A few months back, while scrolling down my Facebook feed, I happened to come across a post from a food blog kind of Facebook page. I had already seen some posts previously from the lady who ran this page. While I never really read her posts completely before or gave it any sort of engagement, her posts kept coming up on my feed. Anyway, this particular day, her post caught my attention, probably because of the select comments visible under it, which all ran on the lines of how mothers are sad, miserable creatures ill-treated by their children and family as a whole. Maybe because this suddenly took me back to my childhood, I stopped and read her post that day.
To put it in a nutshell, this lady’s teenage daughter had had a fight with her that day about something she wanted to do and her mother didn’t want her to. The mother ended up yelling at the daughter about it, and the daughter just left for school. And after the daughter left, she kept complaining about it, but her husband told her that what she said or the way she yelled wasn’t fair and that he wasn’t going to interfere anymore in it. I might have at least attempted to tell myself that I shouldn’t judge as I had no clue what the whole story was and because I am a third party who wouldn’t know the real context or whatever… if it had not been for the way this lady had penned down her post.
Even at the very beginning of the post, the lady had talked about how she was feeling infuriated and was in a bad mood and how her “trigger” had just left for school. Throughout the post, there were references of the kid being her “trigger,” and not in a humorous way, but in a very degrading tone, sort of like a bait for others to freely judge the kid as yet another ungrateful brat who was making poor mommy miserable. The whole post was a vent, understandably maybe. But the way she kept talking about her teenage kid as her trigger and how she went on and on about how she was a mother who kept trying to do the right things and how the kid didn’t care at all, just like her dad who wouldn’t support her in this, kind of made me want to look at things from the poor kid’s side.
In the first place, why she thought a food-related page was a place to put up this rant, although with a single photo of her morning preparations, was beyond me. But my most important thought was, what happens when the daughter reads this post that her mother had made about her, calling her the trigger who set off her bad mood, made public to her 50K plus followers and more people on social media? I felt glad that at least the dad wasn’t part of this “crime.” Because it was very much one. I know, because I was this daughter, pretty much all my life. Thank God there was no social media back then! Otherwise, I would have been painted the “trigger” and the villain for the whole world to see.
But even without the aid of social media–like tools, my mother used to make sure that anyone she met had a sit-through of how she was a miserable woman who was only destined to cry, thanks to her family. And every single time, we went to our ancestral homes, there would always be some relative or the other sitting me and, sometimes, my brother down for a lecture on how our mother was a saint whose tears were a result of our actions. As I sat there, every time, with my head bowed, I wanted to ask them—“What actions?” Because neither did I have an answer back then, nor now, for the very basic questions—“What did I do?” and “Why the hell was my mother crying every time she was around people?”
My brother and I were the kind of kids who never really caused trouble. We fought among ourselves like any normal siblings did. But that was it. And to be very honest, I hardly even saw my mother. She was away all day at work and was busy with household chores or something else late in the evening when she came home that there never was time to spend with her on weekdays. On weekends, we went to either of our ancestral homes without fail, and she was always with the relatives and hardly ever saw us. In fact, throughout my childhood, I was getting sexually abused left and right by people right under her nose, and I couldn’t even tell her because I never got any time or a relationship with her.
Despite all this, she had a way of sighing and, with tears in her eyes, saying, “My life is like this. There is nothing I can do about it.” Exactly how her life was and what she meant by “this,” I have never understood. Neither did all the relatives who were consoling her. But to them, it was always, “It has to be the children. What else can she be sad about?” So I found myself at the receiving end of long sermons and angry rants on the importance of keeping one’s parents happy, although I never once understood why. And for an argument’s sake, let’s say that there was something I was doing wrong; who was supposed to correct me? My own mother or absolute outsiders??? Why did she have to recruit outsiders to do her job if she felt justified that I was bad??? What does that make her???
When I was more grownup and had decided to take control of my life and what was happening to me, I stopped staying silent and listening to these nonsensical rants, either by evading them or by respectfully (highly disrespectfully in others’ eyes) saying that I wouldn’t listen to any more of this. That was pretty much the proof that everyone needed that I was indeed a “trigger.” The truth was that I had had enough of being badmouthed by my own mother to anyone who would listen, that too when I had no idea what I was being badmouthed for. And I had had more than enough of the “parents deserve to be respected for all their sacrifices” sermon, as if children didn’t have feelings, and if they did, they didn’t matter.
Even then, I kept all the hurt that I had gone through throughout my childhood, and beyond, to myself and never said a word to anyone. Until something snapped in me one day when I was close to twenty, at a time when I was living alone with my mother at home. While I hardly had any relationship left with her by then, I still didn’t want an outsider treating her bad. She came to me crying one day about how a chechi in her early twenties, let’s call her Rani, who was staying with us at nights as a help, had spoken rudely to her and made her cry.
I should have just let it go in hindsight. But something about daughterly duties made me console her and tell her that I would talk to Rani sternly about how I wasn’t going to tolerate anyone treating my mother badly, which I did. What happened next blew my mind. As Rani started yelling at me to mind my business and not to tell her how talk to MY mother, my “saint” of a mother, who was well aware that I had come inside to talk on her behalf, walked in with a (fake) shocked expression on her face and started yelling at me, “What is happening here? Who asked you to talk to Rani? If I knew that you had come inside to talk to her, I would have stopped you. Rani is like my daughter, and you have no right to tell her how to talk to me.”
And just like that, Rani embraced her enemy, and my mother went back in her good books—all at my expense! I remember standing there stunned, figuring out what had just happened, reeling under the impact of the most painful stab on my back, from my own mother. In that instance, I knew that I was nothing but a pawn to be used and thrown away. Even today, knowing how cunningly my mother literally used me just to smooth things over with Rani, I feel betrayed to the core, which might sound overdramatic to others, but it is still a very intense feeling within me.
It was still close to a decade after that that I slowly started opening up about the trauma of a childhood full of sexual abuse, the loneliness that I went through, the lack of acknowledgement of what all had happened when I finally did tell her about all the mortifying stories, and even her happily calling the very predators who had hurt her daughter her “very own people” and hosting them at what was once supposed to be MY home. Because I realized that I was being badmouthed all my life by my mother for God knows what, just being a kid maybe, when I was carrying in my mind the burden of a lifetime, only because there was no one to protect me.
I knew then that I no longer owed her my silence, and I definitely no longer had to let others judge me without even telling my piece. It was, it still is, a battle of proving that parents aren’t always right, that children have feelings, and that those feelings matter. So I write and I write about episodes from my life, trying to prove that my silence wasn’t proof that I was wrong, at least to those who are willing to see the other side, no matter how petty I make myself look in this attempt, even when I know that I have simply reversed the roles and am probably guilty of the same crime, just the other way round. I am just letting out the muffled screams from deep within saying, “Can someone please believe me??”
More than anything though, all this has taught me to be different when it comes to my girls. We are a family, we are a unit, and we still might have our fights and worries despite all our love. But never once will I take those out of this unit, because my girls trust me more than anyone else in the world, and I will never break that trust by making them scapegoats and villains in my accounts to others, and for what? For sympathy from outsiders as the ill-treated poor mommy, a glorified saint that I am not? Never! My girls and I will make our mistakes, correct each other, and learn from each other, all within the cherished walls of our unit. That way, our bond of love and trust will never shatter. That way, I will always be there for them, all my life and beyond!
Also published on Medium.
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