It’s been days since she was
around the idea of ambivalence in matters of familial bliss in life. Of course
the generality of the thought is initiated from her own episodes of lonely
cooking hours in her kitchen.Though an enthusiastic cook at times the drudgery
of doing it every day and the conditioning of it being her sole responsibility
has always annoyed her. ‘’Ambivalence’’- the hidden play of it without one’s
knowledge and its oddity with which she still tries to be in terms with. Nevertheless
she decided to give shape and colour to her languid yet serious meanderings on
the subject. The act of cooking just like any ‘performance’ one has to do to maintain and sustain love,
cordiality and life itself is often gender biased as most women like her have
perceived and experienced. She being
never compelled to indulge herself so much in it has often given her great
relief. Still the need for performing it every day though in its simplest form
still exists in her conscience. She does not know what propels it so
mechanically every morning but the thought of not doing it gifts her a sense of
guilt she thought she would never be having in her rebellious mind. It’s as if
it is intricately designed in her instinct that not doing it frightens her of
labelling her as so ‘’ unwomanly”. She thought she could always think beyond
such labels and the indifference she felt in philosophising the inessentiality
of manhood and womanhood could rescue her through an absence of such guilt. Was
she wrong? Is she strongly a part of
such societal conditioning? Why she fails to transcend it? Life is a constant
act of rediscovering and reinventing oneself. But she hates such blotches of
shameful recognition of one’s ordinariness and inability to ward off
institutionalised thinking.
It is at this point that she
realises how she could half empathise with her own mother. The thousand hands
her mother had amidst the cacophony of being a working woman. And how she
misses the very comfortable lingering of her own self all around her house
guiltlessly, looking quizzically at her mother’s “over concerns” and relentless
housekeeping. She could discern it now more vivid. She could only half
empathise with her at present since the motherly concerns are still inexperienced. She has heard women around her complaining about the bodily
traumas of child bearing and rearing and the absurdity of glorifying motherhood
all through its different phases. The wonders of women’s body-bleeding, life
giving and nourishing as a spectacle is easy to romanticize. But its mental-physical exhaustion and mutilation is beyond comprehension to an
institutionalised society. And is yet unknown to her. And the fact that
everything is institutionalised is already dissected and critiqued. The ordeal
of cooking which is often self-imposed has caused much commotion which is only
an instance picked out from numerous other chores. Is she herself the
victimiser and the victim? Why does she insist
so? Why many women confess they have such similar conscience even those of
liberal circles? The knowledge of such ambivalence is nothing new. But it is
excruciatingly conflicting when one experiences it in lonesomeness which is the
default human condition. She simply couldn’t stop amazing herself in such
cognitive dissonances.
