MAMTA: Hi everyone. As you heard, my name is Mamta and it means mother’s love. And I believe that my mother wrote my destiny when she named me Mamta. I was born in India in the state of Punjab, and it is significant that I was born in Punjab because it is the state in which 80% of the deaths that happened during the partition of India into India and Pakistan took place. It is significant politically and geographically, but it’s more significant to my story because this is the story of motherhood.

My father and my mother, they both went through partition. They were in what is now termed in the literary field as ‘undivided Punjab’. And for those of you who do not know much about the partition of India, the partition of Punjab took place as a last-minute thing. In fact, until July 1947, no one knew that when India would be partitioned on 15th of August 1947, which parts would fall in Pakistan and which parts would fall in in the Indian side. Anyhow, my parents both were children at the time. We are Hindu, so they had to cross over from the Pakistani side of the border into the Indian side of border.

And they went through a lot of trauma, as did many other families. In my father’s case, this trauma was very vividly described by my grandmother. A train compartment attacked by an angry mob, an angry sword-wielding mob that cut and slayed everything that came in its way. The only reason why my father survived in that train compartment was because he was buried under a pile of dead bodies.

Needless to say, that trauma was passed onto me and my two brothers, and my two brothers are not here anymore. They passed away far too young, had unhappy lives and died of sickness in both cases. And I believe that the reason why I’m here is because I’m a mother. And this is the story of motherhood.

In 1986, when I was dating the father of my sons, I said to him that if we were in America, I would not get married to him. I would only have children. And that is in no way a statement on who he was. It is a statement of who I am, because when I was growing up, yes, I had the trauma that my parents passed on to all three of us. And yes, there was a lot of chaos, confusion, domestic violence, everything that was going on. But I had also added my own personal trauma, childhood trauma, to the trauma that was already handed over to me and what my circumstances were giving to me as we all do. But in my case, I had decided that the only way to survive was to cut my feelings away, to disconnect myself from my feelings. And that’s how I would live. And I started living that way. And when I bring you to that event in 1986 where I’m telling my, the father of my children that I would not get married to him, is because even through those years of numbness and disconnection, the only feeling that I can remember is the urge to be a mother.

It was so strong that I could feel it all the time pulsating in me. So when my older son was born in 1990, 24^th of October 1990, [on a] Wednesday evening, 7:30 PM, I remember that when I lay my eyes for the first time on him, my hand flew automatically, spontaneously and landed on his forehead in a gesture of blessing. And I said, words blurted out of my mouth. And I said to him, in Hindi, swavlamban, which means be self-reliant. And this is the story of motherhood because just like my mum wrote my destiny by naming me Mamta, I wrote the destiny of my son by saying those words, because he is so independent today, 33 years old, like you wouldn’t believe.

Anyhow, back to myself. I had my second son 15 months later, and I expected myself to be a good mother, just like we all expect ourselves to be. I was stressed, I was fearful, I was tense. I was constantly swaying between an over-functioning self where I was a high achiever, where I was an activist. I was picking up cuddles on behalf of other people. And then I would go to the other extreme where I was completely under-functioning, irresponsible, constantly in conflict with other people, never in the middle. So how could I be a good mother? Because I was only able to bathe them and feed them barely every single day. And by the time I did those two activities, I was completely exhausted. I just did not have anything left in me to nurture them, to nourish them, to be a mother to them. And that was the biggest irony because here I was, I had had the urge to be a mother, and I knew that I’m a mother, and I just couldn’t be a mother.

Anyway, true to my extreme swinging self… In 2002, I made the decision to come to Australia. Why did I make the decision? Because I was worried about the future of my sons considering the situations in India. It was a pragmatic, practical decision, but it had a much deeper spiritual element to it because I brought them here and I still did not become a mother that they needed and deserved. I was busy getting them the money and the house and everything that you could objectify, but I wasn’t there.

And even though I could see that my sons needed me and I needed to be the mother that I wanted myself to be, I just didn’t know how. I had no clue how to be. So in 2008, my younger brother passes away at the age of 38 of cancer, and I go into a deep depression. By the time we come to 2010, my life is completely unraveling around me. There is total chaos. There is fights, there’s arguments, there’s months of not seeing each other. But what am I doing? I am completely numb. I’m completely denying all of that because you see, my philosophy of life was summed up by a song that was in the CD that we got with our first car. So we bought our first Hyundai Elantra from skipper, John Skipper Hughes in Victoria Park. And the CD had a song which went like this: “run away, run away, run away, and save your life. Run away, run away, run away if you want to survive.” And that’s what I wanted to do. I just wanted to survive. And I was running away. So in 2010, life was unraveling. And by the time we came to 2013, I was still the same. I had not changed at all. I was still in denial. I was completely numb. I was completely disconnected. So much so, that while my life is unraveling, I find myself traveling. I find myself in Tokyo, in Japan. I find myself outside the hotel walking down a road that ends in a T-junction. And I come to that T-junction and I find myself repeating a dialogue from a Hindi movie no less, which is that when everything in your life is going right, take a right. And I take a right turn and I see a red door, what looked like a door of a temple.

I enter that door and I read the sign on the right hand side, and it says that it is the temple of a little-known Buddhist sect, which at least I hadn’t heard the name of before this time. And the name of this sect was Zojo-ji. It hadn’t appeared on any of my research, which I did before. Going to Tokyo definitely wasn’t on my itinerary at all. And to the left of that courtyard was a black, glazed statue of a female. And I was drawn to the statue. And as I went and I read the plaque, it was a very dainty feminine statue with a lotus bud in her hand. And she’s standing over there. And when I read the plaque, it said that it is the statue of the Buddha, represented as a woman, and his name was Sumida. And Sumida is also a river that flows through Tokyo.

And I don’t know what it says to you, but I know what it said to me. And my response was to cry. Not to cry a tear or two, but to ball and to continue to cry for about 45 minutes at a stretch. I could not stop. And I remember the father of my sons saying to me, this is embarrassing. You need to come back on your own. Please do this when you’re on your own. People are watching. And so I went back the next day and I spent a lot of time in that place. And I came across another memorial that was for stillborn children, black little laughing Buddhas in a circle with a colored pinwheel atop each of them.

And I’ll leave it to you to find out what it says to you, but I know what it said to me, because I came back and in the December of 2013, I did what I had been planning to do since 1995. And that was to go for a silent retreat of a meditation technique called Anapana. So here in Brooklyn, there is a monastery. And I landed there. And during that meditation, I had the vision of me being in a pit with my hands outstretched, a recurring dream that I had had since I was a child. Only this time, Sumida reached down, held my hands, pulled me up, took me in his embrace, and I decided that’s where I needed to stay. If I wanted to be the mother that my sons needed, I needed to stay in that embrace.

I found my path. I know that it was up to me to walk that path, and I walk that path every single day. Now, a decade later, it’s just the three of us, me and my two sons, they are thriving. I am not there yet. I’m not perfect, but I am sort of walking from the either extreme of being under-functioning and over-functioning to the middle, where I can be in touch with my compassion constantly, and I can give that presence to my sons that every child deserves. So I say that I’m here because motherhood saved me, and therefore this is the story of motherhood.