She loved me so much that she goes beyond to provide more than what she could offer, says Aphre from Kohima about her mother about her mother. Celebrating Mother’s Day, we all remember the love our mothers gave us and sacrificed for us. She narrated how her mother did her best to bring them up.
We were not rich, but my mother gave her everything she could, to provide the best. I remember wanting a Disney princess dress for an event that cost Rs. 1500.
My mom checked her purse, she had few hundred and changes with her. Next thing, she went to the market and bought soya beans and sticky rice. I knew something was up when she told me to wake up early the next morning if I wanted the dress.
The following morning, when she woke me up at 5:00 am, I was annoyed. I entered the kitchen to find maybe twenty or so plates filled with sticky rice roti. She probably woke up at least a couple of hours earlier to make those.
She told me to sell them to the neighbours before they start breakfast. A plate cost Rs. 50 and had around eight pieces.
That afternoon, she began preparing axone and told me to sell it once it was fully fermented. She told me that I could keep all the money I saved from selling those and buy my dress.
Apart from providing everything that I needed, my mother also taught me to pray and be independent and hard working. I remember her waking us up to go to dawn service in the church. “We will go and pray for your father,” she would say. Father was an alcoholic then. She never missed her prayers for my father who came home drunk every night. But she never gave up, her prayers were answered. It took around 20 years, but her prayers were answered.
Mother was not educated. Sometimes I wonder how she was able to single headedly take care of all the nine children. I am so grateful to God for her life. Her children are now all graduate and some are even working. My father came in the picture a lot later but let us leave that for another day.
I will never be able to take her place. She had to take care of her nine children alone. She sent us all to private schools and on top of that she made us take private tuitions. Sometimes, we sit together with our black tea and talk about how she hard she worked and how she handled our drunkard father so well. She patiently waited for God to answer her prayers in the midst of taking care for her children.
Mother always stressed on the importance of getting education. I remember going to the field with her when it was time for cultivation. She used to say ‘take your books and study, it will just take few minutes for you to cook and prepare tea for us’. No matter how difficult it was for her to do all by herself, she never made us do manual work saying it was too hard for young girls.
Every Mother’s Day when we go to her with gifts, she would remind us that we were her treasure and greatest gifts. I will never forget her words “Your obedience is the greatest gift.” And sometimes when I make her upset, the guilt feeling I get is compared to none.
I am so glad I get to talk about her on such an occasion, even thousand pages are not enough if I have to talk about her love, struggles and sacrifices.
My mother is a woman of faith, and I am all that because of her and I thank God for her life.
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A mother is a woman too
Humming a hymn, she limps around the kitchen preparing ingredients to add to her porridge. She almost loses her balance as she sits down on her chair. She laughs feeling a bit humiliated and guilty. “I am of no use,” she says.
This 73-year-old woman, who carried seven children in her womb to full term while having a career, feels embarrassed of body aches.
She is one among the millions of women who feel they have failed if smoke does not rise from the chimney in the morning, if they do not put hot meals on the table, if they do not greet visitors with enthusiasm.
With such women, we forget they too have menstruation cycle, we do not see morning sicknesses, we do not realise the hot flushes of menopause. What we do notice are the leftover rice, the missing sock, the dirty dishes in the sink, the flies around the trash and for a moment we too feel they have failed.
Yes, these women failed. They failed when they did not make the husbands and the children aware that they were not humming that particular morning because their hormones were acting up as it is that time of the month when she bleeds for days accompanied by backaches and stomach aches, sometimes even worse.
They failed to tell us that while carrying the human babies inside their bodies and at the time of giving birth, several bones were dislocated and some probably broken. They failed to appreciate themselves, to think of themselves as women and not just as mothers and wives.
This Mother’s Day, let us look at our mothers as women who goes through regular women stuff. If you do not know what I am talking about, look it up. For your mother.
