The Guilt Of Motherhood

Motherhood is such a bliss. Motherhood is that moment after childbirth when your life changes for ever, following which there are innumerable moments of joys and a lifetime of pride. Haven’t women always been celebrated for being extra-ordinary in their role as a mother? How many times have we seen motherhood being depicted in glorious forms in popular culture? Every FMGC ad on TV where the homemaker is invariably a woman is always calm, composed and knows all the answers. She is always sorted. Isn’t it all so beautiful and pleasing? After all women have been told for ages that motherhood comes naturally to them. They are masters in it even though hardly all studied it in their growing up years.

But let’s put a break to that stereotype and cut to a story of a real struggling mother who is never calm. Have you met her? Does she live in your neighbourhood? Have your heard women whispering about ‘that’ mother who always shouts at her children and is doing everything wrong? You must have. Everyone knows that one mother who doesn’t embody the set virtues assigned for motherhood. This time let’s talk about that mother who hasn’t understood motherhood like she ought to. Let’s talk about the mother who is learning as she is teaching her kid to be a human being. Let’s talk about all the guilt that she carries to bed every night, mentally berating herself for failing her child. Let’s talk.

Not all women are born mothers. At least not those who belong to this generation who have been raised to be go-getters. In their childhood they spent their time studying and playing, their college life was spent enjoying with friends and a few romances. Then came work life which was pretty hard in itself. All this while she was just another girl with ambitions in her eyes and as equal as any male counterpart. Motherhood might have been a choice she made. But the compromises, the long hours, career-ending decisions never seemed to be a part of the deal when she took the decision. But suddenly overnight her life encircled around the tiny human being who completely relied on her.

That’s one of the most humbling feeling any person can ever feel. That feeling when another being is completely dependent on you – for food and for everything else. She spends her days and nights caring for the child. Help is around no doubt, and when asked more hands come forward then needed. But she and the child form a bond that is unbreakable, impenetrable and beyond the glossiness of words. The love a mother feels for a child cannot be expressed in words. Maybe poets have been able to justify the feeling, maybe dreamers understood the depth of that feeling but not all can express its piousness. It’s in that one moment when a girl truly becomes a woman, when she knows that she can’t love anyone more ever. Her child becomes her last love. Her final vow of commitment.

But with this feeling of completeness creeps in guilt. It is like slow poison which enters a mother’s life slowly, steadily and no matter how much she tries, she never seems to get rid of it. Guilt begins when that night she slept without realising her child was wet and needed fresh nappies. The guilt happens when the child cries of hunger because she hadn’t fed on time. The guilt strengthens when the baby falls ill and cries endlessly for hours and she helplessly holds on. The guilt overpowers when the child gets hurts by taking a bad fall. And finally it’s this guilt that consumes her when she can no longer sleep peacefully because she feels she has failed.

Mothers if you too have been consumed by this terrible, terrible feeling, know that you are not alone. You are not battling depression alone. You are not alone who is facing identity crisis. You aren’t alone dealing with the overwhelming responsibility of motherhood. Look around. There are many like you. Be sure that they are all smiling when they step out of the house. Look beyond their smile. Lookout for those tired eyes. You will find many like you. After all we are all gen-nex mothers who haven’t a clue about what’s happening and how to get it all right. Popular culture and media definitely isn’t helping. Who helps then? Oh! It takes a village to raise a kid, you surely know that. Ask for help. Talk to fellow mothers. Take out time for yourself. Do not be guilty if your child didn’t eat on time. Relax if you over-slept. Before allowing others to judge you, stop judging yourself.

You cannot do away with the guilt. That’s the bane of motherhood. It’s going to live with you. But don’t let it consume you. Make peace with it. Know you are not going to be perfect. Nobody is perfect. Everyone who seems to have it all sorted, haven’t actually a clue! So just relax and enjoy motherhood with a smile.  

What's with these days??????

Yesterday happened to be my bhaiyya bhabhi’s 6th anniversary.after the regular formalities of giving the gifts and wishing them we sat for a chat. My brother started off the conversation saying that this over-hype of anniversaries and other such “special” days are something he does not understand. Be it “Father’s Day”, “Mother’s Day”, “Friendship’s Day” all are the gimmicks of gift companies and definitely does not belong to our culture. He also added that the concept of cake cutting is also alien to our culture but now has become a part and parcel of our life. I pretty much agree with his point so didn’t have much to add. But it was my sister-in-law whose words made me sit back and think. She said, many things are not part of our culture but we have adopted it. Giving an example, she referred back to our breakfast of noodles, she said that even that wasn’t a part of our culture but we do eat it happily.

She had a point and I couldn’t argue. Though I have my reservations over the celebrations of all the “days” but her opinion had a point. There are many things which was not part of our culture but slowly and steadily we started accepting them because they were convenient and made our life easier. Today in the pace we are moving, we hardly have time for family and friends or for that matter our partner. Thus we happily resort to the convenient way of making those “special” days more “special” by throwing surprises at them. So the concept of Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day and all the other day’s becomes relevant to our life. And the gift companies happily cash of our sentiments.

So even though we may hate it, and there maybe extremists strongly voiving their opinions with dharnas and bandhs, the fact that we have also somehow contributed to the increasing popularity of these “special days”.

April Fool - The GMail style

"GMail is a new kind of web-mail, built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful. And maybe even fun”. This is one line probably most of the GMail users miss when they log in. This in brief tell us what we are using everyday, what we are experiencing and what is so useful every time we log in to check our mails. Launched on 1st April, 2004 with a storage capacity of 1 gigabyte, today GMail is one of the largest products in the market. It recently celebrated five glorious years on 1st April, 2009. To mark the fifth anniversary, GMail announced its new feature AutoPilot. With the help of an automated artificial intelligence technology called CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed- Intelligence Entity) the feature analyses ones writing skills and replies for the person.

GMail is notoriously known for the April Fools’ pranks that it have been playing on the users and the market analysts over the past five years. In 2004 when Google announced its launch everyone thought it to be a joke because no one expected a mail to have storage capacity of 1 GB. But to everyone’s surprise Google did the impossible and launched GMail with the promised storage capacity. Immediately in a few weeks time other big players like Yahoo upgraded their storage. It is still to be seen whether AutoPilot is just another prank or a real feature in GMail.

GMail since then has been re-inventing itself coming up with newer and better facilities each day. GMail comes in the Beta version meaning that all the features that they launch are on an experimental basis which actually comes out from the Google subsidiary “Google Labs”. The idea of having Beta phase is to enable the users rather than the developers or professional testers to give the feedback. GMail says that it wants the users to be the critics and respond to all the new features that they include in it.

In the last five years GMail has evolved. It was the first mailing site which intigrated chat within the mail box. It was also the first one to include video chats. As Todd Jackson, GMail Product Manager says, that these innovations and features are “really important in expanding the scope of communications that Gmail makes fun and possible and easy and fast.” Other features like less spam, easy UI (User Interface), filters and labels makes GMail a favorite with millions of people around the world. Jackson further enumerates that the steady growth of GMail has been one of the reasons the users are hooked to it. Gmail’s first aim is to make it as user-friendly as possible and then add more additional features. Jackson claims that in the next five years it will grow more and get even stronger.

As for the users, we are certainly benefiting from the increased experiments from Google Labs. Today there are millions of users logged on to GMail and it is “counting”. With GMail coming in many languages it further increases the chances of its growth. The latest edition for India is its Hindi version. Transliteration will only help GMail and obviously us, the users.