I'm mature. I'm her daughter

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All Words: 1724

So basically, this month's prompt implies that I have to write about someone who never grew up.

Someone who never grew up.

Oh, man do I know exactly which person I'm going to write about!

My father's late wife, that's whom. Yeah, yeah, my father's wife would be my mother. She was my mother. She died eleven years ago, at the age of sixty-five. Chronological age, that is. Emotionally, she was still thirteen. Maybe fifteen. Still whining about the things her mother had done to her when she was a kid.

See, my Mom was born in 1941. When she started school, it was fashionable to learn English. So she was sent to an 'English medium' school. Which meant that all the subjects were taught in English. The 'second' language was Hindi, and the 'third' language was Marathi.

By the time her younger sisters were old enough to go to school, British rule had ended in India. The backlash was that people were now shunning the English language, and Mom's younger siblings went to a 'Gujarati medium' school. The Gujarati language is the one closest to my family's native tongue.

Mom didn't have a formal Gujarati background at any level, and her three sisters had all their subjects in the language. But it was more than just the language. The entire culture in the Gujarati medium school was closer to our family's way of life at the time.

So, Mom was teased a lot, by her Mom and her sisters. Teased about her pronunciation, especially in Gujarati. Teased about her reading habits. Teased about her clothes. Teased about her friends. Teased about sending out greeting cards on festive occasions. (The 'traditional' way for us is to go visit everyone. Not just mail out cards.)

With the result that Mom withdrew. She spent less and less time with her Mom and her sisters. She did have some things in common with her Dad, who liked to read the same books she did, but he was a very soft-spoken soul and didn't stand up for her.

Then Mom married my Dad.

She wanted to keep studying after she got married. She was doing a post-graduate course in biology. Dad's Mom didn't want a daughter-in-law of the family to go out to college. What would the neighbours think? Dad fought his mother, to get my mother to go to college.

But my parents continued to live in the joint family. (Dad's parents, their nine sons, and the wives of those sons who were married, all in a 3,500 sq. foot apartment on the fifth floor of an apartment block overlooking the sea.) My grandma lost no opportunity to demonstrate to my mother that she disapproved of her modern ways -- going to college, indeed!

So Mom withdrew further.

My parents moved out of the joint family apartment to a cottage on the beach-front, and then I came along.

Mom couldn't change.

She now had a serious empathy-deficit, and she couldn't really be a nurturing mother. Soon after I was born, my parents gave their beloved cocker-spaniel away -- Mom said she couldn't take care of both baby and dog. The dog's new human said the dog disappeared soon after -- apparently, he went out on the street to search for my parents and was never seen again.

The blow hit Mom hard. I'm not sure if she subconsciously blamed her newborn baby, me, for the loss of her pet.

Anyway, I was handed to a full-time maid, and I became the most pampered little kid ever. The maid was there to do the mundane stuff, but there was someone else called in to give me an oil massage and a bath. My every little need was met.

Except ... my need to learn to do anything for myself.

There was no plan, no thought, no -- anything. I didn't get toilet trained. I peed in my pants long, long after my classmates had learned to use the bathroom. I wasn't told to chew my food properly. I wasn't told to speak softly in enclosed spaces. Everything was just done for me. Soiled pants were washed by someone else. Clothes were picked up off the floor, washed, dried, ironed and put back in the cupboard. As I grew and started needing to take books to school, these were retrieved from wherever I had been lounging to study, and put in place. I was debarred from going anywhere near the kitchen sink or the gas-stove -- I was too delicate, too stupid, too rich to have to do my own dishes or make my own food.

I wasn't allowed to have feelings. Mom was a teacher in my school, and if any other teacher complained about me to her, she'd yell at me right there, in the staff-room or wherever we happened to be at the time, not caring who was around. When I told her that it was unfair, she told me that her reputation as a teacher and her relationship with her colleagues mattered more to her than my feelings, I could suck it up. So, even for minor offences like losing a pen, or writing my name in a slightly wrong spot on an exam paper -- things that other kids' parents wouldn't even find out about, I was often reprimanded in public. When I look back, I wonder what it would've been like if I'd run to her precious staff-room and yelled something rude there. She wouldn't have had a 'reputation' to maintain after that, for sure!

