A simple village woman married off at tender age of 15, my mother spent her entire youth around the fields and forests and that was not romantic at all. Her hard work and strain had sucked life out of her. She was emaciated, small woman shouldering the responsibility of three children and the entire household chores alone. However, as we grew up, we neither shared her burden, nor did we aid her. We barely went to the forest to fetch firewood and fodder for the cattle. We were not in the fields to help her. Instead we went to school; we studied as much as we could. We stayed confined in the area she had demarcated for us. We did so because she told us that we needed wings that she herself lacked, and education would give us that.
My empowerment is the result of my mother's blistered hands and dirty cracked heels that, as a child, ashamed me in front of other people on many occasions. Her hands were sandpaper rough; cracked and dirty, the nails were eroded because of continuous toil in the fields. She applied nail polish on those nail less fingers while going out to the city once in a while and that made it look even worse. She could no way be compared to my well off relatives in the city. But she stood defiant. I could see the sense of pride sparkling in her eyes while telling them that her daughters stood first in the class and that we could fluently converse in English. So she pushed us further to excel in studies. Being born in a village as a daughter never prevented us from any opportunities and choices in life.
As a result, for the two and half decades of my life, I grew up to become a confident girl who firmly believed in her right of 'choice'. I cut my hair in the manner I pleased, refused to wear makeup, refused to grow nails, or to wear ornaments. Altogether I refused to be a stereotypical Nepali woman and instead engaged myself in things that would strengthen my personality.
The need to reconcile my invincible 'self' with the social expectations started being more apparent after marriage. In place of my mother, several other women emerged who wanted to clip my wings so as to prevent me from fluttering in freedom. They insisted that I should chain my neck with pote, wrist with chura and drape myself in the burden of heavily ornate sarees and kurtas. There should be the vermillion powder on my forehead to prove my fidelity. They judged me more by the feminine decorum that I maintained rather than my other qualifications.
In this battle for ornaments, almost every time, the social characters I have confronted are women. Their eyes are shrewd enough to scan and detect if I am wearing those stuffs. These contractors of the social customs are oblivious of the fact that in doing so, they are clipping their own wings as well as their daughters'. They have blindfolded themselves from what lay beyond that glitter. And I come back to my mother bare necked, bare wristed, empty forehead, as natural as I can possibly be because I know even today she would let me flutter my wings in the fashion I choose, because these are the sprouts of the seeds of consciousness she had planted much earlier in my life.
Now as I stand three decades farther from my mother's tireless battle to alienate us from the fields and forests, to prevent us falling into the vicious cycle and empower us, I can well analyze what ignited that spark of consciousness in her and I strongly feel that, it was education. She had been to school for a couple of years. And that was the window for her to view the world from a different perspective. She valued education for her daughters because she had tasted it herself, because she realized its worth and even more so because the society had deprived her of it and clipped her wings.
Drawing from my own life experiences, I have come to realize that women themselves are catalytic for women empowerment. No doubt mother is the first teacher of every child irrespective of their sex but it is truer for daughters because they identify more with their mothers. They inherit the legacy of the social customs (good or bad) from the women around them and entrench it to their own psyche. This process of entrenchment starts right from girlhood and is reflected in their every act as they gradually grow up to become a mother themselves. Thus the state of mother's consciousness has a more significant spillover effect in a daughter's life.
Like every other Mother's Day, this year too, I am sure my conversations with my mother will be lackluster: no frills, no fancy words. But deep inside, as always, I truly respect and value her sacrifice that paved the way for my emancipation.
paudel.smita@gmail.com
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