Dear Mother,
A rare full moon in a wintery night sky. Sweeping a ray of light over the gloomy night through my foggy bedroom window. My eyes suddenly became wet, when warm tears rolled over the pillow in this lonely night, suddenly a familiar hand soothed my hair and I am in your bosom as your little boy. It has been a long time. A long time after I drifted away from you in my teenage years and now as a full-grown man for everyone else but for myself. When I saw my little son draw a picture for my wife today for mother’s day, I remembered you, mother.. because I have never done something like that for you in my life…
We grew up as shy children in a culture where the expression of feelings was a taboo… Hugging in a public a place is insanity and young lovers chased away from parks by police to keep the culture clean! We found expressions of love, hidden bottled deep inside through our creativity in our later life. I wonder whether it is too late now. Too late for me to tell you that, my love is a hidden one, never died, never found expression in words or hugs. For those are rare in our culture and especially in my boring years of growing up as an only child. A loner always lived in his own imagination, feelings expressed only for himself.
Mother, now I know where my creativity comes from… I have to confess this after all these years. Seeing my son when he is an infant suckling my wife’s nipple greedily as if nothing in the world can separate them from each other, I wanted to tell him that one day all will change. His mother will never complain that he had to drift away from her as a grown-up man and abreast a cruel world to fight for a living. His mother would never complain that he went for another woman to search for love and build a family. But his mother will always know, deep down her heart, the love given to her little boy will manifest in multitude and pay tribute to her by infinite ways of expression.
Now I know that every kind and loving expression in this world is a creation by a caring mother given as a seed to a man or woman when they are helpless infants. It is the mixing of sun and moon, Yin and Yan, and masculinity and femininity in Yogic expression, which drives the universe. When Jesus preached ” Loving Thy Neighbor”, and Buddha guided his disciples to delve in loving kindness in meditation, hasn’t that unconditional love was given by our mothers when her blood became milk to flood the world?
Every time I put my words in writing whether those are prose or poetry, I know that those come from your love. Every time I do a painting in an empty canvas and when femininity finds expression in my male being, I know that is the grounding for all the creative work I did for this date. When this world became cruel for me and when the people treated me as if I am nothing, when I cry my heart out in a lonely place because society thinks that grown-up men never cry, I become your little boy for a moment.
So, mother, I know you will never read this letter as your feeble eyes are so weak now and can not read and nobody there in our country will read this aloud on a mother’s day, as it is not celebrated there… I write this to express my love for you after so many years roaming in search of gold and happiness in a strange world to get rid of my feeling of guilt.
Let this letter be an invisible hug from a radical son who escaped not only from his mother but from his mother-land altogether to live in a foreign country searching comfort of strangers. Let the tears rolling over my pillow in this moonlit night mix to the ocean and reach you there and let one mother know that her little boy is thinking about her.
So long mother…
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