My mother and COVID-19: Intersectionality of love and suffering during a pandemic
Suffering is universal; its degree, however, varies with one’s caste, class, gender and sexual orientation.
By Lokendra Sharma
Last year, in September, my mother, who’s in her late 40s, got COVID-19. She had mild symptoms and therefore we decided to go for home isolation. A balcony room with good ventilation, direct sunlight and an exclusive toilet was what we could arrange for her in our modest 2BHK home. With our father out of city for work, taking her care was mine and my brother’s responsibility.
Struggle less physical, more mental
For my mother, the road to recovery was long. But, more than the physical pain, she was impacted mentally and emotionally. Isolation, fears around the ‘mysterious’ illness, oxygen levels, and so on were adding to her underlying issues of anxiety, stress and low BP.
Everyday then, was a struggle in itself. Not just for her, but us as well. We had to quickly learn the art of doing all the housework like cooking and cleaning; take extensive care of her; all the while also managing our academic and work related engagements. The value of her ‘unpaid’ labour as housekeeper was never clearer.
We fed her a lot of fluids — coconut water, ORS, glucose water — and well cooked dalia and khichdi. As she isolated, we ensured that we spent most of our time talking to her, allaying her fears. It was a combination of medicines, love and nutrition that made her recover slowly and slowly.
It’s been about five months now. She’s out of her isolation, she’s recovered. But post-recovery issues like fatigue continue and she has become quite frail. It is as if she has aged a decade in few months. More love, with nutritious diet, for a longer period of time, would be needed to make her return to her pre-corona self.
Intersectionality of love and suffering
As the reader would have ascertained by now, we belong to that cohort whom you can safely call upper caste-middle class. These months made me realise how much our suffering was reduced by the baggage of privilege we carry. It won’t be an overstatement to say that the very idea of love and compassion is elitist in nature. In our country, the majority population cannot afford to care for their mothers the way we were able to — separate room, fruits, coconut water, sanitisation tools, oximeters, and what not.
No, it’s not just about resources at our disposal, it is also about the most valuable thing in a neo-liberal world — leisure or spare time. Despite the advancement of technology and rapid rise in productivity, the promised leisure time never percolated down to the masses, who continue to work day and night to make ends meet. Work from home, study from home, remains a far fetched dream for those millions of migrants who had to undertake grueling journey back home during the lockdown. Masses are working for more and more hours but the real wages just won’t rise; the rich however, are becoming increasingly wealthy. Everyone talks about material inequality. It’s imperative to recognise the rising ‘immaterial’ inequality where ‘time’ becomes different for different people.
Suffering is universal. The degree of suffering, however, varies with one’s gender, caste, race, skin colour, class and sexual orientation. For instance, my mother’s suffering and a Dalit woman’s suffering would be different. Today, when the whole world is mourning for millions of deaths due to the pandemic, and as countless suffer, it’s time we all understand and empathise with the ‘other’. Let us strive to build a more humane and equal world; a world where we coexist in harmony and peace; a world where differences are celebrated and not fought over; a world where every mother could be a recipient of all the love and compassion she badly needs.
