The Woman behind the Great Man

There have been great men who have inspired me or have had a great impact in making the person I am today. I am very open in giving credit to where its due and have written about the great contribution my grandpa has made to my life on multiple occasions.

What I have not written about is the woman behind this great man. This post that I am going to write about is my grandma, my mother's mother and the woman behind the success of my grandpa, his soulmate.

I woke at 3:30am this morning and couldn't put myself back to sleep. I was a bit confused as to why that is so. The body is dead tired after a 14 hour day at work the day before, it just didn't make sense.

As I lay on my bed figuring out the disturbance, what I realized was that there was something bothering me. Enough to keep me up. After wasting about 15 minutes, I realized it was my grandma's illness. She has reached a very old age now and is passing through the toughest part of our lives, the fag end of it. Without going into details, she is in a lot of pain at the moment and I had tried to shut myself out from the thought but obviously it was bothering me enough subconsiously. Pray for her.

As soon as I realized the reason, I got thinking on my good times spent with her. Her thankless job of taking care of everybody. When I say everybody, it wasn't just her kids and grandkids. My grandma is from the generation who was taught the true basics of social behavior.

The human is a giver first before being a taker. Taking that simple life lesson and applying it in practice is the simple message that my grandma had to show us. When you see how it's done in front of you, you realize its possible and thats how it should be done. Obviously, in this age of competition, we forget the ethics at times in the effort of getting everything that we want. We think we deserve everything even if it means taking it away from somebody who may need it more, realistically speaking.

Raising 6 children, living through tough times most of her life, yet taking care of her children, her brother's children, the neighbour's children, her siblings, her generation above, her generation below. It would be difficult to count the people who can't get away without giving credit to her contribution to their life. She has made potential nobodies into great somebodies. I know people who would have ended up in orphanages if it weren't for her extended motherhood role.

My grandpa was a straightforward man. He would call a spade a spade and let the world know about it. Unfortunately, such people are not amongst the favourite list of most people and he had many of his career setbacks because of this overly honest attitude. He didn't ever call them setbacks but that is a different topic. The point I want to make is that the tough life that followed due to the decisions my grandpa made in life were just as tough for my grandma as well.

Bringing children through that and making them realize the goodness and life lessons from that is what my grandma did. She always taught them the lesson of keeping together as a family and building tolerance for each other's differences in opinions. This was more important than anything else that happens around you. At times, she didn't have as much as power or control as she would have liked to keep the children together but I know it was her will behind my grandpa's similar mission of driving togetherness. Being the head of the family he was able to influence some authority over the kids but unfortunately after his death the kids took over.

While I may become the bad guy in the family for saying this but some of her old age miseries may be related to how her kids dispersed into their own lives not being able to keep the family together. Something that she and my grandpa may have agreed to never let happen in their marriage vows without explicitly saying it. Distances between siblings has led to larger distances between their children, my cousins, and it would naturally continue to extend as further generations come through. It is kinda unfortunate that she had to see this in her life after working so hard to keep the family together by teaching all the basics right to everybody. Pretty sad that she had to see what she tried to build all through her life, simply fall apart or rather breakdown, in the end.

Sometimes we dont realize the role the woman has to play in society. A mother can make or break a whole society. We do pick up a lot of traits from our mothers and their teachings go into what we would teach our children and it would continue for generations to come.

As I see her suffer through the toughest of old age ailments, I wish for her speedy recovery and may Allah make her stronger in will, not that she is any shortness of it, and may He make it easier for her to return back to her normal self.

Salute and bow to a great woman.