The lessons I learnt in 2022

As a young, working, new mother, there were a lot of things I had to learn this year. The biggest of them being the need to be kind to self

As I reflect on the year that we are leaving behind, I visualise my body as a ship from which gratuitous cargo has been off-loaded. There is a feeling of lightness, like when all the apples have been harvested and the tree is left bare and its leaves can gracefully fall to the ground so that the roots can conserve its energy and simply be, lie still. This is also plenitude, I have come to learn, this fact of seeming emptiness, or weightlessness. On New Year’s Eve, at the cusp of 2022, my mother-in-law had looked into my eyes and wished me luck for everything that was to come my way. I was in my final trimester, and I could feel our child moving constantly, announcing his aliveness and his growing readiness to emerge. I still remember processing the aftermath of his arrival…the long minutes focussing on a clock on the wall while my organs were being re-assembled. I had felt this weight lifted from the core of my spinally anaesthetised body, and soon after I had witnessed the flushed red face of our child who was placed near my face. Everything changed in that moment.

When I consider how much I have evolved as a person, I feel sure it is because I internalised the life lessons I learned along the way. As a young mother, you are frequently infantilised. Total strangers and their relatives will offer you all forms of unsolicited advice, and if you are insecure or wrestle with self-doubt, it’s easy for your confidence to be shaken. For this reason I’m a bit unsure about passing on the insights I have encountered while coping with the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life—reparenting, which involves healing oneself from various intergenerational traumas while establishing healthier patterns of communication and behaviour. Identifying as a queer feminist involves its own forms of un-conditioning, decolonising one’s mind from the clutches of patriarchal thinking.

This year, in my moments of greatest anxiety, I learned to question the source of my pressure. Was it internal or external? In most instances I found I often put pressure on myself to perform in a manner that was close to perfection. The pursuit of perfection is not noble. It frequently involves trying to play to standards set by someone else. It is nobler, instead, to have an awareness of one’s weaknesses and strengths, and to find ways of adapting to them and enlisting help.

This—practising the art of reaching out to others and asking for help—I cannot emphasise enough. In late capitalist times, the absence of a defined village makes it more difficult to identify who our true well wishers are. We tend to refrain from articulating our need for help, because we assume it is a form of defeat. But we are only human, and this means that by design, we need other people, because our capacities are not endless. Asking for help involves trusting other people to deliver, and that’s not easy, because people can disappoint, and it’s important not to take their failure to help personally. Often, it’s a crisis of empathy, sometimes people are so involved with processing their own struggles, they are unable to see how you are in need. I am still working my way around asking for a hand and accepting it with grace when it is offered to me unasked.

Also read: Your voice matters, the silence shatters

The biggest lesson I learned this year is to scale down my ambitions, an extension of taking off the pressure of external validation. In the past, if I invited people over to dinner, I felt compelled to spread the table with a feast. Now I make three dishes, one carb-based, one curry-like, one vegetable-based. I don’t fuss with desert unless I find I have time. I don’t do appetisers. I no longer feel the pressure of being the ‘perfect’ host. If a dish fails, I apologise and move on, I don’t get hung up on the failure. I’ve had to embrace cooking through interruptions, and if you expect too much from yourself in terms of flavour, you’re setting yourself up for intense disappointment. 

It’s important to pat yourself on the back for minor successes. I cannot stress enough what it means to validate the everyday mundane we take for granted. Waking up and making oneself a coffee or tea, feeding oneself healthy fare, shopping, stocking up the pantry, and the exquisite delight of household chores that allow you to briefly step out of your personal exigencies and focus on maintenance. Retracing all these quotidian things you managed to accomplish at the end of the day puts into perspective the tasks you didn’t. “That’s a tomorrow problem,” I now tell myself at the end of the day. 

Finally, in every moment of unprecedented stress or uncertainty, I try to think of my response by contemplating what behaviour I want to model for our child. If I want him to be calm and collected in the face of adversity, then I must find it in me to enact that behaviour with all the authenticity I can manage until I learn to internalise that response and it becomes de facto. When my child was still figuring out crawling while his second cousin, two months younger than him, had already begun to learn to stand, I had to firmly tell myself that no good comes from comparison. What mattered to me was not that we had the most athletic or prodigious child. If he is kind to himself and others, I will have succeeded in my parenting goals. For (and this is my last life lesson), kindness is self-love (and self-care) in action.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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