No, I definitely don’t have Mommy Issues.
She walked into the room and sat next to me. I could feel my body tense at the close proximity at which we sat. I felt my guard go up. That’s when I realised the bitter truth: I could NOT feel at ease with this woman.
I found it disconcerting that she sat and stared a whole good 10 seconds at my laptop screen before announcing why she was there.
“Could you pluck my eyebrows for me?” she asked, brandishing the tweezer in her hand. I took my eyes off the laptop, stared at the contraption and unplugged my earphones.
Do you ever plug your earphones in without anything playing just so people leave you alone? I’d grown comfortable to that. Now I took the tweezer from her and did the inevitable — I faced her.
“You had an online class yesterday as well?”, she asked casually while I started plucking at her eyebrows.
“Yes”.
“Despite it being a public holiday?”
“Yes”.
It went silent. Maybe she realised she was only getting monosyllabic answers from me today.
As I tried to concentrate on the arc of her brow, I felt one of her eyes on me, the other shut tight by her finger. A deep, inexplicable fear settled at the pits of my stomach. My gut went so far as to clench tightly in anticipation.
The silence between us felt too loud.
Without warning, I remembered dad’s comment when I used to spend the entire 1 hour of “calling time” at the hostel speaking to mum over the phone. He’d said that there only seemed to be calls and no grades — which was a direct jab at the fact that I was not scoring well at the coaching centre.
Back then I’d hold on to the conversation, to carry it longer, just so I didn’t have to force myself in front of books and subjects I loathed. A lump formed in my throat as my mind screamed, “You should have cut all ties right then! You should have refused to talk to her after that one day when you realised that your mother did not care about your well-being; the only thing that ever mattered to her was you getting into a medical college. That nothing else mattered, not even that you were slowly dying inside.
Every day after that, I regretted not being strong enough to stand my ground. Only if I had been clever enough to prepare an independent plan to take my future into my own hands. Only if.
But I was not. I jabbed at the little stubs of hair that were making a mess of my mom’s narrow eyebrow. The eyebrow of the woman who had successfully made a mess out of my life.
My eyes stung as tears rushed to the forefront. Someone inside me screamed the many things I should have said long ago. Words that went untold because they made me feel like an ungrateful brat.
This woman had been stifling me all along and now I was suffocated without the means or knowledge to speak my mind out.
My dad who used to be an absolute stranger now felt more like warmth and my mother who was the embodiment of affection is now a cold block of granite. A cold, manipulative block of hard granite.
Who cries when their daughter opens up and then complains when the same daughter shuts down entirely? She does.
Who judges me harshly for talking about the things that mattered to me and now blames me for building walls? She does.
Who goes and hides behind the wall she made to feel safe from the very person she used to feel safe with? I do.
Tweezing my mom’s eyebrows used to build a warm connection with my mother. Long gone are those sensations and now there’s hatred, fear and regret.
I often wonder if she feels the same way about me. If she wishes I had turned out into the mold of what she wanted me to be. If she hates me for turning into an anxiety-ridden shadow of what I used to be.
I blinked the tears out of my eyes. They went unnoticed like the hundred other breakdowns and panic attacks that entrance coaching had gifted me. I often wish she stood up more for the things she wanted for herself than getting upset over other people not turning out the way she wanted them to.
