Being a mother is serious responsibility; one that most mothers (including me) often take a little too seriously. Mothers like me define the primary goal of Motherhood as, “Bringing up healthy and successful individuals”. Given this goal, it is pretty much impossible to measure the success rate of Motherhood. This is because there are many definitions for “Healthy” and even more definitions for “Successful”. At the start of Motherhood, when our children our barely able to hold their head by themselves, our goals for Motherhood are sky rocketing. I remember, I started with a goal of “Class Topper” when my daughter joined Nursery. Even though she did not top the class, she did do me proud that year. Over the years, as reality started to sink in, my goal of success dropped to, “Straight A’s in all subjects”. As my daughter entered Primary school from Pre-primary school, I had little choice but to transform the goal to, “A’s in Maths and Science. B will do for Languages.”
Sigh! My daughter turned eleven last summer. I am ashamed to say that I still define goals for her success. This year we defined the goal as, “Passing all subjects”, along with excelling in Dance, Taekwondo and Skating. I worked hard, day and nigh,t pushing my daughter towards this goal. Given the syllabus and the frequency of exams, it meant that we work on the goal each day. Loosing even a day in the regime could make the difference between success or failure. And then it happened! My daughter fell sick with a severe Viral fever. She missed school for a straight one week. While I worried about her health, I will admit, I was more worried about the school exams starting next week. Thankfully, she recovered that bout of Viral and managed to scrape through the exams. However, the loss of one week at school meant that we were behind schedule in our Study Plan. So I decided, we would have to just work a little harder to catch up.
Today, as I look back, I can see how stupid this approach was. But then in the midst of school session and goals, I was blind. I think, it was then, that God decided to teach me a lesson the hard way. One month after recovering from Viral fever, my daughter was diagnosed with Dengue. As her fever rose and her platelets dropped, for the first time perhaps in my life, I stopped worrying about school grades and started worrying about her health. I held her hand and bathed her frequently with cold cloth. She shivered and cried aloud. I cried silently at her bed side.
I am happy to say that unlike me, my daughter is a fighter. She fought the Viral and the Dengue and overcame the fever. Over the following weeks she recovered slowly, but till now has not recovered her complete strength. In this whole process, as she slowly lost most of her physical strength, I slowly lost the spirit to push and pull her to meet the academic goals.
Each morning now, when we wake up for the school routine, I am happy knowing that she is healthy enough to get ready and go to school. Who cares, how she fares in school today!?! As long as she is alive, there will always be another day, another month, another year and another school session. If we don’t do well this year, maybe we will do better the next. Maybe we will never do well at school. Maybe that will be our reality! But then, maybe we will do well in Design, Arts, Singing, Dancing, Cooking, Sewing, Skating, Taekwondo, Badminton, ….. Life is full of possibilities. Even if we don’t do well at any of the above, I am sure we did a fantastic job at being a Mother and a Daughter to each other. For me, that is a good enough goal for this lifetime.
Life has taught me a simple lesson. The basics of life is good health and positive energy. Focus on these and life will take care of the rest itself.
P.S. – Like all my other blogs, this blog is based on True Facts. I am not ashamed of having being stupid in bringing up my children. I just hope that others reading this blog, learn from my stupidity and do not tempt God the way I did.
Shilpa Roy Kota 