Surviving Mother's Day

Another Mother's Day came and went. There was no breakfast in bed. No 'Happy Mother's Day, mom!' shriek in unison. No cards. No gifts. No flowers. Not even a damn 'Happy Mother's Day' sms from Airtel. Instead,the habitual chaos prevailed. The usual grumbling before every meal, "Why can't we have anything different, ever?" One daughter had to be forced to do her home work. The other had to be literally pushed into the bathroom to take a shower. The hubby had to be gently reminded that it was NOT Mother Teresa's birthday the world was celebrating. The menu had to be planned, the laundry had to be done, the clothes had to be folded. Well, life is unfair to start with. And then you become a mother.

I have two daughters, and let me tell you, every time I see my friends with sons, I feel envious. No, it has nothing to do with my archaic Indian mentality. Just that mothering sons seems to be so easy. They eat without counting calories. They have short hair that need no combing. They do not spend hours on the phone talking. They do not have to be told to go down and play instead of watching TV. They never look at  gangly, gawky 16 year old boys and burst into giggles and most important, they never talk about waxing their legs or plucking their eyebrows. The mothers only have to cook enough food to feed an army and the boys seem rather happy. The sons also seem to dote on their mothers. My elder daughter on the other hand thinks I'm her public enemy number one. In a few years,the younger one I am sure will start feeling the same. Though I would never exchange my daughters for sons, I really could do with some doting.

My mother perhaps would not have agreed with me on this one. The moment my brother turned 16, she turned into a deranged woman. She regularly checked his bag to find out if  there was a love letter hidden somewhere. She sniffed for cigarette smoke every time he entered the house. She kept a check of how he was spending his pocket money and constantly worried about him getting into bad company. From a perfectly normal happy woman, she turned int a spy with an obsessive compulsive disorder. This went on till he finally married at the ripe old age of 33. Honestly, I do not know how my brother survived those maddening years.

I think this motherhood thing does not come easy to me. I wish along with the babies, God had also sent me an instruction manual to handle them. I would not have stumbled so many times on the way then. This Mother's Day, when I saw some lovely e-mails that my friends sent me, I started thinking, what was the fuss all about? Wasn't it like any other day? We cooked, we fed, we cleaned, we took care, we loved fiercely and we tumbled into beds that night too tired to even straighten out the bed sheets. That has been my routine for the last 14 years. That day was no different. And I know I was not the only one who felt like this. A lot of mothers all over the globe dealt with tears and sicknesses, tempers and tantrums, scraped knees and heart breaks on Mother's Day. And they all survived.

So why just celebrate it on a second Sunday of May each year? Why not every day? After all every day we are mothers, and every day we survive.

Some days with difficulty and the others with some cuss words...