Column

Hummingbird

When my sister and I sit down to talk, there is so much to catch up on. She is a doctor, lives in the UK, has a daughter all of 19; and I…well, you know me. I live here, in India, and work at wordsmithing on the keyboard. And the topic that invariably keeps us chatting through the night is one of two: our mother or her daughter.

My mother lives with me; she is an integral part of our family. But, being human, we have our moments. Her daughter lives with her no longer, having moved to university. Has been a momma’s girl, despite their tiffs, but is now finding an identity that my sister might not quite recognise. What is it about moms and daughter that keeps the seesaw of emotions swinging?

I wish I knew. They do talk about an Oedipus Complex, but I think someone missed out on some tongue-twisting name for this love-hate relationship between mothers and daughters that goes on despite the growing years, despite marriage, remarriage, old age and what have you.

Today’s daughters, of course, are different from yesterday’s generation’s daughters, but so are the mothers. If the subject matter of their discussions and disagreements have changed, well, the tension levels are still an almost measurable constant.

“My daughter shocked me yesterday,” says a friend, who has a 16-year-old single child. “She told me her boyfriend wanted her to sleep over. “Don’t panic, mom”, she added, “it is okay, his parents live there too.”

In my time, I would have had to cross many bridges of persuasion to get an okay to sleep over at a girl friend’s place. “What did you say?” I asked, curious.

“Well I tried telling her Daddy would not like it,” she answered, and she responded with “Don’t tell him, he is a fuddy duddy. You I am sure understand!” Now that was a new one.

I know the girl did not get her way, but my friend worries that she might have done the wrong thing. “What if I have stoked a fire?” she worries. “Am I making it more exciting for her to break the rules?”

But there it is, another example of the seesaw: to trust or not to trust, to give in or hold back…Have we, as mothers, learnt nothing, really?

Yes, we have. “Leniency is a norm I practise,” says another friend. “I would rather have my daughter talk to me than hide things. She tells me everything.” Does she, I wonder. Will she always? Yet, it is a change from the times when mothers were the girl’s equivalent of the warden, and much feared.

I know of a classmate who thought God was punishing her because she bled once a month, and worried her mother would kill her if she found out. But I also pity the mother of three who is unable to tell her girls they must live by the rules — they earn their money, they lead their lives, they come and go as they please. “My husband argues with them, but I hold my peace. I worry they will move out,” she says.

Access to new disposable incomes does that — makes mothers fear about losing their children, and thus they give them a long rope.

Basically, in today’s world there is a definite slackening of the reins that mothers held. “Today, I let my daughter meet her boyfriend in the evenings. I let him pick her up and drop her back. I trust she will be guided by my values,” says Kirti, a Warden Road mother of two. “I do not tell my son or my husband about it, there would be hell.” Daughters, of course, have through the ages staked out their personal course. It is their bid to be their own people, to find their identity.

“Yet, often I find myself echoing a sentiment or a mood I have always hated in my mother”, says Nafisa, a teacher. “Love them, hate them, we cannot ignore them,” she adds.

True indeed. Changing norms might change the equations between mothers and their girl children. Worry over bringing them up right used to be a serious motive for control in the past; today more and more mothers see their girls as a source of wish fulfillment and vicarious living. Either way, the control factor is something that will spark rebellion. And yet, the cord that binds women to their mothers is tenuous. Daughters, as one knows, are more caring of their mothers when the need tables are reversed. And the seesaw swings on!

Email: ssaran@dnaindia.net