Motherhood

Aaargh - just typed a post and Blogger lost it.

Thanks for the comments on my post yesterday. For some reason, I want to write more about my mother.

My mother is a great mother. She and my father brought my brother and I up in a country in which they were immigrants. It's not easy to do that when you come from a culture of extended families, where mothers help each other through motherhood. If you haven't been brought up in an extended family, you would probably find the lack of intimacy in one difficult to cope with. If you have, and you end up living in the typical nuclear family instead, you would probably find it very lonely. She had to try to relate to who her children became as we grew up in a culture that she hadn't grown up in. How to make sure we felt integrated without being alienated from the family culture?

In addition to all that she had a successful career as an anaesthetist. She worked part-time in order to care for us and the family. She has just taken retirement, a major life change on its own, which was timed to coincide with the arrival of Moksha. She had already come over to help with stuff two weeks before he was born. She came to my last OB appointment with me. She heard Moksha's heartbeat and watched the needle trace out the perfect lines with me. She was at my side a few days later when we were told there was no heartbeat. She was at my side during labour. My husband held my hand. A midwife held one leg back and my mother held the other. She held Moksha in her arms and kissed him. Both DH and I failed to kiss him! I take comfort that he didn't leave completely without kisses from his family.

She looked after me and my husband when we got home from the hospital. She cried with us but made sure we ate square meals, supporting my husband by sharing the load of worry he had for my wellbeing on the days I could not even get up or dressed. She helped me shower in my postpartum state of physical and mental weakness. She did loads of laundry.

For just over a week after Moksha's birth I was covered in a raging red rash, which was eventually diagnosed as a stress reaction. I would wake up in the middle of the night in a delirious frenzy of scratching, breaking my skin and risking infection. I was already on the maximum dose of a powerful steroid and had topical steroid cream in addition. My husband sometimes could not stand the scratching and once burst into tears at the terrible sound of it during the night and at his own helplessness to stop it. He was so tired. He wasn't strong enough to hold my hands down when I was begging for them to be released. In my manipulative delirium (I took sleeping tablets for the first week but woke up anyway with the scratching), I told him to let go and promised I wouldn't scratch. Then I would scratch hard. He fell for it everytime. Not my mother. My mother stayed up during the night to hold my hands down and put cold compresses on my legs, my arms, my feet, my thighs. She didn't let me scratch no matter how much I begged.

She is 62 years old and will be my mother forever. I'm not sure if I can convey what I mean by that last statement. Sure, I have arguments with her just like everyone else. But I could not wish for a better mother and my son could not have wished for a better grandmother. Since I became a mother, I have understood on a different level my mother's unconditional love for her children.

My mother doesn't know I have a blog. I love her so much. She is going through a terrible journey, one which she never expected to have to go through, just like I am. She cannot draw upon her experience to help me. She doesn't always say things which I find comforting but she yearns to make my pain go away. Each of us is in our separate tunnels of grief. They're all shaped differently, have varying levels of darkness and unknown lengths.

I hope one day I can be half as good a mother as my own.