NDUMISO NGCOBO | Let’s give a thought to the meaning behind Mother’s Day

“And don’t forget, I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.” This famous line is from Notting Hill, starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. The Grant character felt his love affair with the persona played by Roberts was doomed because he was just a bookshop owner and she was a major Hollywood actress. She delivers the line to remind him that, though she is a movie star, she is also just a girl in love.

The above thoughts were prompted by a Facebook post in which the author shared how uncomfortable she became whenever her therapist asked her questions such as “How is your mother?” She said she would feel uncomfortable and respond with stock answers such as “She’s OK, I guess”. Later in therapy, several pennies dropped for her. It became apparent to her that, until that point, she hadn’t given much thought to who her mother was outside of what she was — her mother.

I myself missed a golden opportunity to get to know my own mother better the first time she showed me she was, after all, “just another girl” in need of love and a shoulder to cry on, that she was still that little girl from Emhlasini, north of Durban. At the time, I was 26 and she 54 — the same age I am now — and she had just lost her own mother, who died not altogether unexpectedly at 85.

Until then, I had never seen my mother cry. While organising the funeral, she was perfectly calm and efficient, but after the crowds had gone home, she retired to her bedroom. At some point, I approached her bedroom door to bother her about a trivial matter. However, before I knocked, I stopped short. From inside the room, I could make out the restrained yet desperate sobs of a little girl lost in a forest, frantically calling out for her mother. I don’t know what prevented me from opening the door, wrapping my arms around her and allowing her to bury her sobs in my chest.

I lost the opportunity to let my mother be vulnerable in my presence for a change

Perhaps I thought I would be interrupting her private moment of grief. Maybe I feared that my intervention would force her, out of embarrassment, to stop crying. Whatever my reasons were, I lost the opportunity to let my mother be vulnerable in my presence for a change. All I can say in my defence is that I was a silly 26-year-old boy.

Today is Mother’s Day across the globe. It was first celebrated in a church in the US state of West Virginia in 1905, thanks to a woman called Anna Jarvis. The more cynical among us will pooh-pooh the day as yet another US capitalist gimmick. Maybe, to some extent, it is. However, even if one thinks it’s a silly concept, there’s no harm in spending a few minutes contemplating the meaning behind it.

Every New Year’s Day, SABC News interviews children who have been separated from their families during the New Year’s Eve festivities on Durban’s beachfront. It is revealing just how many toddlers, when asked what their mothers’ names are, simply say “Ma.” I was well into my late forties before I stopped seeing my own mother as just “mama”. It was during the 2020 Covid lockdown, and she and her last surviving sibling, Aunt Nqobile, had both lost their husbands within three months of each other. They had always been very close, but it was wonderful to watch them gravitate towards each other even more than before.

These days, the two are inseparable, regularly spending hours away from everyone else, though I have no idea what they talk about. There is something beautiful about their relationship that has helped me see them more and more as two little girls from Emhlasini. I wish I could proclaim from the rooftops that I have finally managed to stop seeing my mother as the woman who once force-fed me Maltabella, dabbed my wounds with Savlon, and taught me my ABCs when I was three. But seeing my mother in this new light is a work in progress. One thing I’m certain of is that when the questions posed by WH Auden at the end of his timeless poem The Unknown Citizen are put to me, I will have meaningful answers to them. She is free and happy, and on this Mother’s Day I wish the same for you.