“Motherhood tastes like sacrifice. It smells like endless hours of cooking, sounds like putting up with disapproval at the smallest of inconveniences, and looks like saving up the most burnt pieces of bread for one’s self while giving out the fresh ones to the family.”

My mother doesn’t take motherhood for performance. She takes it as a motto. She sees it as some life-altering, soul-giving phenomenon that is the realest part of a woman’s life. Motherhood isn’t a stage for her – she didn’t major in performative arts. She doesn’t know how to funnel theatrics into her care for the ones around her. Everything that flows from the genesis of love between her ribs, it’s genuine. Raw. Silent, yet intense.

My mother doesn’t always laugh at the right jokes, and cringe at the right memes. She doesn’t have the energy to process things beyond the vortex of her to-do list on most nights. But one thing she does every day, every night, 25/8, is – persevere. Furtively, without show, without the spotlight scalding the gentleness out of her soft heart, and softer eyes. She perseveres – more like a warrior, and less like a woman who calls up her father with a beaming smile, so excited to share anything and everything that happens in her life. The latter part makes her sound more like a little girl. Who, perhaps, still exists, somewhere underneath the bridge of all the versions of herself she forgot to give more time living.

Sometimes, I hear her exhale so heavily. Like, she is finally able to acknowledge that she is tired of carrying the baggage of the entire world on her back. Why not put the world on her hands? -she must ponder. Did god take her for so powerful as to crush the earth whole between the pressure of her gentle palms that have only ever touched to heal? Does she dream of driving back into the safety of her mother’s womb to evade her perpetual responsibilities? Does she concoct tales in her head when she sleeps – of alternate realities where she is more a concept, and less an afterthought? Or, had she stopped seeking asylum a long time ago – accepting this as what she was divined to be?

My mother doesn’t own an iPhone. Just a near-obsolete Vivo model with a cracked screen-guard, a chipped USB port, and passable camera lenses. She doesn’t care about decorating her phone cover, or replacing it with a new one even after severe mechanical damage. She is practical, when she says the money used to repair her phone should be used to run errands instead. Is it just the practicality that propels such a thought process? Or, is it because she’s a mother?

My mother is part of an ecosystem that smells like spices, piping hot tea, and home. She is glued to an interface that barks orders into the saturation of hopes that still pools in the deepest recesses of her mind – “Be a mother first. A wife second. A woman third.” I wonder how one can be a mother before being a woman. Or, a wife, for that matter. Isn’t a woman a metaphorical rainbow that animates every dreary microcosm with warm bursts of bright shades with every role she steps into? Isn’t a woman an ever-functional clockwork that keeps lives, dreams, and fantasies running? Doesn’t she encompass – well, everything?

I wonder, still, if my mother entertains such thoughts in the dead of a sultry May afternoon, when I’m away understanding kinematics at school, and my father is taking trips to banks to keep the house from falling apart. I wonder if she thinks of her own mother, and all the women who came before her in her lineage – the things they sacrificed to birth her essence into being. I wonder, again – pensive as ever, if she regrets abandoning the dreams she had as a little girl, down a chasm of apocalyptic inferno.

My mother didn’t invent any of the sciences. She didn’t invent AI, she doesn’t have a plethora of achievements to her name that she could scatter like ashes on the gravel of her dreams, and call it a day. But she did invent possibility. She crafted a laboratory where I could be a gazillion different things, without being the tiniest bit apologetic. She homed a religion where I could write doctrines after doctrines of all the accomplishments I want to reach for without fearing what the world would think of me. She materialized a kind of impunity into our threshold that protects so, so fiercely that nothing ever seems scary enough to break. She shields our humble abode from calamities, she cracks silly jokes to keep the laughter flowing, and she cradles broken shards of glass in her arms to keep them from piercing our skin – even though she bleeds herself.

My mother is a hoarder. She collects those black containers that you get delivered food in from nice eateries like they are antique. She collects my certificates, medals like they are worth more than every gold ornament on this planet. She collects broken handles of her favorite cups from the annual fair, the half-written pages of my poetry that always fail to make it to the gram, my little, milk-stained onesies from my fairytale-like childhood, and the cute frocks with floral details near the hem from my chaotic, emotionally draining pre-adolescence phase.

My mother is a hoarder. A reluctant hoarder of time, she can’t let things go. The good things, the bad things, the frightening things, the rudimentary things. She saves them all up in a little jar, and secures it inside a treacherous body of art called the “heart”. And yet, in her presence – letting go is as easy as crying over a bad grade.

How ironical. Isn’t it?

But then, irony is weaved into the very matrix of the lived human experience. Especially, when you are the mother of a daughter whose fodder is true crime documentaries, and online edits of Nicholas Alexander Chavez. (P.S. She thinks he’s quite a dreamboat, too!)

My mother doesn’t understand the math we do in schools. Her kind of math doesn’t include Heron’s formula, integration, or learning how to prove a triangle is isosceles. It’s somewhat like this: I ask her for one spoonful of dal, she gives me two. I urge her to buy two kurtis for herself on Durga Pujo, she buys only one, and gets me pretty tops with the rest of the money. I wave my hand dismissively when she insists I take four slices of bread for lunch – “শুধু দুটো দাও, মা।” – and yet, somehow, four breads end up in my lunchbox anyway. Mom math, is it? Maybe. Whatever it is, it is the only kind of math that didn’t make me cry. Or, leave me with sore fingers.

My mother is the kind of goddess you find at a convenience store – with hasty hands searching for spare change in her too big a handbag, with eyes always looking for metaphors hidden in the empty space between two cups on the crockery aisle, with a pomegranate for a heart that has been squeezed almost enough to parch each of its juicy aril. She wears lackluster colors, slurs colloquial slangs when she’s angry, and transforms into a hyper-protective spotted dove when it comes down to keeping her nest safe.

She is magic, my mother. She doesn’t make fairies appear out of nowhere, she never knew how to – she doesn’t sugarcoat, she barely makes things seem effortless. But one thing she’s taught me is that, what requires effort shouldn’t be twisted to seem effortless. It’s disrespecting the nature of hard work, if we make it seem like a walk in the park. It’s not – it’s so not. And you need someone to break it down to you the way it actually is. My mother does it for me – messily, sometimes with angry eyes and a hostile mouth. But she says it how it is, always. How she keeps a whole house running with a fractured foot, and tired eyes. How she wakes up before everyone else in the morning, and never fails the time-bound tests she is compelled to take every waking hour.

My mother doesn’t understand ornamental English. She wouldn’t understand half the things I have written here. And as I press the “save as” button to seal this document as my entry for the competition, she instructs me to fill the water bottles I emptied, and never found motivation enough to refill. I smile under my breath, and yell back a little – “আসছি, মা।“ – to assure her that I will attend to my part of the job.

Got to go, and fill some bottles. Bye! 

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