The other day, my daughter called me from Chicago, “Amma, I am having a terrible headache”. Another day,”Amma, I feel cranky”, and yet another day, “Amma, my periods are getting delayed”.
So as a mother what am I supposed do from here in India, more specifically from Mumbai? I am helpless. Nevertheless, its just those few words like “ Drink some warm water” or “ have a banana” or “ its just that you are worked up, relax a bit, take a shower, eat something and remember amma, loves you loads” or go to sleep and morning you will feel better or just an “ok, I am listening”, that makes the trick and then the next phone call comes a l voice telling that she is fine.
Born in the 1970s, I have this opportunity of being with my mother, who was born in the 1930s and my nieces, born in the 1980s. So then, I sure have been able to observe the vast difference in the role of mothers, their activities, their responsibilities and their struggles to do their best for their children.
Back then, girls were not allowed access to higher education and were impressed upon to be married, do household work and raise children, as many as they could. If we see around, families which started around the 1940s and 1950s had atleast 5-6 siblings on an average. The mothers would cook, clean, communicate with their children in their mother tongue, teach them whatever they knew and tell them mythological stories and significance of various festivals and rituals that happened in their families.
The families that started in the 1950s belonged mostly to a similar income group. The rich were very few and the very poor remained unknown and were left to fend for themselves in order to survive. Only this group being neither poor nor rich nor lower middle class nor upper middle class, just existed trying to manage their ends meet by working hard, day and night to provide two square meals and basic education for their brood.
My mother was a stay-at-home mom, who kept herself busy with cooking, house work, stitching, reading and learning hymns and bhajans and shlokas. As a child, it was taken for granted by me that mother would be at home at any time of the day and night. I went to school without any anxiety knowing that I just have to return back home after school and mother would have kept lunch ready for me. Even if I had to attend any extra classes or sports practice at school, I could just go home after that. Mother would be at home. For any project work, I could depend on my mother for some ideas and most of the time, she would help out with some of the waste material lying at home. She would be an expert for best out of waste ideas.
Then in the 80s, I saw my sisters treaded the same path as my mother. But they had to balance home and work as they were all in full time employment. Since in many households, still there were siblings yet to be married, the nieces and nephews could be taken care of by the maternal or paternal grandparents and aunts and uncles. Still the mothers in the 1980s had to manage home, in-laws, formalities and also be punctual, sincere and adept at their place of work. Moreover, those days, there were internal examinations for promotions. So there was this added opportunity to move ahead at work simultaneously with managing family, of course with the support of the extended family. Women were slowly getting access to better opportunities but home management was still on their own shoulders. Men were becoming aware of the changes and they started doing their best at house management. I would see my brothers-in-law take up the job of laundry and ironing the school uniforms, dropping children at school, wife to the railway station or place of work etc. Times were changing.
But sooner, the trend of unprofessional day care homes started to emerge. Working mothers would throng to let their children in a household with children of other working mothers, with the hope that their children could get a hang of living at home like how they had in their childhood. But for this too, the mother’s heart needed to be worked upon to make it as hard as a stone. To facilitate travel and to help them be away from their children for minimum time during the day, came the concept of learning to ride a two-wheeler or drive a car.
The late 80s started seeing many Indian mothers on their two wheels, with 4 bags around them ( 2 for themselves, 2 for the children at the creche). Once home, they tried to emulate their own evenings spent with their mothers and followed a ritual of lighting the lamp and saying prayers together.
The world was moving at a fast pace. The 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s were being left behind with many new inventions, new technology, higher education and new opportunities becoming open to women. The unprofessional homely daycares started to turn into professional creches. The need was felt that children need to learn more life skills to deal with the outside world.
Well into the 1990s, the families started to become nuclear. The parents of the 1960s started to realise that they had a life of their own. Their dream was to travel the world, learn new things of art, music, dance or improvise their own in-built talents (which they were denied opportunities when they were young). Fair enough. But that left the mothers of the 1990s in lurch without support from family to help them make a family of their own.
The mothers in the 1990s, were faced with a larger responsibility of juggling between in-laws, parents, work and house management. Added to this, was the new trend of developing the personality of their children. Their children needed to be competitive to remain in the competitive world. The children were expected to pack their own things, they had to understand the meaning of different touches on their bodies at the creche, they had to learn self- defence techniques like karate and taekwondo. The inner strength and alongwith physical development had to be worked upon. So swimming, cycling and skating were a must. Mother had to run around buying groceries and vegetables and shopping for the home essentials, so for that duration the children spent some time learning art, drawing or math.
The children were left anxious for most part of the day. They went to school in the morning in a bus and after school they took a different bus to reach their creche. They could not share their thoughts immediately after school with their mothers. They would have to wait till their mother returned from work in the evening. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, they had Karate classes, Tuesdays and Thursdays they had music and dance classes. Some children had to juggle from one class to another. Saturdays were drawing and art classes, Sundays were swimming lessons. The children were getting used to remaining in an anxious state of mind.
