‘Motherly love’ is a lot about power play

I remember looking at the new born baby and thinking… all this fuss and waiting… but I feel nothing! Nurtured as we are on picture-perfect visuals of a new-born being handed over to a tired mother who smiles Madonna like (The Holy Mother, not the singer) as she looks tenderly at him sleeping angelically by her side, I felt a deep pang of mortification as I looked at the baby now sharing my bed.

No gush of motherly love engulfed me... in fact as my mind whispered to me that ahead lay a vast expanse of nights of sleeplessness and colic and health upsets disproportionately huge for such a small being, all I wanted to do was wish it all away and sleep.

Well, all that was decades ago. And soon enough I stopped looking at the baby like he was an alien sent specifically to test me, and began to consider him a piece of my own heart.

Pressure on mothers

Why do I write this? To tell other young mothers, who might, like the one I recently encountered blubbering away that she was abnormal and a monster, because she did not instantly fall in love with the child she had birthed; that it’s ok. Things straighten up, and all will be hunky dory. Anyway motherly love is over-rated. Good in moderate measures. When served out in large dollops, look what it does to half the men in the world who are mama’s boys despite three marriages and two divorces.

Actually motherly love can be dangerous. It keeps others out. Well, in today’s world even fathers are allowed, and seem happy (bless such dads) to help clean, change nappies, and play…but beyond that, it’s all her territory.

Actually, this happens a lot with stay-at-home moms of babies, who also end up keeping house, cooking, cleaning or if lucky, only supervising. But no home runs by itself, and a baby is a 24-hour chore. So, even as they ache to have time to themselves, many young mothers perversely refuse to share any but the most basic baby tasks, holding on to full control. Whether it impacts familial relationships or the baby adversely, or whether things ease out as the child starts play school probably differs from case to case. Which brings us to the story of control. Since time immemorial women have played the control game quietly. It sweeps across generations at times, with one woman exercising control over the other, since her desire to have things her way cannot extend beyond the home. The kitchen is and has always been a fair battlefield. Recipes, utensils, and timings are the arsenal used on lesser mortals to indicate who is the queen in the kitchen.

Political play

It’s political play at its subtlest. And the power play extends far into the future. How many much married men still long for the sambar or the baingan bharta or the gajar halwa cooked the way Mother made them? And how often do wives struggle for recognition of their own culinary skills, which are overshadowed by the ghost of their mothers-in-law’s cooking?

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not only the women who do this. Try telling the Maharaj who cooks across a clutch of houses in a colony how to temper his dal differently, and chances are you will be cooking your next meal.

Any arena has the possibility of becoming a control centre. If the political arena has its skirmishes; and the boardroom and the coffee machine are witness to scenes of one-upmanship and cut throat manoeuvres, the home is yet another battle ground.

Happy the working man or woman who lets the balance of power remain status quo within the four walls. If it gets too much, they can always work the ire off at the gym.

The writer is a Consulting Editor with Penguin India

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