The Land of Many Mothers

The walk from my home to my daughter's preschool isn’t far—left out of the driveway toward the goddess temple, past the coffee shop where they have the muffins we like and the corner store where they have the imported ketchup, across the busy road where motorists do not stop for moms pushing strollers, and just after the vegetable stall with the heirloom tomatoes and the friendly Uncle. It’s our morning ritual—one we step into without a second thought or a three-year-old complaint. By 8:35 a.m., we are out of the door and on our way. 

It's one of my favorite parts of the day. Not just because I'm about to have three hours to myself after I drop the oldest off, but because of what and who we see along the way: the yellow-haired street dog that takes biscuits from our hands and follows us until the bend in the road (past her territory), the woman with the kind smile and the crooked walk who cannot help from indulging in baby sister's chubby cheeks and sending us off with the sincerest "namaste". By now, everyone on the route expects us—the mama and the two baby girls walking slowly down the street toward the preschool.

Some of the passerbys (to whom we used to just give a friendly smile) we now know by name. We have one another's contact info stored away, just in case the relationship should wish to become something more than a simple morning passing on the way to where we are trying to go. One woman broke the silence after a few weeks of congenial nods and smiles with a question I had a feeling she had wanted to ask since she first saw me: a young mother with a toddler at the end of her arm and a baby strapped to her front. 

"Who cares for the babies," she asked, motioning to the girls with whom I obviously had my hands full. 

"The older one goes to school and we have someone who helps a few hours a day with the little one," I replied. 

But as I walked away, I realized how odd the question actually was. How she assumed that I didn't take the full responsibility of caring for my daughters but relied on the help of someone else. 

She herself, I later learned, walked the same road everyday on her way to the home of the boy she cared for. I saw the woman she worked for one day when she opened the door. She was much like me—a young mother of a toddler, middle to upper class (which is a category I easily fall into as an American living in a South East Asian country), and enlisting the help of another woman to help care for her home and family.

Walking away from our school-route friend that day, I wanted to run back to her, look into her eyes, and earnestly say to her, “I do! I care for the babies! I’m their mother!”

She assumed I didn’t. Maybe because she believed me to fit the mold of someone who would have hired help, or maybe because she spent her days caring for someone else’s child she assumed that every child had a person other than their own mother to care for them. 

And the truth is, we do have others care for our children. And it’s not just our sweet didi who helps us keep our home and life in order—it’s every local woman who comes into our home or is associated with our family.

——— 

Nepal is a land of many mothers. It’s almost a culture within the culture. There isn’t even a word for niece or nephew. They’re all simply chora and chori—or “sons and daughters.” And while there are words for “uncle,” the word for aunt is literally translated to “big mother” or “little mother.” Every woman I meet, whether they’re pre-pubescent or way past their mothering years, seems innately motherly. They know how to hold, how to feed, how to rock, how to change, or how to wrap up a baby in their own cultural way. 

I must admit, this is often intimidating and usually very different from the way I would treat or handle my own children. Raising children in a context and lifestyle outside of familiarity has so many challenges. But for me, this has been the hardest—the way the women of Nepal nurture and care for babies and the way it threatens everything I thought a mother should be. 

After our first daughter was born, I grew anxious every time I left the house. Because when I did, I always encountered a woman who had something to scold me about.

“Why isn’t that baby wearing a hat? It’s cold”

“Why are you carrying her like that? Her legs will hurt.” 

“You’re bringing her outside already? It is too early.”

“She’s crying, she needs milk.” 

A few weeks after her birth, I geared up to walk to meet a friend and I passed a houseful of older women. One of them literally ran out at the sight of me and asked me to untie my solly baby wrap that I’d spent so much time learning to tie and carry the baby properly. She insisted that a newborn baby should not be carried straight up and down and should only be cradled in a lying position. As a brand new mom figuring out how to get my feet underneath me in my new life, this was terrifying. 

It’s hard to feel like a proper mother here, in a place where they mother so very differently from the way I was taught. It’s hard to not to be bitter, even angry when the unmerited advice or scolding is flung in my direction, or when people ogle at my babies’ golden hair and fair skin. It’s far too easy to be guarded, to wrap my arms tightly around my girls and shield them from the culture we live in, to shield them from all that feels frightening and unfamiliar. 

