JOIN USSo why did the chicken cross the road? To save her chicks; why else! Mothers tend to have various ‘hen-like’ styles of showing their love and concern, observes Anusha Shashidhar.
If you're a sword, she's your shield, If you're a spark, she's your kindle.If you're a ship, she's your mast,If you're the night, she's your moon.
There's a proverb that goes
"Mother is a verb, not a noun". Tired from school, college or work? She's there with a glass of juice ready for you. First job interview? She's at the temple praying for your career. Searching for a life partner? She is ditching every proposal because she thinks you are too good for any of them.
A mother, somehow, has more than 24 hours in the day to tend to her kids. A mother, somehow, can do several things at once, with just two hands. A mother, somehow, finds the strength to always be on her kids' side, no matter who else she might sever ties with.
Someone once said "The phrase 'working mother' is redundant". Every mother is at work all the time. Household chores apart, a mother never takes a break from feeding her kids, from cleaning their rooms squeaky clean (lest they fall sick), from pushing their kids to do better, from publicising all their achievements...
Much like a chicken cooing over her chicks all the time, most mothers, too, fuss over their kids all the time, earning them the ‘mother hen’ tag. But not all mother hens are the same. Each has her own style. Of course, she may be a blend of two or more of these styles. Because no matter what kind of mother hen she is, all she does, she does for her kids.
The ‘cluck’er
Every beetle is a gazelle in the eyes of its mother. She sees only the good in her kids and loves talking about them to all and sundry, non-stop.
Take Chetan Bhagat's novel 2 States, for instance. Remember the time the protagonist, Krish Malhotra, goes with his mother, to meet his prospective bride, Dolly? Much to his discomfort, his mother just can't stop boasting about him to the prospective in-laws. Nevertheless, he enjoyed the encounter, especially knowing about his marriage market value.
Says Nikhil MM, a business analyst, "Whenever I meet my relatives, I never have anything new to tell them because my mother would have already told them about my promotion, hike and just about anything hip and happening with my life. No wonder mums make great marketeers for their kids in an arranged marriage."
The brooder or incubator
She just can’t help but be over-protective of her kids. An outing with friends? She will want to drop her kid/s off - or even offer to tag along! She loves feeding her kids and - much to their delight - their friends too.
Remember the movie Main Hoon Na? An orphaned Ram (Shah Rukh Khan) finds it nothing short of a blessing to stay with his half-brother's mother (Kirron Kher). She just can't stop feeding him hot parathas. An army man, he might be, but Ram loves the mommy affection via food.
Abhinav Dinesh, a 15 year old, laughs, "My friends mostly come to my house because my mother feeds them non-stop. It's like that pav bhaji powder ad, where the friends of the boy hang around to clean his room, just to have his mother's pav bhaji."
The pecker
She snaps at anyone who belittles or so much as jokes about her kid. She can peck quite hard! Watch your words around her.
"There was this one instance I love remembering," says Prithvi PM, a bio-tech student. "My elder brother commented meanly about my dressing sense because I had worn a sleeveless top. My mother firmly asked him to stay out of my personal choices."
The much-acclaimed play Ek Madhav Baug by Chetan Datar, beautifully captures how a mother can take on the world to keep her child happy. The mother, in the play, comes to terms with her son's homosexuality, and even supports him openly when he faces flak from the society!
The cock-fighter
She can cow her husband down with a mere look, if he so much as denies her child somehing s/he is asking for. She will do anything to get what her child wants.We all know that actor Ranbir Kapoor is a ‘mamma’s boy’. In a recent interaction with the media, Neetu Kapoor revealed that as a child, Ranbir was difficult, and whenever she received complaints from the school about him, she always stepped in to save him from his father's wrath.
Geetha N, a housewife and mother of two, can associate herself to being a cock-fighting mother hen too at times. "Once, when my elder daughter was a college-going teenager, she wanted to go for a sleepover with her girlfriends. But my husband wouldn't let her. I had to convince him, as I realised we had restriced her way too much all her life," she recalls.
The grand mother hen
She is a granny, but having grandchildren doesn't seem to change the mother in her. If anything, she is all the more pampering. She's not very different from the ‘daadi cool’ granny - in the recent super market ad - who goes shopping with her granddaughter to buy her a pair of really tiny shorts. This grand mother hen will make sure her grandkids get what they love, with or without their parents' permission.
If you're a 90's kid, you will remember adoring the cool and loving granny (Farida Jalal), eight-year old Anjali had in the movie Kuch Kuch Hota Hain. It was the ultimate crowd pleaser when Anjali’s granny ran away with her, to a summer camp, despite her father Rahul (Shah Rukh Khan) denying her permission!
Whichever type of mother hen you are, we love you; we always have; and always will... Have a great Mother’s Day!