THE ART OF MOTHERHOOD

Hello, my dear friends of life in my heavenly Turkey, whose health is precious, whose hearts are kind, whose souls are beautiful, and who are full of awareness.

We celebrate the Mother’s Day of our angelic mothers and extend our deepest love to all mothers. On this special day, I want to share some memories of my beloved mother with you.

I was only 1 year old. Since my mother and father were civil servants and my sister was a student, my maternal grandmother, who lived directly across from our house, looked after me. May she rest in peace. I gave her a lot of trouble with food; I would object and refuse to eat. So, every lunchtime, my mother would leave work, rush up Abbasağı Park, and try to feed me my baby food just for 10 minutes. My mother is a petite woman. In photos from 1976, I saw that she had dropped to 43 kilograms as a result of these tiring marathons and climbs. Please keep this story in mind. It’s 1982, and despite our family budget being in deficit, I am attending a private college. I am an elementary school student. My mother would never enter my study room without knocking and without my permission. She would advise me to behave the same way in society. She taught and exemplified the concept of respect for everyone, young and old, using what we now call body language. Even when hugging me, my mother would ask, “Uğurcum, my son, may I kiss you, my baby?” I had a sincere, warm, and respectful communication with my mother. To this day, I have never heard her raise her voice at me. This is because I tried not to exploit either the society I lived in or my family.

Today, we go to luxury shopping malls in our finest attire, eat, drink, and buy expensive toys. Let’s say you enter a restroom there. How many times in your life has your closed restroom door been knocked on with a ‘pardon, is it occupied?’ Or are people colorblind? I think there’s a red warning sign there. Isn’t there? This is just a small but very critical example. In society, even on live television broadcasts, I can tell you about hundreds of people who don’t know how to sit or speak in front of millions, yet pontificate about communication and culture. Raising a child is not just about being a biological mother to that child. Etiquette can be learned up to a certain age. Even if you try hard later (to avoid being a parvenu), you will inevitably slip up somewhere. Life success must be within you. Motherhood is a multidimensional and psychological process. Every mother, I am sure, tries to offer the best they have to their child. And please, let’s not forget. The human mind gains consciousness and awareness by reading and learning.

WEEKLY AWARENESS NOTE

As human beings, our strongest need in this life is the need to belong. We are born programmed to be in relationships. At every stage of life, people we can trust more than ourselves, people we can connect with through love, and the healthy psychological and emotional communications we establish with these people are as essential and important to us as breathing. Just like our immune system. This is also true for the psychological and biological process between mother and child, which begins at birth. Interaction affects you today as an adult in every area of life. Whatever our social roles, identities, or psychological roles may be, we interact with what remains from yesterday. It doesn’t matter what age or gender you are. To live healthily, we need to define these interactions. None of our lives are the result of coincidences. Our lives are nothing more than a reflection of our behaviors.

Uğur Uğural