We who have chosen to live abroad, choose also to expose ourselves and our children to entirely new hosts of terrifying things. Every expat mama has their own feelings about things like this, I’m learning. And every one of them has drawn unique boundaries, trying hard to protect their own personal maternal instincts from the surrounding world around them.

But why are we all so afraid?

———

I once read a story about an expat woman who legitimately thought someone was trying to kidnap her baby. If I recall correctly, a woman had asked to hold the baby, and then proceeded to carry her off, away from the mother. Frantic and panicked, the mother chased after her, shouting and carrying on. The old woman returned with the baby moments later, after having passed her around to her own friends, saying she was only trying to help and let the mother do her shopping in peace. She thought nothing of it and simply treated the mother’s baby as if it were her own, and assumed the mother knew as much.

She was afraid of losing her baby. Maybe afterward, she was a little more at ease but still a little bit afraid—not of losing her baby physically, but losing her baby to what she doesn’t understand, to what is so very different from her.

It’s understandable. This world is scary.

Maybe there are parts of the culture that rub against what we know, or worse, what we believe. Maybe our convictions are misaligned or maybe there is a tradition we are clinging to and sucking life from—the only "normal" thing we have to pass down to our children. Or maybe we have been waiting so very long to wear our babies in our neutral toned, simple patterned wraps and we just want to take a dang photo of how cute we look! Just me? #noshame.

———

At our first outing to church, our daughter was grumpy and tired after being passed around. I couldn’t do a thing for her to settle. I tried to nurse her, I tried to soothe her, I tried to rock her and play with her. Nothing would work. Our pastor’s wife, a veteran mama and one of the most gentle women I’ve ever met, saw my efforts were leading to unwanted results. I was getting flustered, sweaty, and anxious—which was only making matters worse. She took the new baby from my tired new mother's arms and went outside. When she returned, the baby was fast asleep. She sat near the door of the church and draped her shawl over the baby’s face while she rapidly and subtly bounced her knee to keep the spell of rest bound around her. I exhaled. 

Our babies are being raised in a foreign land. We, their mothers, had a backdrop of church on Sundays, grandparents on holidays, cereal and milk for breakfast, and cartoons on Saturdays. They have a backdrop of street dogs on the way to school, buying mangoes from a man on a bicycle, power outages, and spicy food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Where we grew up in a culture of independence and individuality, they’re growing up in a culture of togetherness and community.

I needed the pastor’s wife in that very moment. I needed the village mindset that she had. I needed her to offer aggressively to take my baby from my sore and weakening embrace. I needed her to know better than me.

———

Maybe I don’t have to be so quick to stiff-arm the advice, help, or admiration that comes my way. Maybe we are raising our babies differently than the culture we come from and maybe that is rich and beautiful in its own way. It’s hard, yes. There are certainly parts of it all that make us nervous for good reason. But I’ve been learning something since I got on a plane all those years ago: just because someone or something is different, doesn’t mean I’m right or it’s wrong.

Every culture is beautiful. But every culture, also, is victim to the sin that infects the world. The whole of my American worldview is no less tainted by it than the South Asian worldview among which I live. There are good parts and bad parts of both.

The motherly nature of the women in the place I live is, I’m starting to see, a good part. While it’s well and fine that I want to guard my deep desire for the traditions I grew up with, and it’s okay to want to dress my baby a certain way or carry her in a certain fashion, and it’s logical to listen to reason and scientific evidence—it’s also okay (necessary even) to shed narrow-mindedness, to open my heart and eyes and ears, to find beauty in things that are different, and to accept that sometimes, what I always believed was right, might not be best.

Mothering in The Land of Many Mothers is an opportunity. It’s a chance to shatter what I thought I knew and find something even better. It’s also a chance to narrow down what really matters and to hold fast to what I believe is truly best for my children. It’s a chance to hastily shed what absolutely doesn’t matter and humbly accept and adapt to the differences before me. It’s a place to love and a place to be loved, cared for, and nurtured. Isn’t that what all mamas need?