Accepting My Mother As A Human Being

She wasn’t just my mother, she was her own person too

I always had this idea that my mother’s life didn’t start until she had me, I never saw her as her own person with a history or a life. I’m the youngest of 4 girls so I was always surrounded by people. Unlike my sisters, all I’ve ever known my whole life is them, but they could remember life without me.

When my eldest sister, who’s 8 years older than me, left home I asked my mother where she went to which she replied, “to live with her father.” I was confused. “You mean our father?” I asked, “No…her father.”

I was 6 years old when I learnt about my mother’s first marriage. The day when my sister realised she had enough, she called my mother and asked to be picked up. I went along because there was no one to take care of me while my other sisters had after-school curriculums to keep them busy.

We pulled up to this big white house and a huge family rolls out that I’ve never seen before. They hug and kiss my mother and told her how much they miss her. They look at me and congratulate my mother on having 3 more babies and I sat in awe as they update each other on their lives. A life that my mother had. She sounded like a different woman, not like my mother at all.

My mother is an atheist, she spends her free days reading up on books and educating herself on religion and atheism. It’s a stark contrast to when we go back home to my grandmother’s house. A state that is governed by Islam and so is my grandmother herself.

I soon learnt that my mother was raised the same — she went to an Islamic boarding school and lived her life under Sharia Law and Islam. She married her first husband at the hands of tradition, thinking that her life purpose was to get married and bear children after living her wild young adult life in the city.

When I met my sister’s father, I thought he was extremely tall, skinny, funny and charismatic. He made me laugh, tickled me and I distinctively remember asking my mother if I could stay with him and my sister because of how much fun I thought he was. My mother was furious.

I thought that fury lied in what I said, but it was in who he was. I learnt years later that he was an alcoholic. He had a smell to him that I had yet to familiarise myself with, it was alcohol. Not only that, he used to viciously put his hands on my mother — even when she was pregnant with my sister. My mother told me the stories of how he would drink himself to death, make scenarios in his head and take out his anger on her.

She revealed to my sister that there was one point where she thought she was going to die with my sister barely forming in her belly. She’s not the maternal type, being a mother wasn’t really part of her plan. But there she was, a mother-to-be, and the lioness in her kicked in to protect her child and she left him. 20 years later, he’s still a raging alcoholic and nowhere to be found. The family that I met that day left him behind too and he’s now just a memory to all of us.

This tiny aspect of my mother made me look at her differently. Yes, she had a career, she had a life with her own friends. But she was also my mother. I never wondered about what her reality looked like because it never mattered to me. It also opened my eyes to the struggles that she had as a mother caring for 4 children.

The life that she had shaped her to be the mother I know her to be, but that was a hard pill for me to swallow. To accept that she was as flawed as I was baffled me — you mean to tell me that this woman who birthed not only me but my sisters as well is only human?

Where we lived in the city was dangerous, I remember waking up in the mornings and my mother squabbling around the house because it got broken into while we were asleep. It was run-down with addicts roaming the streets trying to get lucky, what was a single mother to do in that situation — she’s also tiny, 4'11" to be specific.

When the details of her relationship with my father became apparent, it was clear that she wasn’t perfect and that she made mistakes too, and so did my father. My sister exposed that the reality of us living with our grandmother wasn’t because we loved spending time with our family, but because my mother didn’t have the means to support us and it broke my soul.

She hid the hustle and the danger that we were in, to the point where I thought we had a near-perfect life. I always wondered how the life of my sister’s differed from mine, I guess it was just dumb luck that I was born much later and my mother was able to perfect the image of what a mother was supposed to be. My sisters, on the other hand, had seen differently.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting a lot, I looked at myself in the past few years and thought about all the mistakes I’ve made and the way I’ve chosen to live. It’s a hard concept to think about because my life, in comparison to my mother, is very different. At my age, my mother already had my sister. She had a mouth to feed while I just have to worry about my bills.

Somehow, seeing her as nothing but a human that lived a life of consequences has aided in my healing. I’m able to forgive her easily for the mistakes that she’s made in regards to my sisters and me. I see her flaws and I’m able to accept that she’s my mother, but she’s also her own person. And that’s okay. Even the superheroes I looked up to weren’t perfect, that the things that matter are never easy to care for.