Childhood ends, Motherhood doesn’t?

My mom was a teacher during my childhood and she used to tell me that she is Devaki (Mother of Krishna) and my grandmother is Yashoda (foster mother of Krishna) and coincidently my name is Nanda Kishor. I was raised mostly by my grandparents even though I used to live with my parents. She used to take care of me very well in the form of food, stories, scolds, and whatnot. I grew up and became a teenager as I had no option. I left my childhood behind, but my grandmother didn’t leave her motherhood.

I was eating michhar(also called as mixture in some part of somewhere sometimes) with my friends which I brought from home to the hostel on my return. Biting a peanut from it kind of took me back to the days when I used to wait for the 4 PM bell to ring so that I could run to ammumma (that’s what I am gonna call my grandmother). She will make something out of something every day and having it with tea used to be my IKIGAI then. Sometimes she will fry something, on other days it will be michhar and rusk. You eat a handful of michhar while 10% of it falls from your palm, which makes the situation spicy, and now you dip the rusk in tea and have a bite to calm the situation repeating this was pretty fun giving it a climax of gulping the remaining tea. Then I run to play cricket with my friends without an umpire, it’s fun, will share about that on some other day.

The above paragraph is not a food review, it’s more about how much effort she used to put into making me happy and healthy only to handover me over to teenage some years down the line far from her both in distance, thoughts, understanding, and beliefs. She used to enjoy nurturing me, I didn’t notice this then, and still, all of this is my assumption. She was pretty good at it also, she used to make chapatis delicately and it hurts me now that I have to eat these half-ass cooked ones from restaurants here. She used to do everything as perfectly as how a working professional approaches a project. Maybe I was one of her projects, but not the one right after my mother. She became a mother when my mother was born. My mother left her childhood, but my grandmother didn’t leave her motherhood.

I have heard about this friend of my mother who used to live with them in rent and my ammumma used to take care of her a lot, after that many others too. Then I and my sister came, and as we left, she wanted some new child to take care of. It’s interesting how she couldn’t leave motherhood and choose something new. She gladly found her cousin's grandchildren and she really loves them. She makes special dishes for them and used to tell me when I used to visit her like “Hey he(my cousin) is just like you, he likes Valval (One of the Konkani Dishes), he doesn’t eat anything else”. She was delighted whenever she used to share about such things where she made them something and they really liked it. It is evident that she wants something to engage herself in and is unknowingly nurturing human beings to become happy and healthy. That’s a wonderful hobby I guess, I donno personally.

I was talking about this to one of my friends and she told me that this might be only true for women who had the time frame to master motherhood, and is not the case for working professionals who have an equal or bigger purpose in life than children. I am aware of the fact that not every woman desire to be a mother and I really respect them, in fact, I support that as finally people are choosing themselves over other things and want to genuinely make an impact in the world in various domains. But the ones who joined the club of motherhood, do they leave the club or they are still in search of something to nurture be it a child, dog, or anything that will grow into something that will forget everything.