The Better Within
I can still recall the days when I could hear my mother’s faint sobs behind the old bathroom door. I would just stand by the door and wait for my mother. When I heard her shuffle inside I would run into my room and pretend to be asleep. She would silently creep inside and lay beside me, hugging me tight and letting some teardrops fall upon my cheek. Her skinny bones and ribcages felt like the safest place in the world
I would sometimes wonder whether the old mattress was comfy enough to make her fall asleep.It was a summer night when my mother rushed us to the hospital. She was sweating profusely and gripping my hand tight. She silently told me to wait outside. I wanted to wail and nag because that’s what a six-year-old child would do but something inside me told me not to.
Instead, I stood at the door like an obedient child and waited. After some time I heard a woman wail, so I peeked inside the room. I saw my mother crying over a sleeping man, a man very close to me. My grandmother was consoling her though I don’t recall any of my aunts and uncles consoling, not even while cremating my father’s body.
Even phone calls reduced drastically, no one called like they used to do before. The neighbors started ignoring. Year passed and I was the mad woman’s son. Everything changed and the house started looking old without maintenance. And I was the son of the woman who ate her husband, as they would say. But I was never merrier to be called my mother’s son because no one felt what I have felt
My mother was the strongest and most brilliant woman in the world. She told me how to read and write with the little formal education she had before my father died. I enjoyed the laughter she gave when I asked her silly questions. She had so much knowledge in her that she would calculate the accounts in her mind but no one gave her a job because she was a widow, after all, a danger to their family and their husbands
But I know my mother wouldn’t do such a thing because she had me and my late father in her heart. It was not long when the boys started throwing stones at me and my mother, sometimes making us lock ourselves for a whole day.
As the long winter nights dragged in, I was never so happy just to lie beside her with an empty stomach. I couldn’t just hide my excitement, what we would do together tomorrow??I wouldn’t forget that she was my first friend and my first love always supportive through thick and thin. There were days when she was really happy. One of the days included my result day, just to stand beside the crowd to clap for me; she readied herself from early in the morning. I would smile beneath my blanket covers.
Just to see her smile, I wouldn’t let myself drown in silly enjoyment as my friends did even in my final years in college. Just remembering the day when I first met my mother in the social network bottles tears in my heart. My mother looked so happy and enthusiastic like a child peering at me and time to time checking her new mobile phone. For the first time in my life, I heard murmurs and whispers behind her smiling face. I knew, by sitting at the end of the opposite world, that my mother was not alone but was surrounded by the relatives I forgot, those uncles and aunts who deserted us.
When my flight started, I couldn’t help myself from tossing and turning constantly giving smiles to the old man beside me. When I exited from the airport looking forward to a taxi to head straight towards home, I found the woman I loved, the same woman I wanted to badly hug although she looked a little aged from the last time I had seen her. But she was the one I rushed like the same seven-year-old boy carrying the prize and hugged my mother. All the emotions that I bottled up for 20 years welled up as tears
My mother just silently tapped my back and said “You have grown stronger”, and smiled. I was happy to be finally in those same bony hands which shielded me from stones and shouts of insult. I was far too happy to say, I have missed you, but she knew I did because I was the mad woman’s son. As we walked towards a taxi, she said, “I am not the madwoman anymore”. Right then and there I realized how the word judged but I just smiled and looked into my mother’s eyes, for the first time in my life, it felt so right because it was never so wrong. Never wrong to be a mad woman’s son.