Mom Guilt

I am two fools, for loving and saying it ~ John Donne

 

Glutenous mothers scare me. They haunt me like a shadow, a dark image chasing me everywhere everyday all through my daily chores and actions. I have a phobia of being siphoned by this prototype, this socially approved Super Mom.

I acknowledge my kids are not ugly to look at and charming at times but it's in an apologetic whisper that I murmur I can’t moon over them forever, for all my life. My life is more, apart from them, not necessarily separate and distanced but only sufficiently distinct.

 

I have adored their little steps from walkers to baby steps and so on. I have even celebrated the steps that took them away from me day by day through schools and playgrounds, birthdays, and age counts. The steps that shook them, discouraged them, and confused them, I watched over those too. Yet, there was also a resentful feeling of being trampled by those puny little feet and of being bulldozed by them to make way for the new paths that they wanted to take. Caterpillar trail being laid over my journey made me want to take a break, every now and then.

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I have always admired their unique voices, lisps, and lilts. I still am their most fond listener and cannot wait to watch them tell their tales. But I am terrified by the nightmare - them writing their own stories over the parchment paper made of my skin. This is unacceptable to me. I can't let them dub over my song, though it now seems like a mime for the blinds to me too, still I can't let them dismiss it. No matter how advanced and multidimensional the experiences of this post-post world is, I am still relevant. I am still here. I cannot stand to be referred as past tense, address me loud and clear while I am still here.

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All these dandy mothers streaming in pictures after pictures of their beloved babies , updating status after status about their children's infinitesimal achievements,  earn the standard position of a super mother by being resplendent over their every move and mistake, where  I just fail. I fall flat at the starting point, where I hear them boo at me Unfit to Exist while my companions run over me making it to the end line deserving their honorable death as well exhausted mothers who never even tried to wean off their grown up  children from their breasts.  The guilt is immense I can tell you from the way I pretend to fit in but the remorse of succumbing is even worse as it stares at me from the dark edges and ends - of my mind and my life.

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BaSila Hasnain

03-10-2020

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