Once, Mom needed to buy a new umbrella and the three of us went in the car -- Dad driving with Mom next to him, and me in the back seat. The area we lived in wasn't very developed then, we had to go 'out into town'. I hadn't realised that the route to the umbrella shop took us past the library. When the building came in to view, I grew excited and said, "Hey, can we stop a minute? There's a book I want to borrow, I could pick it up."

I didn't hear the end of that for a week. "You know that I urgently needed a new umbrella, and you hadn't said you wanted to go to the library." She rounded on Dad, too. "Why didn't you tell her that Mom's umbrella is important, her library book is just a lark?"

I wasn't even allowed to think for myself, or make my own choices.

We jump now to ninth grade, with TV coming to India, and some families we knew owning black-and-white TV sets. (We didn't.) Then colour-TV came in, and I actually knew two people who owned a colour TV -- Dad's younger brother, and a classmate I didn't like very much.

I particularly remember this occasion. My school's dance troupe, comprising people I knew, was going to be ON TV. This was huge, and I wanted to watch it in colour. Dad phoned his brother, and we arranged to have dinner there and watch TV.

At the last minute, Mom decided that Dad would go to his brother's house -- but she and I would go to my (pesky) classmate's house. She wanted to be polite to that girl's Mom. I begged, I pleaded, I hated going there -- but it was no use.

Mom didn't understand anyone else's needs but her own.

I had a miserable evening at my classmate's place. After it was over, Mom grudgingly agreed that we would have been better off at my uncle's. They'd been expecting us for dinner there, anyway. I wonder whether they had made extra food, and what they did with it.

This happened when I was in the ninth grade. I'm fifty years old now and my blood still boils about it. I mean, Mom should've gained some empathy by then, shouldn't she? What had I done to deserve visiting someone I hated? Sometimes, I wonder what would've happened if I'd taken the sandwich my (pesky) classmate's (equally pesky) mother gave me, and thrown it out the window or something. I actually build scenarios in my head with something like that, and it gives me a chuckle to imagine Mom's red face.

After my Grade XII exams, we shifted cities. Mom didn't let me help with the packing, insisting that I was too delicate and would fall sick if I carried stuff around. It was a busy time for her, and if I dared get sick, she wouldn't have the energy to look after me, oh no. When we arrived and were unpacking, she complained that I 'hadn't lifted a finger to help pack'.

Dad is much more understanding. He's eighty-three now, and he understands why I don't go to the sink and wash up. I was never trained to. The days the part-time help doesn't come (we don't have full-time help any more), Dad washes the dishes quite automatically. I woke up with a cold this morning, and Dad is making ginger-tea for me right now.

Dad puts up with not being able to invite people home, too. I mean, I can't help the mess in the living room. Nobody taught me to pick up after myself, remember? He should've taken a firmer hand in my upbringing, if he wanted me to turn out some way or another. Just because Mom had withdrawn, thanks to her childhood experiences, was no reason for Dad to withdraw from bringing me up, too. Imagine, I was left to two maids, who waited hand and foot on me. How was I supposed to learn to clean up? So, when Dad's friends or brothers come to our city, he meets them wherever they're staying -- a hotel, or someone else's place.

People tell me that I'm like her, you know. That I resemble my Dad's wife in many ways. My love of reading, my passion for teaching, even some of my gestures and mannerisms, they say. I resent this. I don't resemble her at all. I mean, yes, I love reading and yes, I'm a pretty good teacher, but that's my own thing. It has nothing whatsoever to do with her.

One thing I do know. I'll tell you what it is. Look at me now. Take a good look at this story.

She never grew up. I did. I'm mature.

I'm mature.

I-m-m-a-t-u-r-e.

Not like her, am I?



"Quotation Inspiration - September 2018 Winners!" 
Third Place - "I'm mature. I'm her daughter"