Today I met a Perfect Mum. Everything she does revolves around her children. She is selflessly giving, she cooks perfectly nutritious meals for them, puts her rest and hobbies and friends aside to care for them and play with them. She is genuinely happy when they are happy and sad when they are sad. But somewhere inside she is silently screaming. Where is the joie de vivre promised from motherhood, she asks?
I am not the right person to answer, I tell
her. I am an Imperfect Mum. I question the long work hours spent away
from my child but I know I do it because I value any skills I can bring to better
this world and make a living at the same time. I do date nights and vacations
with the man I love, even more so because he fathered my child and is my equal
partner in bringing him up. I meet new
friends and chase old friends I still care about even though they sometimes seem
too lost to remember me. I go for massages
when I am tired and aching from my workouts on a weekend which I should spend completely
with my child. I feel happy and guilty
that we can afford good help but jealous of her that she spends more time with
my child than me. I compartmentalize the
time I spend with my child everyday even (gasp!) scheduling it into my calendar.
But when we are together, nothing else matters. Time stops in his eyes and his smile and oh,
how we dance, how we giggle.
I never believed I could be a mum as the
only mum I knew was a Perfect Mum, my own mum.
Just like you. But as I grew up
and reflected on some snippets of my childhood, I realized she wasn’t as Perfect. In the constraints of her own middle class Indian
life, she found time to learn and sell hand-made clothes, learn and take
pottery classes and has slowly evolved to be a loved social and community
leader. She confessed she was jealous of
my grandmother spending more time with me while she toiled away in the kitchen preparing
meals for us or taking care of the home.
She longed to go out for movies with my father and when I was older, she
did and they took vacations away from me too, just the two of them.
She taught me to embrace being an Imperfect
Mum and that is the only way I know to break free and enjoy Motherhood, not suffering
alone but enjoying as part of a team. I
know many Imperfect Mums and this Mother’s Day I want to tell them how perfect
they are, just as they are. Let’s accept
the guilt and look at finding our Joie de Vivre in the everyday.
