Take pride in moms, working too

Simran Sidhu

Mom, why aren’t you a housewife, like my friends’ moms?’ I asked my tired mother as an eight-year-old. She had just returned home from work. ‘Don’t you like your mother working?’ she enquired. How could I tell her that a working mother meant that my lunchbox didn’t contain yummy food like my friends’ tiffin. That I had to eat cold chapatis when I came home from school, because my mother was away at work, and that sometimes I had to wait as long as 5pm for her to be home. Once back, she would have no energy left to talk, let alone solve my school troubles.

I have grown up silently wishing that she was a housewife, and envying my friends, who had a 24x7 homely mother, who didn’t go to work. I just couldn’t believe it that they had their mothers all to themselves all day long. 

Years later, my wish came true. When I took admission in a college, my mother took a sabbatical from work and shifted with me to the city, while dad stayed back at home. We were just the two of us there. She was there to welcome me when I came home from college tired. I didn’t have to eat cold chapatis anymore. She would make yummy meals for me. And she would also freely listen to my college problems. I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe my luck.

One evening, while she was cooking my favourite meal, and I was happily sitting beside her, inhaling the aroma of the food, I noticed that her hair was shrivelled up in a messy tapering ponytail. I wondered where the neat bun she tied whenever she went to work had gone. I looked at her clothes, and wondered why and when she had switched to simple wornout cotton suits from the beautiful Chanderi. I even spotted a small hole in her salwar. I looked at her flip-flops. The leather pumps were gone. I remembered that instead of the branded handbag she carried to work every day, she had started carrying a simple canvas bag on her shoulders. When did they start drooping? Maybe because we couldn’t afford a maid now, so she cleaned the pigeon droppings, washed utensils and mopped the floor every day. 

She had changed. Every little thing about her had changed: her clothes, her smile, her eyes, and her outlook. I realised that she was not my mother, only a faint, sad shadow of her past self. I took the ladle from her hand with teary eyes. I realised that her hand wasn’t meant to hold a kitchen ladle, it was meant to hold a pen. 

Now, when she comes back from work tired, but with a smiling face, I look at her proudly, and smile too.