Hello Beautiful Ones: Hello series, #3

By Abbas QriquaS

Shifting from the protagonist and her antagonist to the central character about whom the fight for custody seems to be raging brings its own drama. Rightly, the author centralises the voice of TAM in the story. In Hello beautiful ones the book is light, irresistibly warm, strangely consoling and ruefully mordant. With no care in the world TAM are growing as well as any children would. They are happy. Rowena and Mastandi spared no cent to provide a cushy life for the three Hebrews compensating for the abandonment they suffered earlier formative years. They were trying to remove the stigma of fatherless/motherless by engineered the kind of life that would give TAM love, unfortunately, they ended up erasing the memory of Modi from her children - an unintended consequence. What will happen to TAM when they reach young adult age? Will they forgive Modi when they learn what she did to them when they were innocent and vulnerable, or will they turn the tables on their stepmom when they learn of her plot to erase Modi's from their memory? The reader is invited to take a leap into the future and imagine what life might be if TAM were to reunite with one parent only to lose the other permanently. this is a riveting story, a collection of palimpsests that make for a satisfying read. Readers will find the novel relatable as much as it is absorbing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abba QriquaS
• Release date: Jan 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224021000

Abbas QriquaS

Abba Qriquas has the following collection to his name: Fiction Hello series Travel series The world temporarily closed Current affairs Betrayed, broken & corrupted Twilight at dawn Free humanity free the earth 1632 centennial series Biography Ek is 'n Qriqua YA Inspiration Soaring eagle Letters for my sons The kingdom series Book 1 Book 2 Book 3 Book 4

Book preview

1

MOTHERHOOD

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In the past thirteen years I have loved and fallen out of love too many times to count. Mercifully gotten up that same incalculable number of times, broken my own heart and had a couple of other people break it for me. Fell in love with Standi, wrote a book, lost track of a million great ideas and found ten good ones. Buried my mother. May her soul rest in peace. It has been nothing short of amazing, hard-as-shit, beautiful thirteen years.

Now, instead of just watching the kids grow I want to be an active participant in their growth journey, prepare for when they leave the house to be their own persons in the big wild world without me or their Pappas. But in the meantime, I must do the mothering duties for these three graders to the best of my abilities and enjoy it while I can.

I don’t think it’s out of kilter when I say this is wholehearted living adventure  helping me find the skills of the best mother my children would be proud of someday and the grace to try again when I am not. Most of all, I want this living to continue  leading back to myself. All of me.

Some people call what happens at midlife a crisis, but it is not. It’s an unravelling – a time when a mother feels a desperate pull to live life she wants to live, not the one she is supposed to live. The unravelling is the time when she is challenged by the universe to let go of who she thinks she is often supposed to embrace who she really is. I often wondered privately if I have what it takes to live to the expectations of this role. And so, I enter this motherhood phase with great trepidation.

Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut and another rips open. There’s happiness and satisfaction in being a mother of just one but what if you happen to be a mother of triplets, the joy is multiplied by three or the corresponding pain is increased by that number. I'll never know until I have taken the plunge into the deep end.

Regret will always have a place at the table of any mother’s memories of raising her children. The pressure comes upon us all from everywhere: media, the press, and movies all paint a picture of moms and love and happiness. But we know that real life is not like that at all.

Mothering is one of the most complex and demanding jobs in the world, and the huge majority of moms try their best to meet the threshold of what psychologist call the good enough factor. The system is stacked against mothers but achieve success in spite of it all.

Interweaving her personal experience with the latest research in The Motherhood Complex, Hogenboom have noted some of the modern myth of maternal perfection and highlights the importance of understanding how and why we change for women’s physical and emotional health, to the true cost of the motherhood workplace penalty and the intrusion of technology on family life, she has revealed how external events and society at large shape the way we see ourselves and impacts upon the choices we make.

When it comes to self-conscious motherhood, it begins even before our children are born. As the babies grows, we seek advice and do research on how to be the best possible mom. We note what the other is doing and how they do it, setting standards for our mothering techniques along the way. We distinguish not only good from bad, but best from better. Sometimes, though, we wind up not only wanting to be the ideal mom but yearning to be known as that great mom.

There is the pressure to make baby food from scratch and to use only certain diapers. Love drives many moms to make these choices, but there are equally as many who make them because they seem to fit an ideal-mother identity.

These moms can’t see that they are driven more by self-induced standards than by love, and in time all the joy leaches out of their mothering. If I am the self-conscious mom, this undercurrent will continue to tug at me when it comes to make decisions about these little ones.

Self-consciousness impacts the decisions we make. Our choices big and small are too often governed by ‘what will people think of me and my mothering skills?’ Our attempt to shape the answer to that question becomes an internal driver that we aren’t even aware of its pull.

It is there in the home furnishings we choose, there in the tables we set and the planter we place on the patio. It is there in the car we drive and the holiday decorations we choose for the front porch. Self-consciousness can also drive the decisions we make for our children.

The schools they would attend and the summer camps, the clothes they wear and the friends they make along the way. This relentless undercurrent is flowing somewhere beneath our very genuine mama-bear love. I want to avoid this pitfall. If at all possible.

I am glad I have someone in my corner to check my excesses and remind me of reality.

Even many mothers who do not meet that threshold did try their best. They simply didn’t have the tools to respond to their child’s emotional needs, perhaps because they didn’t get nurtured properly by their own moms. Just like me

The world is full of people who love their mothers, most of them very much. But love comes in many different shapes, sizes, forms, and depths. And what therapists know is that when it comes to relationships with mothers and daughters, no two people are quite the same.

