The women we will become

When my sister and I were growing up, we had a running competition every time we got into the car or sat at the dining table. The aim was to outsmart each other and be the first to call shotgun about sitting next to our father during meals or behind him during car rides. 

We were daddy's girls, both of us, and every inch of proximity we could gain was a win for the week. I can't imagine it made my mother feel very special to see her children fighting to be as far away from her as was physically possible, but I think she understood. 

You see, the roles in our house were very well-defined – Baba the boundless source of love, the parent who let us lather any curious mix of moisturisers on him when he got home from work, the friend who stopped us from studying 'too much' and made us watch cartoons with him the night before our exams. And Ma, well Ma would have put any military regime to shame with her uniquely effective strategies for inducing fear and discipline in our little hearts.

If you had asked us then to predict how our relationship with our parents would be two decades on, I think we would have gotten the answer grossly wrong. At least partially. For our attachment to our father has remained unsurprisingly unchanged; his persistence resolute in acting as advisor, protector and our life-long indulger. But the woman who we often suspected was our stepmother has adopted so many new avatars over the years that her metamorphosis would have been impossible to foresee even if we had tried.
I am not a mother yet, nowhere close, but I imagine that is what motherhood is. The incredible ability to transform, adapt and respond according to the needs of your children. To be the disciplinarian when they are young, the giddy confidante when they discover love, the empathiser when they fail and the healer when they come back to you, keep coming back to you, every time they are bruised and broken.

I am not a mother yet, so I don't really understand the significance of Mother's Day from the other side of the table. But I don't think it's about Mother's Day anyway, it's about all those other days when she took on the unpleasant business of teaching you difficult life lessons, when she forced you to face your fears even though she must have been more afraid than you were. All those other days when she asked you to be brave because nothing was going right for you and she was hurting just as much as you were or the days when you stole some compassion from her because you had none left of your own.

I am not a mother yet, of course, but I think every daughter is one day a reflection of the woman who was hers. In our fits of teenage angst, no matter how many times we promised ourselves we would never be the kind of mother our mother was, truth is, we will. And maybe that isn't such a bad thing after all.

To all the mothers and to all the daughters who are their mothers in the mirrors, Happy Mother's Day.