It means a lot!

There is something about the way people look at me these days. As if I need clinical care. Everytime I come across a gaze that hangs in front of me like a question mark, I say `ok. I am ready. Shoot.' And there it comes. ``Still sitting at home?''

My mother's serene face cross my mind then. And the answer she taught me. ``Yes. Happily.'' Because, as she found out, that's what the question is all about. To point out how unhappy a situation I have fallen into.

My mother was 25 when she got married, an age too late for a woman of her times. She is 60 now. A graduate with additional qualifications, she was called for a bank job, a coveted post then .My father, with  a feudal baggage, would not approve. He asked and everybody in the family repeated, ``why should you when your husband makes enough to feed you?'' Ten years later, when in a flash, he left this world, my poor mother was left with no choice but to take up a job. ``Had you taken up that bank job, things would have been easy for you now,'' many rued. She became a teacher and worked for nearly 15 years.

But thankfully, times had changed and going to work was in fashion, even in our conservative family. It was soon after my marriage and my brother's venturing into business that my mother quit her job finally. ``You should rest now,'' we both said and she seemed only eager to. Which surprised me. I had thought the school was her second home.

In the days that followed, I found her doing things she loved or rather missed doing all those years. The foremost, being easily around for her grown up kids! Then I knew how much she had missed her first home!

It's been the other way around for her daughter though. When I took up journalism, it naturally earned me the status of the stupid person ever to be born in that family. ``People who study literature are generally emotional and end up messing up their lives. And now journalism- somebody is sure to end your story,'' an elder teased.

I had a dream and a passion to chase it. My age held me tight. My mind was focused. Even a teenage love affair could'nt break it. After nine years, when after having given some proud moments to my family and having drained my passion and lived enough to start a new dream, I meet with these stares that mocks me endlessly. For, the `working-mother’ is in fashion. And I have missed the bus.

Who sets the rules in your life? Your priorities or the society? What is once a taboo becomes a fad and vice versa. Am I to dance to music set by others? To live on your individual choice is not so much of a bad idea. Even if that means `dumping a decent job to go to seed.’

But  if there is one person who is more than happy seeing me at home, it’s my mother. ``You can always board an other bus,’’ she says. There is a child in me who missed her mother badly at one age and there is a mother in her who understood the little one’s yearnings and still couldnt do anything. Together, we seem to be mending things after all these years, for another little one. Happily!