Our disadvantaged mothers gave us an advantage

There has always been an abundance of fresh fruit in my house. As a child I would always have plenty to take to school, and even now there’s nothing that cheers me up more than a container of berries packed by my mother, without even asking. There is a double meaning to this fruit – a metaphor of becoming my greatest tool in explaining the immense love I feel for my mother and the other women in my family.

As women we are taught to tolerate hardship and use our pain threshold as indicators of our strength. This rhetoric is intensified for South Asian woman, as we are expected to struggle and suffer without ever raising our voices or speaking out about our troubles. Lessons like these are passed down through generations not out of spite, but out of sheer survival. Ancestral trauma is a tangible issue within our communities - we are taught to accept the pain imposed upon us, without question or complaint.

The lines between tolerance and compliance are blurred, which is why it often feels impossible to break out of this cycle and teach our children that they deserve more. Abuse is not witnessed, but experienced, with the lessons we do not teach our children being equally as important as the ones we reinforce in them. The abuse takes many forms, from domestic violence to the racial injustice that our parents and grandparents simply could not stand up to. One of the starkest generational differences amongst our communities is the ability for our younger peers to make noise and assert their rights.

My mother raised me to believe that nobody has a right to inflict pain on me. She made certain that I view my life as an active process in which I participate, instead of just a passive series of actions that pass through me.

This might seem like a normal thing to someone outside of Sri Lankan culture, but the ability to take control of one’s own life is quite a radical act in a world where being a woman opens the door to constant scrutiny and judgement. 

Talking to her now, my mother will never describe her life choices as sacrifices, but the older I get, the more I realise just how much she has done for me. As a single Asian mother, she felt like she had to overcompensate for all the ways I had already been disadvantaged. She worked twice as hard to make sure I felt equal to my peers, drilling into my brain that although my family looked different to everyone else’s, it was never short of love.

My mother knew how both our culture and wider society might look down on me - whether that be for my skin, my gender, my faith or the absence of my father. Perhaps this is why she spent more money in the exotic fruit section of Marks and Spencer’s than she ever did buying clothes for herself. In the grand scheme of things, this wasn’t the greatest sacrifice my mother ever made for me, but it’s a beautiful symbol for the selflessness she showed when raising me, and so many South Asian mothers do with their children.

Sacrifice doesn’t feel like sacrifice when you do it for love, and in a period of history so overwhelmed by negativity and suffering, it is this love that we must hold on to.

There are many words I associate with the women in my family, most of which come with positive connotations of happiness and nostalgia. Sacrifice, however, is a word linked so closely to the women I love most in the world, that it almost feels like a price they had to pay just for being alive. I cannot imagine the strength and bravery it took my grandma to immigrate to this country, nor can I imagine how difficult her life must have been living here during an era of little equality and excessive xenophobia. That level of courage is something I simply do not possess, which is why I am never short of praise for my grandmother. In many ways, she was the ideal Sri-Lankan wife, eternally generous, beautiful and domestically gifted.

Despite this, she was hyperaware of her position in society – Asian and British. She learnt to manipulate this to her advantage by scrimping and saving every last penny. My grandma fixated over money with the goal of saving it all for my mother and me. I never understood why she always offered to save my birthday money for me but looking back at it now, it makes perfect sense. She felt her duty was to provide for us, so she did this to the very best of her abilities. There was always warm food on the table and packed lunch to take to school. What she could not give, she bought. And what she could not buy, she saved for.

As a second-generation immigrant, my mother’s sacrifices differed greatly but are still so much deeper than I know how to comprehend.

She doesn’t even flinch as she recalls how hard she had to work to keep our household afloat, using her student loan to pay off the bills and praying for afternoon lectures so she could avoid the extra charges of peak hour travel. That to her was just a given, in the same way excelling in her chosen career was also just something that had to be done. The pressure from her parents may have been present, but it just made sense to her to do well at work so she could earn more and put us all in a better position. Her single wage kept us alive, and the need to provide kept her going.

The understanding of family in South Asian culture is one of my favourite things about being Sri Lankan. Our sense of community is so strong that it remains pertinent across oceans and generations, giving us all a greater sense of belonging and purpose. Working hard not just for yourself but because of the wider implications it has on your family, is a beautiful quality that we should celebrate. My grandparents would laugh if they could see me now, but I hope they would be proud too. I am the fruit of their labour and a direct consequence of years of sacrifice. My family worked hard so that I could work harder. And whilst this is a responsibility we cannot bear lightly, it is one we are privileged to have.