And how could I not talk of food yet. Yes, after the shopping, the housework of arranging the purchases made. The 1990s was still seeing every household have normal indian food of rice, dal, rotis, bhaji, salads and chutneys, curds and pickles and papads, puran polis, vadas, idlis and dosas too. The guests too could be expected to have whatever the host has prepared. More or less, the concept of food remained largely alike in the friends circle or office get-togethers or family functions.
The working mother was aware of the food choices of the family members and she could definitely manage with a one-time maid to clean and cook for her family. Some special dishes, she could herself make, to give that personal touch to her children.
Definitions such as quality time, emotional quotient began to appear. Many children were started to be dealt with as slow-learners. Had the same children been around in the 1970s, they would have just enjoyed learning things at their own pace. But no, we were in the 1990s. The world was moving fast. How can we let our children lag behind? So new professionals who could read stories for children started to emerge.
This phase went on till, maybe mid 2000s, when the whole concept of a responsible mother went through a sea change. From mothers being the first teacher to teach kindness, compassion, sharing, honesty and sincerity in the 1950s, the mothers in the 2000s had to do this and more. While they were to teach the children good virtues and attributes, they were also to sensitise the children about the bad and cheaters out there. The children were to be adept at multiple skills and also top the class with good grades in all subjects. The timid, loving and caring picture of a mother turned to a tiger-mom. The mother had to herself learn newer things to direct the energies of her children in the right directions. There were no elders at home, who could teach bhajans or narrate stories to children or share the responsibility of bringing up the children. The whole onus was on the mother alone.
The kitchen took over a massive change. The traditional dishes were now time consuming and quick 2-minute ready to eat became the trend. The rice and roti took to the back stage too. The mothers realised the traditional food was suitable for that particular time and nature of activities then. They were not conducive enough for todays’ activities. For example: though the traditional vegetarian meal has a lot of simpleness and is a healthy diet, it has been realised that the diet includes more carbohydrates (which help people doing physical labour) and less of protein. Whereas the generation today have more or less a sedentary lifestyle and their activities relate to usage of technology through digital devices. So only carbs in food only made them heavier and sluggish. Moreover, every mother now had to necessarily have knowledge of baking and making international cuisine which could range from chinese, japanese to italy, mexico and puerto rico or australia. This, because children discuss in class what they have in their lunch boxes. The normal roti sabji was looked upon by peers and so the lunch boxes had to be trendy with such international cuisines. So the mother had to learn new recipes, lest they lag behind.
Did i tell you about the preferences of food of the guests in the late 2000s?
No ?
Well, when i was young and whenever my aunt or any relative visited home, mother would make poha or upma or any other south indian snack. In case anyone visited late at night without notice, the guest would be happy to just have curd rice with pickles. But in the 2000s, the scene was different. The non-vegetarians look lowly upon the vegetarians and may ask what was for them among the various spreads on the table. Within vegetarians, most people have different choices of vegetables. The traditional ones don't suit a dinner table, for example broad beans or snake gourd. The names of the vegetables need to be trendy, say like bell peppers, capsicums, tomatoes, spring onions etc. normal white rice too is not trendy enough. It should either be a biryani or a pulao or quinoa or brown rice or millets.
When you go out for a picnic or a social do, the vegetarians are treated like an outcast and are sneered at and teased for not having tasted the flesh and the bones.
Be that as it may, the world has surely undergone a massive change in terms of lifestyle, food habits, recreational activities and communication languages. There is no more space now for sitting together and having the same food by all the family members. The mother tongue cannot be spoken any more. Because most parents come from different regions and have different mother tongues and there is no time to converse the same sentence in multiple languages. The smses, emails, and WA texts in English as a common language is enough for communication. What has one to achieve by learning the mother tongue? The roots and familial bonding are a thing of the past. To bring that into our lives now, is too much hard work with no real benefits.
All the same, one cannot tell that the 1950s was better than the 2000s. It is just that time flies, the world changes, one has to find ways to survive in the world and feel reasonably comfortable.
Life has changed more, since the pandemic of the past one and half years. The mothers have to help children in their homeschooling - taking note of the time tables, scanning and uploading answer sheets, maintaining files of the test papers apart from their own busyness of working from home.
The mothers. Yes, the mothers, they take the blame for all the changes in the world and all the drifting that happens by the men of the family. But mothers being mothers, their love towards their children does not change whether it is 1950s or 2000s. It is just that they can't afford to remain like a mother in the 1950s, whose work revolved only around the house and children. The mother of the 2000s needed to know how to ride, drive, shop, be a financial manager, a secretary to the family, a cook, a teacher and also know the language of her children to communicate and the knowledge to operate devices with new technology.
A mother’s journey never ends. Once a mother, the journey that starts keeps on and on. On her deathbed, my mother called me one night and said,’I am worried about you. You have to take care of yourself. You are juggling too many things at a time. Eat well.’
