Opinions of Wednesday, 24 January 2024

Columnist: Abdul Rahman Odoi

Mothers: Stronger than the strong

File photo of a mother with his child File photo of a mother with his child

Women are special people; they give men a meaningful life. If not for them, the world would face extinction.

In the gender supremacy debate, the Bible compared the finding of good women to a task worth far more than mining diamonds.

The bright future of children is premised on the kind of woman a man finds as a better half. While men think they bring so much onto the table, women bring everything — including their lives.

Trevor Noah’s ‘Born A Crime’ is punctuated with selflessness, commitment, compassion, and the dedication of a mother to leading her child to find bliss in God and a successful end. Despite having to conceal the fact that her child (Trevor) belongs to a white man, at a time it was a crime, she lived to raise him single-handedly, flouting racial laws, and setting her own, all while being abused by Trevor’s stepdad whom she’d later become bonded to, and eventually being shot by him.

The joyful end of Sonya Carson: her tenacity in raising those strong boys (Ben and Curtis Carson) to prominent men the world needed to survive, as an unlettered and single mother — being married at age 13. The headache, hopelessness, and helplessness they put her through. And the pragmatic resolutions she brought forth to curtail their mannerism.

Cyril J Davey relates how by the age of 12, Sadhu Sundar Singh had begun a life of asceticism. The boy was so much inclined to God that he once had to steal his parents’ ten-rupee when they feared giving a dying beggar woman food and clothes because malaria would siege their house.

But would later confess when their maid was wrongly accused of the crime he had done, which won him his father’s adulation. Singh, his father, said: “I do not like so much religion in a boy of twelve, but at least it is the faith for which our fathers suffered martyrdom that he loves.”

Sadhu lived the life of a Christian monk, revered and honored worldwide after surviving many prosecutions. His mother — serving as a pillar — laid his foundation of godliness. She’d take him to sit at the feet of a Hindu sadhu, an ascetic holy man, who lived in the jungle some miles away, and put him in the prayer room each and every morning before he departed to school.

To the end of his life, he spoke passionately of his mother — that whatever he was — he owed it to her. “No man, he declared, was ever truly good who had not a good mother.”

Mothers are so strong and, their strength lies in wrestling principalities — the evils of today and tomorrow, and molding the mannerisms of their children to a standardized ascetic behavior. Where else lies one’s heaven, if not the mother’s feet?