Giving birth to a child is not the only way to become a mother, discovers Miriam Zamani

Azra Bibi is ageless, or so she seems. She has been ‘there’ for at least two, possibly three generations of children who have, under her guidance, sailed through the ups and downs of life with courage and the strength gained from her endless patience and wisdom which are, like the treats in the kitchen cupboard, dispensed as required.

“I was married and widowed before I was 15 years old,” this still sprightly lady, her smiling face weathered and lined, recalls. “I have always loved children and not having any myself, got in to the habit of making a fuss over the countless children of my siblings and of my neighbours’ too. Luckily, my in-laws who I lived with, didn’t mind that there were always children buzzing around like bees.”

Azra Aunty, as these legions of children, some grown up with children of their own now, call her, glows with joy at the sight of a group of young boys playing cricket on a flat piece of ground just below her mountainside home a few kilometres outside Murree. “Better they play cricket than sit inside and watch television” she says. “When they’ve finished they’ll all arrive here looking for a glass of cold water and will rattle on about what happened in school today and who did what to who and why. They make my day with their chatter. The same with all the girls too, although these days they grow up so fast and, before you know it, talk of nothing but fashion and nail polish,” she says with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes.

Mothering others comes naturally to Azra Bibi, as does helping children deal with whatever problems they face in their lives. “It’s me they come and talk to when something is wrong, often something they don’t want to discuss with their parents and it’s me they run and tell good news to first. It’s as if I am all of their mothers rolled in to one” she says proudly, blushing a little as she adds, “the thing is, we are the best of friends as well which, as I have come to understand over the years, is a gift that few children share with their birth mother. I am blessed indeed.”

Bonding with children who are not their own by birth is a special ‘something’ that some women, single or otherwise, have and, depending on personal circumstances along with societal conventions, can lead them, as with Azra Bibi, to be a mother figure for all, to follow careers as children’s nurses, to establish or work in orphanages, to dedicate their lives to helping the children of the less fortunate, to becoming teachers or to taking in and bringing up children ‘birthed’ by others, either through legal adoption or via privately arranged fostering.

Such women become either the mother the child never had or a replacement for the mother they don’t get along with for countless children all over the world.“I don’t know what I would have done without my foster mother” says Amna, a middle-aged lady from Lahore. “My own mother developed serious mental problems after the birth of my younger brother when I was five years old. I hated going home from school because my mother would be so depressed that all she could do was sit and cry; on other days she would roar and shout and hit out if any of us went near her. It was a relief when we children were sent to stay with a distant relative, an unmarried lady who loved children, in another part of the city. This lady quickly became our mother, a mother who did all the things with us that a mother is supposed to do. We called her mother too, and still do.

“Our real mother passed away a few years ago but for many years, even though we were taken to visit her once a week, she hadn’t known who we were and, terrible as it sounds, none of us missed her as we had, and still have, our foster mother who loves us as our birth mother, poor woman, never could. Father is still alive but he had his hands full with mother and very little time for us. He has always, sadly, been a stranger.”

Women like Azra Bibi and Amna’s foster mother are prime examples of what can, in a way, be termed ‘universal motherhood’ and these women, like mothers everywhere, should, at all times — not just on ‘Mother’s Day’— be recognised for what they are — mothers in every sense of the word.