Honoring Mother’s Day

It was real for as real can be. After 7-minute contractions for close to 24 hours which are nothing compared to a ‘real’ delivery, I lost him in bits and pieces of tissue, blood and mass. While I always thought giving birth to a child after bearing for nine months or having kids from the heart is the true essence of being a mother, the right to being wished ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ that night changed my definition forever. I realized, “Motherhood is a million little emotions that are woven together with grace, redemption, laughter, tears and most of all love.”

I was reminded of all the mothers that did not give birth to me. There is nothing much to justify about Amma who is the quintessence of my existence. A relationship via the umbilical cord that came after a very hard pregnancy. There were five that I was spiritual tied to who took on being my mothers when I went to undergraduate college and two while in graduate school. Their warmth got me through seven gruelling years of angst, suppression, success and life. I am forever indebted to them.

What I lost was not just a piece of my heart but also the labor of true love. Perhaps, a little of me also died that night. Life didn’t stop and I almost gained a doctorate in secondary infertility, got pricked countlessly, had so many preach that my biological clock expired, and some even suggested that I should adopt. I wish they knew what I truly want. It was a very different dimension for Ram, so I have honorably excluded him from this Mother’s Day tribute. Probably, I’ll do an apt exclusive for him on Father’s Day. I would be incomplete if I didn’t mention him and a friend who held my hand through a very gory mess, as mothers would.

After that day, I may have been discussed in many wavelengths of sympathy, precept, rancor besides mute commiseration. My best friends took turns to be my mother for days, months and years to come, proving that being a mother is indeed an emotion, not a birthright. Some of my other friends, despite being amazing fathers, flawlessly played mothers to me. And somehow, I had become a mother to my own mother, and strangely to my husband sometimes, although it is against all connubial paradigm. The best being that I am a super mother to most of my friends kids. A rather cool version of their real ones.

So, when Mother’s Day does arrive, there is no treading cautiously. For having experienced a plethora of ‘motherliness’, for finding and living dreams through cliche yet ubiquitous captivity, for being in completeness of being a matriarch – all that, a numberless are deprived the honor of. As someone famous said, “Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.” Happy mother’s day to me and all those that make motherhood a universal sentiment.