An Ongoing Mother-Daughter Journey In Life
Rebuilding a relationship together as mother and daughter.
In view of the current situation, our next Crazycat Get Cosy: Our Maternal Figures will take place on 19th August 2021
In the meantime, we’ve asked Taahira (Baby T) from Spice Zi Kitchen to share with us a little bit about her relationship with Mama Zi; which stands as a little inspiration for all of us, as we stay indoors and build on our familial bonding. She also shares some tips on how we can build stronger relationships with our maternal figures and hope they’ll move you to try them out if this is something you need.
words and images Taahira Ayoob
My mum (Mama Zi) and I actually had a tumultuous relationship in the teenage and early adulthood years of my life – I wanted to leave the house, I spent days not talking to her and ignoring her, and at one point, she also said she would send me to girls home for my attitude and misbehaviour.
It may be surprising to some, who see us now running Spice Zi Kitchen – an Indian Muslim home cooking experience together. It requires us to spend our entire weekends together, several phone calls about ingredients, logistics, cleaning and operations to make sure our home is clean, suitable and welcoming to guests. However, it took us at least six to seven years to get to this stage, where I was confident enough to do this with my mum; we are nowhere near perfect, and we still argue and disagree.
Nevertheless, we are on an ongoing mother-daughter journey in life.
Mama Zi was a tiger mum – very focused on getting perfect grades, the perfect job, and very strict in her upbringing when it came to clothes, life, love, friend and lifestyle choices. We had many, many arguments about these topics over the years!
Sometimes, I would cry and leave in a huff, other times it would be my mum – there was no resolution on this. I was bitter and frustrated, my mum felt misunderstood that her intentions were ill-perceived.
The first most important thing for me to do was, to be honest with her – in my thoughts and my desires, and not seek approval or acceptance but simply for her to respect that these were my thoughts. From her side, she explained that she cared, loved and only wanted the best for me.
Once we set the foundation for this, I worked towards creating space for new memories.
I started planning a variety of things we could do outside of the home – art jamming, nature walks, cooking together. Things I would do with my friends, in a jiffy, but with my mum why had I not thought of it before? Who said a 55-year-old could not enjoy these things too? She just needed to try and so we did.
Some things, Mama Zi would say … ”Ok, what is this about art walkabout. It’s a bit too abstract?” But other times, she loved what we did together – it gave her time outside of her work and home, and also showed her the world through a young person’s eyes! She loved it!
With both our busy schedules, it was easy to forget and lose track of these activities. However, I made a conscientious effort to plan for our dates – set it in my calendar, set reminders on my phone and sent her messages or call her at least once a day.
Consistency was key.
Through all our trips and activities, she started to see life differently. She started to agree with my wild ideas like going hiking in Nepal and mountain-gorilla sighting in Uganda.
During one of our trips and adventures, we cooked for a local family as a ‘thank you’ gesture of all the time they spent showing us around. My mum was an excellent guide, cook and conversationalist. I saw her in her element and decided, we could do something with this, and so Spice Zi Kitchen was born.
At this point, we had gotten comfortable with our differences and disagreeing with each other in various circumstances outside of our personal issues, so I was ready to approach the topics personal to us.
I wrote a post-it and asked that we listened to each other without judgement, we spoke without attacking one another, we respect each other and most importantly, we always, always centred ourselves to love; especially when tempers flared up.
It has been seven years of the start of this journey, and we have many more to go. We know that there will still be days of arguing, days of fighting and disagreeing.
However, there will also be as many or more days of laughter, days of joy and learning to love each other, as we grow older together.
About the author:
Taahira Ayoob is the founder of Spice Zi Kitchen – an Indian Muslim home cooking experience that she runs together with her mum. They use food as a vehicle to share their knowledge on Indian Muslim culture, heritage, history and their ongoing mother-daughter relationship.