Column | Mothers Stay Put, No Matter What The Odds: Divya Mittal On Motherhood

When I was district magistrate Mirzapur, a bird built a nest in our garden. My daughters and I would walk up to it regularly. The bird would fly away, revealing three tiny eggs. When they hatched, out came delicate chicks. We went to see them and stopped at the spot where she always flew. But that day, she didn’t budge. We stepped closer, sure that she would take off. She did not.

I walked right up to the nest and she looked straight into my eyes as if to say, “You think I’ll leave them and fly away? I’m going to stand between you and them.”

Where does such a small creature find the courage to face someone my size? She had nothing—no plan, no claws, no weapon—except her refusal to leave.

A mother is not the strongest. She is the one who refuses to leave. I had lived that for years without the words for it. Once an older gentleman asked me how I managed my daughters and work. I told him: good support, a good husband, a good calendar.

I went home feeling that I had described my daughters to him as a scheduling problem.

What I did not reveal were the nights I cried, exhausted. Every hour in the office felt stolen from them; every hour with them was a file somebody was waiting for. All working mothers know that voice at two in the morning: what if I am not enough?

One such night, my eight-year-old daughter found me. I was very tired. Putting her arms around me, she said, “You’re my hero.” I had expected her to keep a ledger of my absences. She did not. She had simply watched me get up every morning and go where I was needed. And whenever the world had frightened her, I was the place she ran to. This is what the bird was too. For weeks she had faced away from us and flown. The day the eggs hatched, she turned around and faced us, with her babies behind her.

The Turning Around

That is what I call the turning around: when the most important person in your life is no longer you. I now know the exact moment I turned.

A few hours after my first daughter was born, she fell asleep on my chest. I was afraid to breathe because even the slightest movement could wake her. I remember thinking: to the universe, you are but a speck. But to someone, you are the whole universe. In that moment, I was hers. And she was mine.

The turning has a second part and it is harder. It means letting them go alone into the very world you were protecting them from. Standing between them and the world becomes standing aside.

At our daughters’ first major chess tournament, we told them to be fearless. When it was time, they walked away with their water bottles and score-sheets. The younger one barely taller than the tables she was walking to. I thought they would look back at me for reassurance. They did not.

I sat in that corridor for three hours, with a small ache but a larger pride.

The hall was not the only place I could not follow them to. Sometimes, I simply wasn’t there. That is how I learned the turning has nothing to do with being a woman.

Once when I was away, our younger one caught a fever and was crying for me. My husband video-called me, trying to sing the lori I used to sing, his voice aching with helplessness. I sang it to her and she calmed down. Maybe I was consoling him more than her. He stayed up the whole night, singing the same two lines until the fever broke. That night, my daughter had a mother. He just happened to be her father.

The turning changed my work, too.

In Sant Kabir Nagar, a father came to me: his son was Covid positive and had been admitted to the L1 hospital. His son’s Board examination was two days away. He said, “My son just wants a chance. His year will go waste otherwise.”

The rules rightly said that a patient could not be moved and an examination could not wait. But the rules had been written far away from the fear in that father’s eyes. So we asked the Board for something unusual. Permissions came overnight and by morning, his hospital ward turned into an examination centre.

For an administrator, the turning means a district stops being a geographical area and becomes people. An application is not a piece of paper. It is a mother who has walked 11 km to hand it to you. A file is a father, afraid of losing the land and with it, his child’s future. It made me look at people’s struggles and see myself fighting for my own child.

I saw it everywhere once I knew what to look for. In Deoria, 500 villages turned. Under Operation kabza mukti, we asked people to think of their village’s future, and they cleared the encroached ponds and paths themselves. There was no force, no police. And the self-help group didi, who is up before her household stirs at dawn and the last in the family to eat; who keeps the savings books for 10 families and knows who will need a loan even before they ask; turned around for women who were not her own, long before any of us.

All of us were guarding a future we will never live in. It can be a classroom. A ward. A shop. A company. A country. Anything that becomes yours to nurture. And however small you feel, you are exactly the size you need to be. Just like the bird.

You do not stand because you are brave. You are brave because you stand.

(Views expressed are personal)

Divya Mittal is a former IAS officer who served as district magistrate of Mirzapur and Sant Kabir Nagar