On the second Sunday of May (May 9 this year) Mother’s Day is celebrated all over America. It is the annual ritual when kids make breakfast for their young mothers and older kids take their ailing mothers out of their nursing homes for dinner. Mothers are honored at churches and family functions. Restaurants are full as all mothers take a day off from cooking.
Mothers look forward to this day when they can count on undivided attention from their children. The retail industry starts promoting this day three months in advance where they try to equate love and devotion with the “value” of the present. Interesting ads pop up on TV like –“If you really love your mother, you will give her a plasma TV this year” or “Tell your son to send you to the Caribbean for a holiday this Mother’s Day.”
I have always watched with amusement the celebration of Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Sweetest Day, Valentine’s Day, Secretary’s Week, Boss’s Day, and the myriad of days invented by the retail industry. As a Bengali, I have found it very difficult to celebrate mother’s day one day of the year and ignore my mother the remaining 364 days. Maybe Bengali mothers are in a special category who cannot be relegated to a one-day celebration.
I can only speak about my mother but I don’t think the experience of my fellow Bengalis is any different from mine. While my father spent most of his time at work, my mother functioned as the Chief Operating Officer of the family. She managed the family finances; made sure all of us children went to school on time and did our homework, served as the principal liaison person with the extended family, was the main confidant of my father, and of course cooking delicious meals. My father could peruse his career knowing that everything will be taken care of. While I can go on about what she did for us, the list is equally long about what she did not do for herself. In other words, she put her needs last. She gave up opportunities to travel to America and Europe so that she could stay home and ensure her strict oversight of our education. She avoided with equal diligence many social parties associated with being the Secretary’s or Commissioner’s wife for the same reason.
My mother was married at 16 having never set her eyes on my father before her wedding day. Like young girls of those times, she accepted her parents’ decision without any question and embarked on her journey of life. Over the next 50 years, she fulfilled all her duties as mother and wife but she was also unique among her peers in many ways.
She was a voracious reader and educated herself in many different ways. Even though most of her children when on to achieve the highest levels of education, she remained the most well-read person in the family. Her knowledge of literature, religion, and politics was a constant source of amazement to the grandchildren. She connected with the next generation better than us (their parents) and she was always the “first to know” about their love lives.
While she put our needs first she did not give up her dreams entirely—that of being a writer. As each one of us left home to begin our own journeys and she had more time to herself, she started to write – first a short story here and there and then novels. Her novels were mostly about historical romances and we were surprised to discover the ‘hidden’ person within my mother. We never knew that she was an incurable romantic at heart and her zest for life belied her older appearance.
Once my father, who was 13 years older than her, passed away, she had even more free time than before. Instead of withdrawing into a cocoon, she started traveling to various parts of the world where all of us had settled. To our amazement, she rode the highest roller coasters with her grandchildren in the amusement parks in the USA, tasted sushi in restaurants in Vancouver, Canada, and swam in the cold waters of Lake Willoughby in Vermont. She was never afraid to experience anything new — whatever that might be. The grandchildren never referred to her as old because she had shown them that being young is really a state of mind.
To me, every day is mother’s day including May 9th, the designated Mother’s Day of 2021. I know that anything that I might have achieved in my personal and professional life is due to an action that I had no input — to be born as the son of Selima and Habibur Rahman. To be called my mother’s son remains to this day my single biggest honor.
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Dr. Faisal Rahman is the Founding Dean and Professor at Graham School of Management, Saint Xavier University, Chicago, Illinois, USA. He is also CEO/President of APAC group of healthcare companies.