In everyone’s life there comes a moment when you stop crying, take a deep breath and tell yourself to fight on.
Very often, that moment is when life knocks you to the ground and you lay sprawling, bruised and battered, all your energy spent, feeling the coldness of the floor and the contempt of everyone else around you.
Simply put: the situation tells you you’re out of the race and people expect you to drop the whole thing and crawl into the safehouse.
I can think of several moments in my life –right at the time when people suggested that sending me, a just blinded teenager, to college was a waste of time and my career choice was foolish. And yes, all those who made such suggestions were well-meaning people with good intensions. But, just as we know, the pathway to hell is paved with good intensions.
But every time when life knocks me down, when every joint, every sinew of my muscle tires with pain, when I lay sprawling on the ground after one more punch to the face, I’m sure to find one cheerleader in my corner who eggs me to get up and continue fighting.
Of course, I can spot her, as blind as I am, and find myself grinning. I take her suggestion to fight very seriously because she’s a fighter herself, and she knows the value of fighting the good fight and, more importantly, she taught me to fight.
If I open my memory album, right from the time when I wore specs aged five, at the time when I walked out of the ophthalmologist’s clinic with blindness and blank future staring me in the face, at the time when I struggled to learn my way around technology, when I couldn’t understand, for the life of me, how a relationship for life sealed in the divine contract called marriage could break down so badly, she was in my corner, crying with me, wiping my tears, shaking my shoulders and urging me to get on and get going.
And, my friend, it’s not just cheerleading for the sake of it. It’s not as if she’s doing it with a hollow sense of bravado. She has been through a lot, she knows pain, how it can shake someone down. She knows the value of life because she survived a life-threatening brain condition and went about the business of living, never shoving it on our faces as if it’s a big deal, although it is.
She was thirty-two and I was just nine, when I ran home from school one day and found her rolling on the floor, towel tied to her head , in unbearable pain.
They first thought it was refractive error and glasses would fix it. But the diagnosis that it was far more monstrous shook my extended family.
A leading neurosurgeon in my hometown said time was running out. She was wheeled into the operation theater and the surgery went on for seven hours. “Her brain is crashing against the skull and could hemorrhage anytime. We’ll try saving her,” was the doctor’s grim prognosis as he turned away from the shattered family members and walked toward the operation theater.
The real miracle was when, months later, she got up from the bed and began cooking for her husband and children, and carried on living, while her surgeon thought she was resting in bed like a patient. “rest too much and you’ll rust,” was what she often said in those harrowing days, in Tamil of course.
And that’s the other thing. People think she’s a graduate from the way she speaks and she’d tell us that it’s not school or college education that taught her common sense and clarity. “I’m happy that textbook learning hasn’t muddied things for me,” she says when we talk about perspectives and points of view.
One thing I can say for sure is that she definitely didn’t require college education to be a fighter. On the contrary, the story of women like her who survive serious conditions and develop more willpower to play their roles as wives, moms and caregivers for their disabled children need to be studied in business schools and leadership academies, because we need more people to understand the art of reassuring others.
When moms of disabled kids reach out to her to learn how she raised a blind son, where she found the strength, she answers them not in words, but in tears. A real, critical intimacy is established in that moment of seeming vulnerability.
Of course, those are not tears of weakness or defeat. On the contrary, those tear drops are manifestations of love, a silent emphasis on the need for compassion, a reassurance that hope isn’t dead.
There’re thousands of moms who raise children with disability, who deserve to feel proud of what they’re doing. I’m sure they’d see themselves in my mom, find an able ally in her and derive some gratification that there’re fighters like them whose reward is the fact of their continuing caregiving.
It’s time to let all those women know that by doing what they do, they enrich humanity far more than any grand project. Like me, all kids with disability can vouch for the fact that the world and life would’ve been a far harder place without our moms.
On International Women’s Day 2020, this is a tribute to all those moms, like my own. Our happiness is your success. You’re the only bright light in the firmament of your children.
This’s our turn, your children’s turn, to get up and cheer you!! Thanks for teaching us to fight challenges!!