Wanting what's best for my mom

There are many times in life when we want something to happen, however someone else might not feel the same way. It could be for a good change or a good reason but perhaps that someones does not want to be a part of it. This brings up the topic of my family and I wanting my mother to take better care of her health.

For the past three years my mother has been taking poor care of her health. She does not sleep or eat right, which are two important things human beings need in order to survive. In the past years, she has also gone through a lot, which could be some of the elements that were reflecting on to her health. My mother is a very hard working woman, my family and I really appreciate all that she has done but we just wished that she would take better care of her health. Knowing that she was not taking good care of herself had a huge impact on my family. We tried to help her to eat and get to sleep on time but she did not really take our help into consideration, which frustrated my family member because she was not willing to bring change into her health.

Everyday she has a very early start meaning that she should also be going to sleep early, in order to get the right amount of sleep, but she does not. She wakes up every morning, bright and early, before her sleeping childrens. Since I leave the house before everyone else, she comes and wakes me up first and then heads downstairs to prepare breakfast for everyone. After I eat breakfast, I head out to leave but I do not leave alone, my mother actually gets ready to drop me off to the trainstation. At that time I was younger but I was able to walk myself to the trainstation. I would tell her that “you don’t have to go,” but she would refuse to listen and would come along. I did not mind this because this was one of her ways to show that she cared about me. But I did not want her to come along because I wanted her to get some more sleep and eat since she had not eaten breakfast with me. Once I had told her “mom, I am old enough to walk myself to the trainstation, you do not have to come with.” My mother took that a bit too personally and got upset about it. The next day when she would want to come along again, I would say nothing. I tried this many time and I always got the same reaction. Then I realized that there was no point in saying or doing anything because she would just do things her way.

Everyone in my house has a different schedule, we all leave and arrive at different times, the only time we are all together is after 11pm. My mother refuses to go to sleep before her children. A lot of times I have to stay up really late to finish school work and she would decide to stay up with me until I finish. Once when she was staying up with me, I asked her to go to bed since she gets up before me but like before she would not listen. At home I alternate between two different languages, Bangla and English, I speak Bangla with my parents. One day my older siblings, Laxmi and Mithun, told me that I tend to have a harsh tone in that Bangla. I had no clue what they meant because when I speak, I can not tell the difference between my tone being harsh and not harsh. I also do not mean to do it, it just ends up happening and sometimes my mother takes that personally and ends up getting mad. At that point it is really difficult to make her understand my point of view.

My mother says that she does not have the time in her schedule to get enough sleep or eat well. This made me sad because it showed everything she does for us, does not give her time to do things for herself. One day when my siblings and I were in the kitchen my mother was repeatedly telling us to eat. My brother, Mithun, told her “mom, you constantly keep telling us to eat and take care of ourselves but why don’t you do the same.” My mother was busy cooking so she responded “then who is going to do all my work.” She does a lot for our family and she does not want to give my siblings and I responsibilities because she thinks that it would be pressuring us. When in reality we actually wanted to help out because her doing so much was affecting her not being able to take care of herself. If we had more to do then perhaps she would not have so much to do and would have more time to take better care of herself.

Everytime I or anyone in the family tried to make a change in her health, she would not pay it any mind and that would make us really mad. We showed her that we cared but she just stuck to doing things in her same way. Then I think what did I do wrong? Did she think that I did not care or is it that she did not want to me to care? Whatever the case it got me really angry. But I learned to control what I would say to her, because first it probably would not matter and second she would probably mind. There was obviously something wrong, but I just did not know what it was; that made it hard to help change her health. Maybe its the fact that human being do not have the ability to make other do what they want, even if it is for a good cause.

Overtime we all realized that this was, obviously, something we could not change overnight so why not take baby steps and see where they led us. To make things a bit easier for my mother, my siblings started do more around the house; my mother still did not allow me to get involved. Wanting to change my mother’s health is still possible, however the results would come in a slow pace. I have learned that when someone else is involved in the change I want to make, I can’t force it upon them that I have to wait and be patient.

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