I
love you Mum
I
love you mum for your tight-lipped beauty and the way you flutter your lids in disapproval,
fifty times per second. And those mind-blowing silences the art of stretching
which you have perfected over a lifetime. A second short and we live and a second
more and we die. For the Mount Everest chill. And for letting us feel atom bomb
level heat without lighting a matchstick.
For
sitting on judgment on your padded throne. In your time they did this and they
did that. Girls kept their mouths and legs shut till their wedding day and thereafter opened them only at
a tightly calibrated width. So it must be painful that a rotten apple rolled
out of your womb? One that you’d happily donate to a bordello and spray your
hands with your favorite sanitizer.
I
love you mum for all the armageddons you set off in my life with an almost
inaudible, infinitesimal word slipped here or there, obscure as a post-lunchtime
fart. One which you could always later deny. “I never said that” your mantra. Your
amnesia is a gift as my memory is a curse. And yet you remember the marks you
scored in every subject as a toddler.
I
love you mum for sitting there forever scandalized by something blasphemous
the world did. Unchanging, abiding and enduring in your ironed cotton gowns,
muttering, “You too Brutus”
For
peering at my fully made-up face and telling me I need a better nose. For
putting on ten kilos in 3 months and telling me my middle is an inch bigger and
I should diet. Yet I love you for being a pudding and still eating chocolate pudding every now
and then.
I
love you mum. For being a mouse and a
lion in the same breath. For going picnicking while sending me perpetually guilt-tripping.
For making me feel like I need colon
irrigation and a lobotomy and a chemical menopause, all within 5 minutes of
starting a conversation with you. I love
you mum for always looking like you just swallowed the Universe.