts things in perspective, you know.
I suffered from depression, she told me last week, after I delivered him. “I couldn’t take care of him, so my mother took over the parenting but we are fine now”, she tells me with a smile. Sometimes, you don’t have to actively participate in a conversation, especially one where you don’t have anything nice to say. So I kept my peace that day.
She is not a friend; not even an acquaintance but I wanted to scream at her real hard when she revealed her future plans — “I think it is time I adopted a child. I feel I will be a better mom this time around”.
