Mothers Day

I. Love. You.

I reluctantly scribbled the three words on the inner leaf of a handmade mother's day card.

Inwardly I was appalled.

The card itself, was to my five year old mind. Perfection.

Decorated with an explosion of glitter vomit, surrounded by an unholy trifecta of wonky rainbow hearts with a crosseyed sun flower drunkenly occupying pride of place at the center.

But - poor misguided miss what'sherface, clearly did not understand the subtle intricacies of our familial dynamics. Hence that rogue "I love you".

Satisfied with the depth of my filial affection , miss whatsherface moved onto to her next victim.

I furtively scrambled for a rubber, erased the unseemly sentiment and replaced that offensively effusive Love with an appropriately demure Like.

There. Much better. Ami would approve.

She came back. Eyebrows raised. "Love " dearie. We love our mommy.

We like chocolate , we LIKE Santa but we should love our mommy .

I fairly seethed with resentment.

I decided I did not like this harlot teacher intent on tainting the puritanical sanctity of my familial values with her clearly deviant ways.

But I didn't have the words to tell her that in our family love was a taboo four letter word.

Not because my parents were in any sense unloving. Like many Asians of their generation they had been raised to be emotionally undemonstrative, instead expressing affection through tireless acts of service . Perhaps , they were also just a little apprehensive and scared that children who were given permission to casually toss around words like love today. Would one day announce a total freefall into mindless promiscuity .

A love fest of sorts perhaps. Shamelessly indulging in debauched orgies, tossing respectability and tradition to the wind. Getting up to all sorts of terrible shenanigans , culminating in a loss of face so complete that we would all be forced out of our little town and succumb to living under a bridge, main-lining heroin to numb the pain of our indelible shame.

Our viewing material was painstakingly censored for any hint of unseemly emotional expression , my copy of Disneys Sleeping Beauty ended rather abruptly with the last two pages taped together and one line hinting at an awkwardly jovial post marital hug scribbled in by my mom. Time magazine and national geographic were given to us after the parental censors had blacked out all material deemed unsuitable for small children.

Princess Auroras' indiscreet cavorting with woodland fauna and the entirely non-consensual testosterone triggered liberties taken by a marauding prince with her comatose person had no doubt culminated in a gaggle of illegitimate children and Aurora turning tricks on some shady medieval sidewalk in my mother's disapproving imagination.

Basically. LOVE was bad news, something decadent people on TV indulged in before taking the fast track to perdition.

Declarations of love ,impassioned or otherwise were just not on the menu.

But our Lady of whoredom (because that is what my very uptight five year old self had branded her ) was still standing there.

So having grudgingly weighed my options , I half heartedly erased the like

and rewrote love in what I hoped was a barely legible scrawl and sulked for the rest of the day.

The card in my bag felt like radioactive contraband. As soon as I got home. I took it out and erased with a mindless fury causing one of the sunflowers eyes to fall off .

The tell tale impression of that errant love still lingered. So I ripped out the inner leaf and in painstaking capitals wrote. I LIKE YOU AMI.

The one eyed sun flower looked a little miffed and out of sorts but I felt like I had run a marathon fueled only by righteous fury.

I had single-handedly protected the family honor.

No one would ever know the agonies I had had to suffer, retroactively facing down the forces of immorality represented by miss what'sherface.

I handed ami the card. It's beautiful.

She opened it. Her face fell. Thank you beyta.

She enveloped me in a hug and everything was OK.

But I played that moment over again and again.

If I wasn't wrong. There had been a brief, very brief flicker of disappointment.

But why? hadn't I gone out of my way to defend our khaandaani izzat?

I thought about it.

For many years.

I thought about it.

Maybe miss what'sherface was right. Maybe I should have written I love you.

I never made my mom another mothers day card.

I did just message her to wish her a wonderful mother's day and to tell her that I loved her.

I got a heart emoji in return.

Thank God for repressed desi moms.