A STUDY IN MOTHERHOOD By Iqra Asad
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Motherhood is much more than ten letters, that goes without saying. It is a three-syllable noun. Incidentally, there is this 24-hour bracket that comes around every 8736 hours dedicated to “celebrating” motherhood. Wow, a whole 24 hours, this motherhood thing must be something important. If it’s important enough as all that, it must be worth going into the depth of it. Turns out there is a lot more than can be said here, but we can have a look at some of the finer aspects of motherhood.
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** VIP treatment**
**Case study #1**: Mother looks out the window to see her preschooler toddling across the lawn. His pursuit of a butterfly is interrupted as he falls flat on his face. Instead of breaking into ear-splitting yells calculated to put the most strong-throated of opera singers to shame, he quickly picks himself up and resumes his study of wildlife. Mother is astonished. She goes out to ask her little boy why he didn't cry. His answer, "Oh, I didn't know you were nearby."
Case study #2: Somewhere in their teens, people enter a phase called GROWING UP. This GROWING UP is different from the growth they undergo when they shoot up from little children into big children. Some symptoms of this phase are
n going from silence to 500 decibels in 0.5 seconds
n reacting to a lack of a household commodity like clean towels or toothpaste with the wrath of a general being informed of the desertion of his troops
n using words like “touché” and “capiche” to show they can pronounce them even if they can’t spell them
n sprouting electrically charged hair and/or fly-sized beards
Though the symptoms are visible to the world at large, it is the mother who is on the receiving end of most of the GROWING UP (behaviour?). That is because people instinctively know that a mother will bear an amount of GROWING UP that will make other people throw you out of their homes. Therefore mothers worldwide are blasted regularly with GROWING UP and other mother-only strains of behaviour.
Management and know-how
Over the course of bringing up her children, a mother is expected to know
n How to divide five slices of pizza evenly among three children without provoking World War III.
n What to do when her child starts bawling in the face of a doting relative.
n The names of friends and their mothers, teachers and the best friend's canary.
n The answer when she is quizzed on the identity of Ronaldinho or John Cena or the intricacies of Pokemon cards or Beyblade.
n Why bubbles form and stars twinkle.
and a wealth of other things which would, in themselves, make an entire encyclopedia.
** Worrying**
Making the decision to have a child--it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
-- Elizabeth Stone
That explains why mothers worry so much; because they care. This can be best illustrated by the story of the camp leader who, after a severe thunderstorm that was big enough to be mentioned in the news, received calls upon calls from the mothers of the campers wanting to find out if their children were OK. He thought, "Mothers! They are just too protective. They don't know when to let go." The next time the phone rang it was his own mother calling to make sure he was OK.
Never underestimate the worth of carrying a mobile phone unless you want to arrive home two hours late to see security forces deployed around your house and a helicopter with a searchlight chugging overhead. "Thank God, you're all right!" is something you'd expect coming home from war instead of coming home from college, but to a mother, there is no such thing as a rational explanation. When her child cannot be contacted, a mother's worry meter goes something like this:
15 minutes: The traffic must be bad.
30 minutes: Something must have gone wrong.
32 minutes: Something HAS gone wrong.
321/4 minutes: Call the police! Something has happened to my child!
Looking at what goes on in the world, one gets an idea of the horrors contained in a mother’s “something could have happened”; one really can’t blame her. Compare the image of coming home to a concerned mother to one of a mother who opens half an eyelid as her child comes in three hours late with a cursory “wipe your shoes on the mat, dear”. Which is more disturbing? Children are the only creatures who get a truckload of prayers from their mothers simply because they exist. Cherish it!
Shukriya:bb: