A ‘difficult’ mother we grew to love

Mohanmeet Mann Khosla

She gave the go-ahead to crazy ideas like turning flattened tin cans into sleds so we could toboggan down empty hillsides. ‘Just be careful about the trees,’ she would say. If we did careen into a tree, she would spank us first and coddle us later. She told us to climb plum trees if we wanted her to make jam. She told us it was her job to give us pocket money but ours to stretch it. And if we wanted to buy sweets from the shop across the road, we would just have to figure out how to cross it on our own.

That was my mother and her rough and ready style of parenting — one that often sent my father into apoplectic fits.

She told us our first stories and showed us our first dew-covered cobwebs. She made us fall in love with dreams and spanked us into facing reality. We never did take the straight path to anywhere when we were with her. Dense undergrowth was always an invitation to discover what was on the other side. We would get lost but we knew we would be just fine, for we were following someone who had spent her entire childhood escaping from classrooms, just so she could find open spaces to free her imagination in. She never checked our homework or agonised over our tiffins. But she answered all our ‘whys’ and sanctioned a guilt-free lifelong aversion to cooking. She told us, ‘Do what interests you,’ and then showed us what it takes. We watched her block out everything when focusing on the task at hand. There was always a hot water bottle to take care of an aching back, but if furniture had to be moved and flower pots to be shifted, it would be done. There were always band-aids to take care of pricked fingers but if dried okra had to be fashioned into a bird of paradise, it would be done. And if she forgot to eat because there were more interesting things to do, well, that, too, would be done.

There were times when she was difficult to love. When the world drew in too close and she struggled to come to peace with it. She would lash out then. Don’t we all? When we love too fiercely? When we hurt too easily? What does one do with an overactive conscience? With the confusion when others don’t play by the rules? How does one heal the scars that solitude continues to scrape? Yet, it was always solitude that brought her succour. She would shut out the world, and us, until she had cauterised the pain. She would keep a torch under her pillow because her troubled sleep also brought the dreams that birthed her stories. She would paint the shadows that the light threw, and when she would sing, even the silence listened. We learnt to give her the space she needed, for hadn’t she taught us to guard our own? We learnt to let her go, not because she loved us less but because she deserved to love herself more.

Fly free, mom. Go home to the stars.