Mother’s day. Another western custom that has slowly filtered through into the more conservative eastern culture. Growing up in a Muslim Indian home with relatively strong traditional and Islamic values, we really never celebrated Mother’s day. While the message of the day is to show love and appreciation for our mothers, I grew up with my mother firmly saying that we should be showing love and appreciation for all important people in our lives every day and not just on a randomly selected day each year.

With that in mind, I thought back to my early childhood days and wondered back on lessons from Islamic classes (aka Madressa). I was looking for guidelines on how to show appreciation and who to show it to and for some reason the only one hundred percent clear lesson was the words of Prophet Muhammed (P.B.U.H), “Paradise lies under the feet of your mother.”

And as the words rang through my mind, I found myself wondering how many stories the feet of our mothers had to tell. With the help of one of my best friends, I set out to discover the world under the feet of mothers around me and as I delved into unknown depths I discovered striking, strong women and the people they helped mould.

Before I could delve into the beautiful stories that awaited, I decided to first define the word mother but alas the definition I found was lacking in variety.

According to thefreedictionary.com  :

mother

ˈmʌðə/

noun

noun: mother; plural noun: mothers; noun: Mother; noun: Reverend Superior

1. 1.

   a woman in relation to a child or children to whom she has given birth.

But I can not accept this definition, for as you will see below there is so much more to being the mother of a child than simply being the person who gives birth to the child. Below I will show how I came to realise that these strong and nurturing women are qualified doctors, lawyers, teachers and shoulder-to-cry ons. They are more than just the women who survived 57 Dels of pain to deliver a beautiful tiny creature (which for random interest sake is the same as breaking 20 bones at once). No, this woman is a warrior, a protector and a spoon weilding terror (if you grew up Indian, the spoon was often replaced by slipper or rolling pin depending on how badly misbehaved you were).

By now, I can practically see your eyes rolling at how corny this all sounds so instead of rambling on and on, let’s get to the interesting bit. Let me introduce you to the amazing gems we discovered:

In no particular order, except that I’m starting with my mum first (because as we’ve already established she’s probably reading this before anyone else), ladies and gentleman I present to you :

My Mother:

Now, after meeting these gorgeous and amazing women you see why I cannot simply accept a mediocre definition that a mother is simply someone who bares a child. For clearly, she has the role of a thousand people and yet she wears just one pair of shoes at a time. It’s no wonder paradise lies at her feet.

Sitting in Awe,

This post was inspired by Social Print Studio who encouraged bloggers to share on 
their blogs about the important women in their lives.
This company, whose specialty is in printing on metal and helping people share 
memories through photography.

***Disclaimer: This post is not sponsored***
Co-written by: Idz