By Tanya Kini

We were drinking tea in the office where I worked as a PR associate. I talked about my weekend plans with my mom. My friend talked about a conversation she had with her mom about her sister. My boss talked about the recent trip to Shirdi with her mom, and that she was surprised at how enjoyable it had been. The conversation drifted and as we began to pack up to go home, my boss made an observation. All 6 people working at the office at the moment came from single mother households. All our fathers had passed away (at varying times in our lives and due to various reasons) and our mothers had never remarried. “Speaks volumes about our personalities,” said my boss.

You know that aspect of your life that you take for granted until someone points it out to you and then you become obsessed with it? I’d never really thought about my mother being alone until my sister mentioned to me jokingly, that my mother wouldn’t know how to survive without me when I moved abroad, seeing as we did everything together. I laughed it off but it made me slightly uncomfortable. Granted, my mother and I did do everything together ever since I moved back to Bangalore in 2011 for college at the age of 18, after boarding school — watch movies, explore new restaurants, drink wine and binge watch NCIS and Castle. But I’d brushed aside feelings of guilt when I used to change plans with my mother to hang out with my friends. Why was it so difficult for me to think about my mother alone when essentially she had been alone ever since my father passed away in 2009?

I was 16, new to a boarding school in Coimbatore and possibly the worst version of myself at the time in 2009. Prior to October 2009, I didn’t see it but I was selfish, a downright bully, highly immature, whiny and extremely ambitious. I thought I deserved the world at my feet, not by working for it, but simply because I was me. I didn’t see it then, but I was entitled and spoilt. My mother was a teacher in Abu Dhabi (where I’d studied for the past 8 years) and someone who I couldn’t fully relate to despite being completely open about everything in my life. I couldn’t fathom how my mother didn’t have higher goals for herself. My sister was off in Bangalore, doing her post-graduate degree in Clinical Psychology and creating a new life for herself. Then it happened — my father passed away from a heart attack in October 2009 and life as we knew it completely changed. My sister became more introspective; I became bitter and felt wronged by the very world I’d loved so much. My two moods were cutting and sarcastic, and a dark cloud hovered over my head. My mother didn’t know this because I was at boarding school, but I made everyone afraid to either approach me or hang out with me. And I didn’t know my mother was emerging out of her cocoon, much to everyone’s surprise.

My father was the one who’d handled everything — from bills, bank accounts, and insurance, to travel arrangements. When he passed away, my mother was on a dependant residence visa in the UAE, which meant that when my father died, she had one month to move back to her home country. This meant sifting through 8 years’ worth of files and memories in our Abu Dhabi apartment and shipping them all to our new home in Bangalore with my grandmother. I had a class trip to Sri Lanka a month after my father passed away (and which he had already paid for in advance) which I didn’t want to go for because it felt like I was disrespecting him. But my mother said that it was important for us to carry on with our lives. That’s the one thing that didn’t change about my mother — her determination and tenacity. She’d never been given the avenue to display those qualities to me, and I’d been blind to see them for myself in our daily lives before.

My mother never aspired to become anything because she is one of those rare personalities that “goes with the flow” — whatever life throws at her, she catches and deals with. That’s how she dealt with her husband dying — she picked up her life, moved to Bangalore, found a new job, and continued living. She showed my sister and me what we needed to do, and more. That didn’t mean we continued to live in the same manner we had before my father died. Financial constraints meant that I couldn’t go abroad for my undergraduate studies (in hindsight a good option), which made me resentful of my situation and wonder if life would have been easier if my father was still alive. We’ve had huge arguments about my night-time excursions, that resulted in tears and my mother yelling that my sister had it easy, because my father had been there to help her with decisions. It’s that eternal question of “what if” that rolls around every time a major decision needs to be made.

What if my father had been alive? Would I have ever known what my mother was capable of handling? My sister’s wedding is now the family benchmark for all other weddings. Not just because it was a crazy three-day affair — my sister loved any celebration that put her at the centre of it all, and her wedding had to be the biggest — but because my mother, along with my aunt (my father’s sister), managed every aspect of the wedding. They put up our out-of-station friends (Baroda, Muscat, Dubai and Abu Dhabi!), and it was a moment like this (Kelly Clarkson song reference yes!) where I wondered if the one thing that could have made it better was my dad being there.

I’ve had this conversation with a friend of mine who works at that same office. She confessed that she wonders how her life would have been if her father was alive. She believes that her stammer began because of anxiety issues related to her father’s death and she says, “Maybe I wouldn’t even have been in Bangalore. Maybe I’d have been working elsewhere without the stammer. But all I know is that I’m grateful for my mother and so proud of her because no one else could have raised two daughters on their own.” Her father passed away when she was very young (around 5 years old) and sometimes I believe that she wishes she had known him. But there is no right age for a child to lose their parent. The only good thing, I believe, that comes out of it is that you see your surviving parent in a completely different light.

I confess, and it is a confession, that my mother and I became closer after my father passed away. Maybe it was us leaning on each other, or maybe it was me becoming an adult. Either way, my eyes were opened to this whole new world that I’d only read about and seen on TV or in the movies — a single mother bringing up her children to be successful and happy in their lives. After that conversation in the office, I began to look at the lives of my friends and the impact that their mothers being single parents had on them. One friend’s independence came from having to take care of her sister when she was 22, while another friend discovered his sense of responsibility. It’s something that I would never wish on my worst enemy but as a big believer in destiny, I believe you should take what you get and make the best out of it. And that’s what we all learnt from our moms.