War, exams, and worry
Another Mother's Day has rolled around again. Well, the second in 2025 if you insist on honouring the UK one as well, which falls in March. Although of course this year if you do your mothering in Pakistan, you are even less likely to be in the mood for the standard unimaginative stock of candles, flowers and chocolate in tiny boxes than you would be during any other ordinary Mother's Day untainted by the sound of drones and threat of war.
Why do people assume mothers are in raptures over lighting a candle near wooden furniture or prolonging the life of cut flowers? To many of us, this is a mystery, but it is not today's mystery to solve. Thanks to the dour mood of the nation, this Mother's Day, we will at least be liberated of the need to drum up fake smiles masking our plant serial killer tendencies — but with a price.
This year, it is impossible not to think of the women who raised PAF pilots despite having prayed fervently for years that this day would never come. All the chocolate and calming lavender-scented candles in the world will do nothing to ease the dread squeezing your heart in a vice grip. You may have signed up for this years ago, but you do not deserve sending what was once a piece of you out into something neither you nor your child ever started. Your unrest is seen, and your feelings are valid.
When exams and war collide
Like any war, this one encompasses so much more than those at the front line. Many of you mothers of teenagers, for example, will have never dreamed of an army career for your dear offspring. Instead, you will have spent most of April stressing out over whether or not your son has retained anything at all about circle theorems or Lady Macbeth's psyche as O-levels rear their ugly heads.
Now, come May, you are now stressing out about whether that son of yours will get to sit his exams at all, or whether or not he will have to rely on those awful predicted grades. Those predicted grades were achieved by a child for whom the threat of real live O-levels were a minute speck in the horizon ("I'll get my proper studying done in March!"), so you try to think about those predicted grades as little as possible in the interests of avoiding a splitting headache.
There is rarely ever an ideal time for a full-scale war in your backyard, but if an opposing government insists with increasing sternness that we pencil it into our diaries ASAP, May is the worst month in the academic calendar to circle. (June is not a great time either, for those taking notes.) Naturally, as with most wars, this one was planned by men uninterested in parenting matters, as opposed to mothers of sixteen-year-olds sitting life-defining exams — and now we all bear the brunt.
Ode to mothers of teens
To you mothers who remain gripped with fear over the uncertainty over your child's future - this Mother's Day, I see you. You did not sign up for the mental stress of cancelled exams in addition to that other real stress of airborne drones. Especially if you have a five-year gap between this exam-plagued child and his older sibling, who endured a once-in-a-lifetime COVID-19 fiasco that derailed O-levels wherever O-levels are found.
No mother deserves to undergo two separate once-in-a-lifetime exam-related incidents. I will refrain from adding a pointless "You've got this" (a phrase that proliferated with nauseating popularity during the pandemic years). You probably haven't got this at all and may perhaps be relying on divine intervention to sort out this mess. You are seen, and your struggles, too, are sadly valid.
As war threatens to derail this year's exams, you may yearn for a time machine so you could crank it back a few months and do whatever you can to bump up those predicted grades. Like many of us who have found ourselves wishing we could have a do-over with our children (why did we care so much about many peas they ate at age 2?), you may ache to turn back the clock to help your son understand circle theorems better than even Einstein could have hoped. Because logic evaporates into wisps of nothingness in times of stress, you may be seriously questioning why scientists are more vested in sending Katy Perry into orbit than building a time machine.
But dear mothers, a gentle warning: do not tempt fate with such prayers, because you would never get your hands on that time machine to undo crying over peas or palming off your son on Einstein himself for maths tuitions. Instead, Katy would cut in line and hoard it to redo her trip to space every week. It is a lose-lose situation for all concerned. (Except for Katy. But she does not concern us at this juncture. Even though she, too, is a mother.)
Hope for womankind
As for you mothers of babies and toddlers who truly cannot fathom a day when your child will be independent enough to revise incomprehensible maths and decode Shakespeare, there will come a day when all this is over and you will have a chance at an ordinary Mother's Day.
Let us pray for the day when the toddler who sticks a 'why' at the end of every sentence that exits your mouth morphs into a teenager who will never ask why ever again. This is because a teenager knows absolutely everything about anything in the universe. You will realise this because in a few years, whatever the topic that comes up at the dinner table — be it a discussion on Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible, musings on photosynthesis or gentle laundry tips ('Dear son, the floor is not a wardrobe') — will be met with the pained world-weary words 'I know'. One day, your child, too, will be burdened with knowing everything. Have faith.
And finally, if you are a married woman but have refrained from becoming a mother by choice, you may encounter - particularly at a wedding - some very concerned women who will try to dig a little deeper at uncovering the mystery of the baby-shaped hole in your life. Do not — and I cannot stress this enough — tell them you have done this on purpose.
Instead, do urge them to seek divine intervention on your behalf. Do not forget to embark on your own divine intervention campaign to counter theirs. It is a headache, but a much smaller headache than the one you will endure if you rashly announce, "Actually, my husband and I have decided to wait at least five years." If you fall for this trap, may the Lord be with you - and the rest of the women raising children in this uninvited darkest of eras. Let us pray for better times when the dread of today becomes a memory from yesterday.