Everything my mother loves has a maternal essence woven within it. Everything that brings her joy is something that she can give back to her family, to the Earth, to the community, without asking much in return. She nurtures, and nurtures, and nurtures, until her hands are red and raw with it.
She loves to garden. She nurtures her patches of veggies and fruit-bearing trees like she nurtures her children; with sunlight and water, with love and attention. She loves to cook. She takes whatever she grows and returns to her kitchen, to feed her family. She makes curries from her gourds and pumpkins; she cuts her guava into thick wedges and offers them silently. I know it tires her, but her kids love to eat, so my mother loves to cook. She does not love to sew. And yet, when she sits down with a needle and my dress, I know that this, too, is an act of love.
I also know my mother married young. She became a mother long before she was able to become herself. I worry that everything my mother loves, she loves as a mother. I worry she left behind the things that she loved as herself, rather than as a mother, in a past life where she did not have kids to nurture. I see glimpses of that person sometimes, a familiar stranger, a teenaged girl who shares my same spirit, a spirit not yet broken. She sits within my mother, somewhere, and she’s been there for a while.
There was a time where my mother would not grow trees, but climbed them. She tells me stories of her past self under the cover of the night sky, our heads under the blankets and whispering, as if sharing secrets. I remember, once, she told me she used to be top in her class in essay writing. She said it with the same pride, the same glow in her cheeks, as when she shows off the herbs from her garden.
I wonder if it’s from her that I inherited the ability to weave prose together; whether the same love for writing that once ran in her, now runs through me. I wonder about everything to do with my mother. How much have we inherited from her, that she herself has given up?
Everything my mother has given up, she makes sure I pursue. Not only in education or careers, but in happiness also. As if she were living life vicariously through her daughters she gives, and gives, and gives, and watches as we navigate a world wider than she was ever allowed to explore. Her daughters have grown up not only nurturers, but travellers, creators, writers; never are we discouraged to be anything other than what we are. Our identities were curated and moulded in the open, never whispered under the blankets, never forgotten or an afterthought to the roles we were expected to play into.
She raised us to be lovers, to care deeply and use our heart equal to our brain, to not shy away from companionship. She raised us to be romantics, not settlers, though I wonder if she herself ever had the chance at the good, soft love she deserves. Everything my mother has given up, she makes sure I pursue. I wonder how many Valentine’s Day’s my mother watched pass by, how many ‘loves’ she watched her daughters fall in and out of, with yearning to experience herself. Every flower received by her daughters is a flower received by her, every door opened is a door opened for her, every act of love shown towards her daughters returns to her in full bloom.
And with every heartbreak she sits through, she tells us “ami chai na je tumra amar moton hou.” I do not want you guys to become like me. It’s her favourite lesson to teach. To find a soft love, one that gives as much as it takes, one that nurtures in return. A mother’s deepest desire seems to be that her daughters do not grow up to share her fate.
There’s a poem by Jasmine Mans:
Tell me about the girl
my mother was,
before she traded in
all her girl
to be my mother.
What did she smell like?
How many friends did she have,
before she had no room?
Before I took up so much
space in her prayers,
who did she pray for?
I hope she prayed for herself; for the girl she was, and the woman she was to become.