Mother
(This is a snippet that Facebook kindly reminded me of earlier this year. It was written a few years ago when my kids were young – I think my younger son was in Std. Five. The rest of the piece was written in February 2020)
I am shamelessly eavesdropping on the conversation between three lovely ladies outside school. They are discussing the kids, their friends, study habits, extra-curricular activities and busy schedule. But I am not welcome to join this cozy group. You see, I’m not a member of their exclusive club – the A list, the creme de la creme. Who are these ladies? They are the domestic staff waiting to pick up their charges. I think they look at me with pity. I’m in the minority of mums who still look after our kids ourselves. But oh! It was lovely to hear the concern and love in their voices…
Cut to the present. My sons are all grown up now. The days of picking them up, getting them snacks, supervising their work and play, just being around for them are almost done. I had no live-in helper. This is what I chose to do as a mum – be there. It seemed to fit in with my circumstances and personality. I had no caregiver as a child and though not a foreign concept, I didn’t give it a try when I became a mom. Maybe my stay at home mom act worked, maybe it didn’t. I had friends who worked full time and still managed to be stellar moms. I had friends who hadn’t worked a day in their lives and still needed a platoon of supportive parents and household help to make it through their days of mothering. I even had friends who switched tracks midway, either going back to sanity and a career or dropping it all to just enjoy their kids full time. Obviously, there is no right way to run this motherhood marathon.
But enough about us official mothers. Biological, adopted, step. I got to thinking about the sisterhood of secret mothers our children and we grew up with. We are probably the last generations of young Indians who took for granted the love these caregivers lavished on us all. The mostly unacknowledged women (and men) who left their own children in far away places, to live their lives in our homes and raise us and our children as their own.
The Ramu chachas, the Shanthabais, the Annies and Fatima Bibis who cooked and cleaned, helped with homework, played endless rounds of ludo and rummy, taught us cricket, carried us and our school bags home from the bus stop. The long standing drivers, the Sunnys and Ahmeds, the inadvertent eavesdroppers of heated arguments and careless confessions (it’s as if we didn’t even acknowledge their humanness), the custodians who brought drunk kids home late at night, who knew about the boyfriend first, who saw the tears cried in the back seat and kept the code of discretion.
The young girls, the Sushmas and Aartis, who looked after the babies, keeping them fed and cleaned and powdered, bringing them to mothers and grandmothers after their naps, in the best of sunny moods. The colic, the poops, the wailing, were all behind the scenes, the young girls dealing with it as matter of factly as they dealt with their younger siblings in their own homes.
I’m unsure whether the children or shamefully, even their parents registered that they were people with stories and lives, tragedies and triumphs. When they confided in us, the parents, we empathised when we could, we made comforting noises, we even handed out money as compensation for the invisible but very solid wall between us. They bathed our children, fed them, sang them to sleep. But we did our best to keep them at a distance. We did not acknowledge our frailities to them, these familiar strangers who shared our homes. They poured their hearts out to us, and in moments of unguarded weakness, we may have allowed them a glimpse of the darkness behind our perfect lives. But it was always shortlived, regretted and we quickly retreated behind the wall of money and social class. It is a fine example of the thin line between love and hate. No, not hate. A much worse emotion: indifference.
It was a relationship that fell apart at the slightest rebellion or infringement of that boundary wall. We spoke often: of their ingratitude, how we never learned to harden our hearts, that we felt betrayed each time they left or we kicked them out. The truth is we never really had the kind of familial relationship, with its bonds of loyalty, that we fondly imagined. We had always been their employers, they our employees. No matter that they had stayed up nights with colicky babies and feverish toddlers. No matter that these caretakers took great pains to train us children very early on that they were not our mothers, so that our mothers might not be mistaken for visiting aunts – that would be a faux pas that could cost someone her job.
And yet, to the children, they were our secret mothers. An entire generation of young people may remember their ayahs and maids and chachas more fondly than they do their parents or grandmothers or aunts. We confided in them before we grew old enough to see the barrier. We cuddled them until we learnt to recognise the wall. We cried for them at night before we understood that the boundary is insurmountable.
And so we lived in undeclared conflict with our caregivers – guilt, love, gratitude, disdain, resentment warring within us through our childhoods and early years of parenthood.
The ladies I eavesdropped on that long-ago morning outside junior school were very different, part of a new wave. They are the new breed of professionals who offer their training and experience at a premium. They are clear about the dividing line and often insist on it remaining inviolable. This is perhaps their only defence, having watched their mothers’ and sisters’ hearts broken when the children they cared for grew into the same sort of adults as their real parents.
They are friendly and firm. They do not indulge their charges. They have working hours and overtime kicks in on weekends. They follow diets and medication charts meticulously. No homemade laddoos brought for the kids. No mango pickle or spicy fish curry sneaked from their lunch plate. No homegrown remedies for colds and colic. This is clinical caring at its best. They accompany their charges everywhere, to the school and to the doctor as well. They certainly know their routine far better than the parent. And yet, all this frightening efficiency comes at a price. Not just the monetary but the maternal. They are no longer our children’s second mothers.
That secret society of old time carers – it was a complicated love. We loved them but not enough. We were grateful but it was conditional. We appreciated their presence in our lives but made sure we owed them nothing beyond their salary, an annual bonus and a generous pension. Often we resented our need of them to keep our lives clean and smooth and untarnished.
And yet, the other day, a dear friend said with deep happiness that she was off to meet the woman she had known for the first thirty five years of her life – her grandmother’s cook. She was looking forward to this reunion. She reminisced about the fish curry this lady had made for her, the taste of which no other cook could ever replicate. My friend is a good woman, in every sense of the word. I was left wondering if this quest for her secret mother was a function of her good nature or if it comes to us all one day or another – this need to acknowledge the precious things our caregivers left to us. The warm hug, the undemanding love, the unflinching loyalty to us children, if not always to our parents. The unquestioning belief in us and our abilities. The stories and songs we still hear in our sleep, the games of simple rules and clear outcomes they taught us, the food they cooked for us.
I never had a secret mother. I was brought up by my mom and aunt and grandmother. Perhaps my aunt was my secret mother. My boys though, they had only me. The only mom they know. Of course, they loved the attention lavished on them by caretakers at friends’ houses, when I gratefully accepted the break from mothering. But for the most part, it was just them and me, figuring out being mummy together. My friend and I got to wondering if we were enough for our respective children. Did they miss having that support system? When they were mad at me, who could they have turned to for comfort and understanding? Who was there to teach them silly rhymes and tell them stories? Did they miss the learning? Did they miss the understanding that comes with growing up in a village, for this support system of ours is exactly that – the village that teaches and nurtures and protects, over and beyond everything that the parents provide.
It’s silly and pointless to wonder. My boys are grown now. They remember my stories and songs. Their growing years are their own singular experience, I can’t possibly go back and change it. And in all honesty, I’m not sure that I would.
The sisterhood is a fast changing anachronism. Soon, it will be a thing of the past. For those of us who thrived on the depth of caring our ayahs and bais and chachas lavished on us: we should consider ourselves blessedly lucky to have had them in our lives.
Lovely piece. I can so connect!