Dr. Rabia Nazir
One thing that any woman needs most is love, and appreciation for herself. You love a woman and appreciate her for whatever she does, irrespective of how poorly she does it or how incompetent she is at certain chores or technicalities; it infuses life into her. Appreciate her for being a woman- a source of life and creation, a source of comfort to you and your kids, a source of physical being who is used by your children as well as you to derive inner peace for yourselves, she will keep going . She will remain strong if she has to go without food and any basic comforts of life. She will not demand you shower her with material riches, if you pour in her heart the pearls of love and appreciation for what she is. Once she is deprived of this, she starts getting weak from inside. The tree of selfless love remains in her heart, still providing shade to you and your kids, but flowers of glow and vigour on her start to wilt. She never refuses to give the serenity of her shade of protection to weather worn you, or the kids. Gradually, her leaves of energy that grow afresh everyday, stop growing in that abundance anymore. Your criticism and hostility for her lack of energy and her shortcomings, pull at her leaves that are remaining. The tree of affection, an unconditional one, still remains upright in her, because the roots of the unconditional love she extended to you in the beginning, dug deep into her being. The roots got anchored strong within her, rendering her incapable of withdrawing her extended shoots from over you and the kids. Her whole life is an embodiment of selflessness and sacrifice. But woe to man, who never understood the importance of watering the plant of devotion with showers of empathy and concern. Woe to the selfishness of the one, who plucked at her flowers, plucked at the fruit she bore, scattered the seeds of the progeny he gathered from her, all over the planet and yet remained thankless to her, and insisted that she bowed to him for the material roof that he got suspended over her head, while he remained anchored to the strong shoots of comfort from her being to keep himself steadied all the time.
Women….n not women rights is the subject that keeps calling me to itself…..I want to work for women…..for men to realize the importance of women n to treat them accordingly, so this society could be shaped into a better one. If mothers aren’t great at raising kids, how can great nations be made? In order to have a great nation, we must have mothers who are great women. Women who are emotionally, mentally n education wise strong enough to raise children who grow up to emulate Qaid e Azam , and Allama Iqbal, if saying Imam Abu Hanifa and Shams of Tabraiz sound like too far fetched of an idea.
A woman who was created to be ‘ A MOTHER ‘ – someone upon whom depends the shape and form the children take and grow up to be men, has lost her essence by being subjected to all the unnecessary demands of ‘men’. To make it simplest, a girl child when born, must be educated in the best possible way, manners and demeanour, required to be the best model of a WOMAN. Men can cook, clean, drive, wash, iron and what not. But it’s only women who can provide love and harmony within a family unit. The woman who was created to be a source of comfort to men and children, and was therefore endowed with all the tender and nicer traits of love and art, is doing almost everything today, but being that; i.e., being herself. Today, a woman, depending upon the class she belongs to, is catering to the needs of ‘her society’ more than she is doing what would please herself or her immediate affectees.
An average lady in our society wakes up in the morning and gets her children ready for school. She helps her husband get ready for his office. The rest of the day till the kids and the hubby return home is spent in housekeeping and cooking. The children when return, have television or other gadgets to turn to, to kill the afternoons and evenings away. The same goes for the husband. He returns home to television and his cell and to the food that was prepared after spending hours in the kitchen. Where is the usefulness of all the input, if by the end of the day, the children did not learn a thing that would help them be ‘ good men’ , ‘ pious men’ , ‘righteous men’ ? What benefit was another day, spent in spending it away , because there is no other way to live away this life? What became of our time and again expressed desire to stop massacre and brutalities in Kashmir? What became of the tearful emojis we just posted on social media in the name expressing our heart wrenching emotions to support Syria?
Why can’t the world see that our hearts are bleeding for Syria and Palestine? BECAUSE OUR HEARTS ARE NOT BLEEDING.
We are the mothers. We barely get time to tend to our own basic needs of just being alive. We are so bogged down all the time. Office, parties, acquaintances, relatives, dresses, shopping, travelling, holidays, friends, and then spas…..we don’t have time to raise children the way they ought be raised. We are going to be responsible for another generation bring raised in practices of inhumanity, injustice and apathy. Women are meant to shape the nations. Women can’t do that if they have to keep competing for validation for their existence. Our jobs, our figures, our culinary expertise, our well kept houses have failed to raise a generation that would fight for the right of Muslims to live free of any labels. Our generation is a glaring evidence of living dead . We are neither good humans nor good Muslims- which actually is one and the same thing, but we fail to understand that, even.
We need good mothers. Good women, to make possible the existence of great men.
