Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 00 357 99 966518
00 90 542 853 8436
We bring nothing with us when we come to this earth – we get out of our mother's womb and we are naked… We leave the same way, when it's our time to leave, not possible at all to take anything with us…
We come to this earth crying and we leave crying… Calling out to our mothers, the very first connection with our earth…
It is our mother who teaches us everything for the first years of our lives. She teaches us to smile, she teaches us to love, she teaches us to talk and to take our very first steps on this earth… She teaches us not to fear, she teaches us the loving care when we are sick, being by the side of our bed, caressing our head, soothing us, telling us that everything will be all right. She is our only and primary connection with the earth; all other relationships come after that…
She teaches us to eat and drink, she cooks for us, nurtures us… She gives her milk and then when we are old enough, she cooks wonderful things for us to eat… I remember how my mother used to cook eggs for me – the melada style – and feed me with a spoon, telling me to open my mouth wide since the plane was coming to land in it! She would put a little salt on each spoonful of egg and my mouth would fill with the pleasure of eggs… She would dip bread in the egg and would feed me, telling me stories and fairy tales so I would not notice that I was eating and all of a sudden, both eggs would be finished! As a child she would tell me years later, she had only seen eggs in books – they had been such a poor family that she didn't know what eggs tasted like. Only when she was grown up, she would discover eggs… Perhaps that's why from a very early age, she would try to feed me eggs for breakfast…
During times of deep poverty when my father had died and had left debts of the house owned when it was being built, my mother would hide the egg shells from the previous day and in the morning when I would ask her why she was not having an egg with me, she would show me the empty shell and say `I already had it before you woke up…` A white lie, I would discover years later because there weren't enough eggs for both of us…
She would make soups for me when I was a child, lentil soup with chicken stock, rice soup with carrots and celery and pieces of chicken – she would always put the liver of the chicken in the soup and would reserve this for me. She would feed me the liver of the chicken with a little salt on it and I would be all smiles…
Whenever I would feel sick with flu or would have a headache, my mother would make me `mother's soup`, putting carrots, celery, fresh tomatoes, chicken, rice and red lentils to make me strong. She would tell me stories about lentil soup, how good it is for our bodies, how it contains iron and how she had met a very old guy who came as an inspector to her school when she had been a young teacher… The old guy had rosy cheeks and he looked very fit despite his age. They would ask him his secret and he would tell them that `Every morning he would eat lentil soup!`
She would show me the lizards and tell me how great they were, eating all the flies… She would show me the spider webs in our garden and tell me that they were here on this earth and that they served a very good cause by eating the flies! She would tell me stories about snakes and how snakes ate rats and helped the farmers… She would tell me about black snakes that Cypriots used to cherish like pets, once upon a time in Cyprus… In their old house in Tahtakala, they would put milk for the black snake, who would come to drink it… She would tell me stories of the cuckoos perched on the date trees who would come at night to sing to us: `The owls are very good, they eat the mice!` she would tell me…
She would teach me that the ants were hard workers and show me their nests, she would tell me stories of the cricket and the ant, finding books in colour from the library where she was working and telling me the tales of La Fontaine… I would be amazed with the ants and the laziness of the crickets singing all day long in August, making a big noise, flying and perching on our almond tree… She would show me how ants would follow each other and tell me that `They have a wedding and that's where they are all going!` From the age of six, she would start teaching me English since she had been an English teacher at the Shakespeare School and she would use the books from 1930s and 40s, giving me homework, making me listen and repeat, every night watching television together – the series in English like Avengers or Peyton Place on RIK – and she would be translating to Turkish from English for me to understand…
She would always sing when in the kitchen – I would grow up with beautiful songs she would sing to me… She would sing children's songs, songs she had learnt from our auntie from Switzerland about macaroni – whenever she would cook macaroni, she would sing songs about macaroni from Swiss Italians…
She would teach me to appreciate milk, cheese and halloumi, rice and macaroni, chicken and meat… She would show me how fruit grew on the trees, how the lemons became lemons starting from flowers… We would smell the lemon flowers and tangerine flowers and smile… Together we would collect lots of tangerines and she would give me a wooden spoon to stir the juice with sugar in order to make lemonade… We would be hard working and happy in the kitchen, making lemonade for hot summer days, to offer to guests and to drink ourselves. No Coca Cola in our house in those times, only lemonade made with tangerines and lemons from our garden…
These are the things I cherish about life, the things I learnt from my mother, the things that helped me to stay strong despite poverty, despite threats, despite unemployment, despite dark days of political repression for many years… These are the things that I also taught my son, showing him the moon and the stars and the flowers and to be happy that we are on this earth, that we are lucky to have each other and love each other, that no matter how harsh the conditions might get, we would still survive with the love we have…
From a very early age, my mother would teach me to always give gifts, that it would not matter if it was small or big, that we needed to share what we had because the earth will always send us more if we shared.
The biggest gift she gave me was to learn to love this earth and to understand that each creature had a life of its' own, serving a purpose, a bigger good… That we should always think about them, take care of them, not hurt them because we belonged to the same earth, same planet… That we were all connected, that we should appreciate all the flowers and all the trees and all the ants and spiders and birds and all other living creatures… She would teach me compassion and to be gentle with all living creatures, to communicate with them, to touch them, to learn from them, to be one with them…
In today's chaotic world, how many mothers actually create time to teach these values to their children? Children nowadays are given electronic toys to play with, they spend more time indoors in front of TV or a computer or an Ipad, rather than being out in the open… Their parents make them run from one private lesson to another, not even run but the kids are taken with cars so they don't even actually walk… Children are more lonely today, than in the past… Children are less connected with the earth and learn less from the earth… Sure, you can learn a lot from the internet but could it be the same thing to watch the lemon tree blossom and actually see how a flower turns into a lemon? Can it ever give the same feeling, these images on screens, while the actual life passes by without being too much noticed?
I thank the earth for giving such a mother to me who taught me how to love the earth and to appreciate all living things… Perhaps everyone should create more time with their children in order to show them how wonderful life is and not everything takes place in the virtual world of internet…
18.11.2013
Picture: The Japanese painter Tetsuya Ishida felt the loneliness and the ugliness of consumer societies and painted those...
(*) Article published in POLITIS newspaper on the 15th of December, 2013 Sunday.
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