This Homemaker Job: What Other Talents Lie Hidden Behind It?

While some homemakers are happy with their choice, others find that the homemaker job is not enough for them. 

“I know myself. If given an opportunity I can even speak to the PM of India. I can discuss for hours on topics I have knowledge of. I have that confidence,” said a beaming middle aged mother as I finished taking her video bite for my vox pop interview.

No. I never intended to take her interview. After all, my interview was around the migration of youth. While scanning for people who could be my interviewees, our eyes caught her young son as a potential candidate. The lad with his mother was resting in shade in between admission procedures in the university, with the innocent expressions of a new entrant in unknown territory.

As she started shooting away her views with valid points like a lioness on her mission, we were enamoured. After all, it’s not everyday that you see this side of a middle aged, visibly nervous mother and a homemaker turning into a diva in front of the camera lights amidst loud laughter and thundering high fives from the surrounding next-gen crowd.

The woman who was unknown to me a few minutes back, seemed like someone I have known since years.

No. Not a relative. Nor an acquaintance either. But I felt I had known her for ages due to a common thread most mothers who choose to be a homemaker for their children have in common – side-lined talent.

I have met a mother with sunken eyes and sagging skin, the saree end tucked at her waist as she hurriedly prepared the dinner table without  caring for her withering nail polish. Oh!How I wish Gordon Ramsay could have tasted any of her dishes just once!

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Another face of a homemaker mother I remember, who sang a lullaby to her little one in the sweetest voice I had ever heard. “Why isn’t she a singer the world should have?” I have regretted.

All these faces are the same. Aren’t they? The face of every home-wed mother, some crushed in confidence , some hidden away in the kitchen , some hushed away from intelligent family discussions while they serve their family perfect rotis. Some flushed away in pink as every parent teacher meeting makes them nervous for they can’t speak in English.

Yes. I am talking about every house-wed mother in this country who sometime perhaps dreamt of being someone, standing on her own feet. Who perhaps still wonder what life would have been if they chose the path of refuting their parent’s decision to get them married and continued their education instead. Those women who still wonder if they would have chosen the path to college than a wedding, and the path to promotion rather than pregnancy, how different their life would have been!

No. Marriage is not a sad thing. And neither is pregnancy. Rather, it is one of the most beautiful milestones of life! But how it changes a woman, how it pushes her to a life she perhaps never imagined!

And in those women, after faded years when I discover a self trained beautiful singer, a never marketed beautiful  painter, an unpublicized brilliant cook, a  hidden talented writer or an orator awaiting to explode in front a thousand-strong crowd…it pinches me!

It pinches me for I see the desire to be recognized and to be appreciated. For I have seen them glowing with power when they tell tales of how well they played basketball at college and that 70% achieved even after helping their mothers in the kitchen the whole day.  For I see the faces  of women who are a storehouse of talent yet unexplored.

It pinches me when I see such women being taken for granted as homemakers, when I see them underestimating their own skills, when I see such women feeling unworthy and unsure of themselves, of their lost age and beauty as they feel good for nothing and  strive to grapple with the pace of a fast moving world. As they struggle to meet the never ending expectations of their husbands and kids and feel a loser if they fail to be as presentable and polished as their family expects them to be.

Sometimes they know what they are good at, sometimes they don’t. Some still dream and find options of carving a niche while some may have stopped dreaming for themselves altogether.

Dreams! Of being someone much more than they are today. Of being someone perhaps they have never expected themselves to be.

Perhaps.

Perhaps its time for hands which pray, which make those perfect round rotis, which gently pat on their child’s forhead to put them to sleep, its time we hold those hands and raise them above. And this time not for us! Not for showing us way. Not for enhancing our pride. Not for cheerleading us.

For them. Only for them.

Image source via freeimages.com

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