I think I was just about a year old (fun fact - Imma get on a call asap to check this ‘fact’ with my mum), when my babysitter took me into her home
A tenured professor from Ankara, Turkey who’d moved abroad, like my parents, in hope of a better life for her family.
Highly qualified expat, impeccable credentials, but her English wasn't considered fluent enough to teach at university. So instead of shrinking herself into a job beneath her, she went a different route and set up a small day care centre in her home, for the children of the neighbourhood.
People tend to underestimate the manner in which the feminine intelligence transfers to some of the most primordial instincts in humans. One of the first things she made clear to the mothers at her doorstep was the shape of her offer: high-quality care for only six children, at prices slightly higher than what most day care centres charged locally.
Complete responsibility. Home-cooked, organic (by default, at the time) food at the family table. She was going to care for these children the way she cared for her own two young daughters.
One of the first women at her doorstep was my mother, who had just signed a contract to start working after her unofficial maternity leave, as the family tried to build a life from scratch — still travelling amongst multiple countries, figuring things out with the base in this mediterranean city.
But my mother's question was a different one entirely.
"How much did you plan to charge for taking care of all of these children?"
When she heard the reply, her response was instant. "I will pay you the entire fee if you take care of only my son."
Within minutes, the two women had a deal.
The anecdote, revisited
For the longest time, this was an amusing anecdote sitting on top of the whirlwind of my quaint but turbulent early years — years in which we moved countries, cities and homes 10 times before I turned 9.
The country I spent the earliest 5 years in was declared a dictatorship by the media months after my family fled, sensing the unrest that eventually led to war. Some of my childhood friends still tell me stories of driving across the desert in the middle of the night with missiles flying over their heads.
It's only in recent years that I've realized the doorstep negotiation might have been one of my earliest lessons in understanding the concept of worth. And the slippery slope it can be into the territory of privilege.
Because let's be honest: not all mothers can afford to do what mine did. And some hard-core skeptics will find the premise even greedy from a certain lens.
(The only advice I have for the latter is this: don't even think about messing with my mom. Really. You don’t wanna try).
Jokes apart, that privilege many would assume a woman like her grew up steeped in was an entirely different story. She was the youngest of six siblings torn across worlds after the British partition of the Indian subcontinent, arriving as a refugee in a what was now a new country, carried across borders as a baby amidst communal war in the arms of her fourteen-year-old brother.
Sounds too unreal to be true, right?
That's the woman who decided I was worth the attention of six children.
A girl told in third grade that she'd have to quit school because there were no funds. Growing up in households amidst extended families, often without her parents. Eventually finishing medical college on scholarships and building one of the most successful careers of her generation, not as "a woman doctor," but a doctor.
Gold medals, national awards, the lot. But most importantly: a village of people who line up to show her their love in a queue so long I've had to fight my way in amidst the chaos on some days.
My mom is the original slumdog millionaire. It wasn't a movie. It was my mom.
To this day, she still practices medicine in her seventies.
I had to negotiate for weeks to make sure the new car she buys while sorting property particulars after my dad’s demise isn't a "just tiny enough" set of wheels, but one where she gets to be the queen she has always been.
The woman who considered me more valuable than anyone I know, still has to be fought against for me to return the gesture.
Hold that thought — it matters later.
The lesson it took me forty years to hear
Here is where the anecdote stopped being an anecdote for me.
For most of my adult life I seem to have carried an unspoken assumption: that worth is something I have to prove before anyone is allowed to name it. That I ‘earn’ recognition first, and only then does someone get to say what I’m worth.
It seemed so self-evident I never thought to examine it.
It’s only recently that I’ve pondered about the incident at the doorstep when two women negotiated the value of a toddler who had accomplished exactly nothing and decided, within minutes, what his care was worth.
Neither of them sought evidence.
Neither of them apologized for the number.
The agreement took minutes.
Both women were fluent in the same language, and it wasn't English, Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, German or Turkish (the 6 languages the mix of my first babbles comprised).
I started noticing too, the absence of a question mother never asked.
The objective ‘worth’ of her son.
That ‘number’ never existed for her.
She only asked that the arrangement would reflect what my care was worth to her.
I've come to suspect that it was a ‘value’ never discovered, but decided by not deciding, but knowing in ways that defy knowledge.
I’ve also found myself observing what the professor, the first woman my mother trusted her son to take care of, was protecting when she capped her little day care at six children.
She had simply decided what her care was.
The same process she used to care for her own daughters with no thoughts of diluting it into anything less.
There's an old word for that, one that has largely fallen out of fashion in an society of scale: honour.
I contributed nothing to that arrangement.
Just learnt a few Turkish sentences I have forgotten and a year with a family I’ll probably never meet again.
Two women simply decided I was worth the attention of six little humans, and that was that.
The decades taken for me to understand what a radical act that is feel like an intricately designed blur when I think about it.
The verdict we keep waiting for
I've spent over three decades as an artist, among artists, following my ‘bliss’.
A vocation my mum, the same woman giggled at at my first declaration of (we’ll talk about that another time).
There’s another act I thought was radical at the time. Another decision often labelled a ‘privilege’.
Another story for yet another day.
But I've watched what most of us folks in this world of ours do, with or without thinking of ourselves as ‘artists’.
Outsourcing that decision.
Waiting for external evidence to put a number on our worth.
Metrics.
Stats.
The label.
The manager.
The playlist.
The committee.
An algorithm.
A f****** robot.
An entire industry, a society built on the promise of eventually informing artists what they are worth with a never-ending queue for that a verdict, which, when it arrives, is never final and always a dangling carrot.
With the demand for another round of evidence to submit this year.
This month.
This week.
My mother on the other hand, skipped the entire courtroom.
Headed straight to a doorstep and never looked back.
It's worth sitting on how foreign that feels in today’s world regardless of how our earliest caregivers have treated us, because somewhere along the way, most of us invariably ended up robbing someone of the opportunity to simply love us for who we are, asking for nothing in return while we were caught up being busy "paying our dues", and receiving kept feeling like an increasingly flawed proposition to consider.
Most of us tend to be a lot more adept at estimating worth when it comes to someone else than ourselves.
My mother, the woman who understood value better than anyone I've ever met, still wants to buy
"just enough" cars.
And I've started noticing the identical reflex in humans a lot more acutely of late.
This is the epiphany that seems to be starting to rearrange how I engage with people, and vice versa.
Not a technique from a workshop or a weekend retreat on an island.
But a quick no-nonsense conversation between two women who ‘didn’t speak each other's language’ in a foreign country years away from a war.
I have no idea where that family is today.
But every now and then the odd Turkish word finds its way to my tongue.
Maybe that’s just Berlin and the neighbourhoods I cycle through on my daily commutes.
But It won’t stop me from remembering them and wondering, hopeless romantic that I am, if that might be them, doing the same.
Join my free training.
Artist Mindmap 2.0 is a reimagined 6-day email mini-course designed for serious, sensitive, and soulful artists who want more than
surface-level hacks.
0 Comments