“Come on Mom! All my friends are going abroad, why can’t I? This is unfair, this is so unfair!”
While scientists are still searching to travel in time, I have already traveled 20 years back with this sentence of my daughter. Because I had once asked my mother something similar:
“Mom, Ayşe goes on a girls’ vacation, and they ask me ‘why doesn’t your mother let you?’ Now I also want to go on vacation with my friends. Why can’t I go, why?! Isn’t this unfair?!”
How long can a person stay angry with their parents? They always say until they become parents, but mine lasted a little longer. Even after I became a mother, I fought for a long time saying, “I won’t be like my mother!” And I really wasn’t… I allowed everything she would get angry about. So much so that when making a choice, I would always think, “If my mother were here right now; which one wouldn’t she take, how wouldn’t she behave? Heh, okay, I’ll take that one, I’ll behave like that.” It really worked for a while. Children would run to me whenever they wanted or were in pain. Every time they came to my lap, I would think, “This is how you become a mother. A compassionate, safe haven for a child…”
We are truly very strange creatures. If we didn’t have such naive hopes, perhaps no one could have children. Because when we are pregnant, it never occurs to us that this child will grow up and say to you, “You shouldn’t have given birth to me then. What’s it to me!” You never think that the baby who smiles at you while you clean her diaper will go to the bathroom after every meal and make herself throw up in the future. How would she do it if she thought about it? She closes her eyes and drifts off to the sound of “This is the order of the world, my child, you should definitely build a home…” No one says, “Get ready, you will see things you have never seen before. Your loved ones will look down on you, sometimes they won’t want to be seen with you, they will be ashamed of you, they will have strange troubles, add up all the energy you have used to find solutions in your life so far, multiply it by 144, calculate the number of solutions you will need to find in the next two years.” Nobody prepared us for what will inevitably come our way…
But do you know what I was most unprepared for among what I was going to experience? To say, “My mother was right in some ways too.” Because while I was trying to be the opposite of her, I started to lose my motherhood. I thought that if I didn’t become like my mother, I would have a wonderful relationship with my children. It wouldn’t always be tense like the one between me and my mother. I thought then that my children wouldn’t do everything they could to get away from me. I thought that as long as I gave, they would be satisfied with what they had, they wouldn’t look for or want more.
When did I ever see people being satisfied with food? I used to always think that people would eat and eat and eventually get full. Then they wouldn’t want to eat more. Every time I ate, I ate waiting for that moment. Thinking that it would click and stop after a while. But every time I ate, I came to eaat the next meal hungrier. I became more intolerant to hunger than before. I never saw these as signs either. I said okay, I would continue until that moment came. Until one day, while I was flipping through channels on TV, I came across a program that told about heavy lives. I had never thought that the human body could reach 300 pounds. Moreover, the man had been eating as much as a fast food restaurant for years and still hadn’t been full. That “moment” had never come to him. Moreover, he was hungrier for that burger than anyone else. The woman who couldn’t get out of bed and go to the bathroom was crying because she missed eating pizza. At that moment, I understood that humans are not creatures that can be satisfied by eating. I won’t be satisfied by eating either. My children will not be satisfied with what I give them and will not be satisfied in their lives. With every door I open, they will want me to open the next ones. Since I grew up in a house with more boundaries, I would have been satisfied if that door were slightly opened, like a fasting person being satisfied with two bites. But I had turned my children into “Heavy lives, my daughter’s story.” It wasn’t just about food, it was about other opportunities in their lives. But hunger was the same hunger, insatiability was the same insatiability. That’s why, in this journey of motherhood where I vowed not to be like my mother, I had heard many times more than what I had told my mother at the time… And I understood, I understood that boundaries are needed in raising children. I wish I hadn’t had to sacrifice two children to understand this… I wish someone had explained this to me on the first day I found out I was pregnant, or maybe even before I got married, by telling methe logic behind it. If only I knew what I would find in the end no matter what I did.Wasn’t there such an education? While everyone was having so many problems with their children, spouses, parents, and people at work, wasn't there somewhere that could teach them how to deal with what was going to happen to them in the future?Not cosine, not Mercury retrograde, not the volcanic mountains in Turkey? If so, where was it? Was there a way to get things back on track when things were this bad? If so, what was it? Wasn't there anyone who knew?
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