In the bleary early days of mothering, my friend and I joked that books and movies with dying children should come with warning labels. ‘Dead baby alert.’ We ‘lol’ed at our running exchange, but the truth was darker and more profound than we admitted, as all truth in new parenting are. The ‘mammas’ as we call ourselves.

For my friend Tidimatso, motherhood had proven to be stranger and more intimately compromising than she had expected. Her biggest difficulties were not external—the grocery store tantrums, the lack of sleep, the many domestic injustices of the day. Instead, they seemed to rise from her gut, like fermentations—wordless burdens, unanticipated sorrows, and all the worrying. She worried about the improbable, mostly, the heavy tree branches that might fall on the child, diseases that he might pick up in the sandbox.

When her son was a newborn, she had entertained a very brief but horrifying notion that she would go mad and drop him in the fish tank. She had stacked books on the lid, to deter her crazed, hypo­thetical self. It would take long enough to remove them, she reasoned, that the impulse would pass, the child would be spared. She would come to, like a sleepwalker. There were so many of these morbid, imaginary bargains to be made, now that her son was in the world, and she could not stop the world from taking him if it wanted to.

Our babies were fresh slates, and we hoped shiny futures awaited them on our doorsteps. But in the folds of our tired brains, we also could feel gnarled misfortune out there too, clawing to get in. What’s more our parents and their parents stood on the welcome mat; the hurts of our own childhoods slung low among them. But magical thinking is poor security; other universes, happy and sad, always seep through.

I have seen Tidi driving the mammas away and loses herself in a mind-melting eternal transport to the past, haunting old versions of herself and Thato the father of her son. Unable to keep out the dangers of her family and incapable of taking responsibility for her role in all, Tidi drowns in the infinite soup of ‘what if’ s.

If only we could lock our doors and our minds, we might keep our children safe from it all. What do we do when misfortune is already inside the house – being us – no closed door will protect our kids? Here is the darkest and most profound parenting truth of all: it is impossible to keep a child safe from his/her mother’s follies.

We are all human, we will all leave on this dimension – our babies included, as simultaneously close and unimaginable as that may feel. But being mothers requires us to be present with our kids despite the limits of time and space. I am staying open to all my mistakes, all the blame, and all the forgiveness, but I can’t lose sight of how lucky I am to live in the one today that is my own.

As toddlers, they are spirited and loud. Whispering in their tiny ears and in their father’s big one. I had other names for them too, dozens of them. I missed them every moment I spent in the studio and scooped them into my arms every time we reunited. My love for my daughters came easily. Their father loves them too; we talked about them every night after they went to asleep, thanked each other for the gift that were to our two girls and their brother. Everything that I had been denied I gave to them, and then some more. And they gave me their love in return. Unconditionally.

I initially interpreted the new atmosphere around mothering as just a new kind of patriarchy. And while I remain uncertain that there is a lot of casual sexism underpinning all this, I can conclude that the impetus is political: adverse conditions that are related to poverty are recast as parenting failures.

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When reading about mothers and daughters, we might feel grateful we didn’t have to endure such conflict and trauma. We might long for what we, ourselves never had. But then again, we might feel seen. Belonging is an innate human desire to be part of something larger than myself this is true for mothers.

More often, literature reflects troubling, toxic, or estranged mother-daughter relationships than they do healthy and inspiring ones. Some works portray relationships between mothers and daughters who embrace the complexity of their respective identities and personalities, of their own and their mothers/daughter.

When my own mom was still alive, I always look forward to celebrating Mother’s Day with her. But then when it happened, I end up feeling disappointed. Because for some reason, I always ended up annoyed and snapping at her. It was hard to pick a Mother’s Day card for her. None of them fit how I actually felt about her. I know it’s wrong, but it’s how I felt.

Five years ago I gave my mother a book in hopes that the novel would speak for me, say what I couldn’t say – I could understand you better if I knew you more, if I knew what you went through, before me. When my mother passed on, my grief was compounded by how much I didn’t know about my mother, of my mother.

When TAM came through and I became a part of them, I knew I wanted them to know me, the girl I had been, the young woman I missed, yet often regretted and the woman I am, as me Rowena the woman quiet apart from being their mother.

Because this yearning is primal, in the past I often acquired it by seeking approval from my friends in high social circles, which has often proven a barrier to it. True belonging happens when I present myself as authentic, imperfect self to my children.

My sense of belonging can never be greater than my level of self-acceptance. I dedicate the books I write to my daughters Tova and Ariella, as an extension of my desire for them to know me, and to know how I saw and see us.

As a matter of fact, we are wired for connection. It’s in our biology. From the time we are born, we need connection to thrive emotionally, physically, and spiritually. I cannot separate love and belonging, it’s not an accidental entanglement; it’s an intentional knot that love belongs with belonging.

I consider this book a tribute to their journey from abandonment to belonging. The willingness to tell their stories and feel connected in this disconnected world is not something I want to do half-heartedly but intentionally. Their journey was a path of conscious choice by their birth mom, a little countercultural though.

And so, as I catalogue my daughter’s growing up milestones, tracing the moments ahead of them leaving home for university or for overseas experience their leaving must mean that the people I shared my life with for three decades would soon be young adults on their own leaving me and their Pappas they are leaving behind friends.

This means focusing not only on the last years, the present and pressing moment, but also the next eighteen years of our lives together as we look ahead to the future in our respective worlds.

The modern conversation about parenting turns the healthy baby, and healthy children into the proof of the parents’ excellent life choices is flawed. By turning