Splendid Results of a Mothers Love

As a child, just like many others, I received endless love and support from my friends and family, especially my mother.  Neither of the main characters in A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini had mothers like my own, which I found interesting, and after some further pulling from the story I realized that the importance of a mother figure as well as the absence of a mother figure in these girls’ lives is a reoccurring theme. Without the basic fundamentals learned from a mothers love and nurture you would think that a girl would not know how to function as a daughter or as a mother later in life. The search for these basic fundamentals and love are evident in the novel both in Mariam’s desire to be a mother better than her own, and Laila’s desire to have a mother figure more nurturing than her own, which they find in each other.

Mariam had a close relationship with her mother, probably only due to the fact that they lived alone together and she was extremely dependent on her mother. Despite this closeness, Mariam’s mother is anything but supportive and nurturing. Because of her mother’s negative disposition (some might call it realistic), Mariam spent her entire life in disbelief of the ugly truths that her mother told her about the world, and most importantly her idolized father. Mariam admitted that she believed that her mother told her those lies so that Mariam could never really be happy. By constantly telling Mariam that she was a harami, from a very young age Mariam’s self-image and confidence was weak to say the least. Mariam’s mother also contributes to her idea of her self-worth through the following line: “Women like us. We endure. It’s all we have.” That line puts a cage around what Mariam believes she is capable of and hinders her from trying to make the best she can out of her life and to settle for the cards that life deals her. Personally, not only do I believe that Mariam’s mother had a huge impact on the mostly submissive and powerless person that Mariam became but I also believe that had the toxic environment that Mariam grew up around been reality, the woman would not have thrived in life even as much as Mariam did. When Laila is found amongst the rubble and ruins of what was her house, and Mariam has the opportunity to become a mother figure to Laila a change or awakening in Mariam’s character can be found. She now feels as if she has something to live for and protect in life due to her multiple miscarriages.

Laila’s relationship with her mother differed from that of Mariam and her mother. Despite the fact that for most of her life with her parents Laila was the only child in the house, she still felt over shadowed by her mother’s love for her brothers. Laila’s mother basically totally ignores Laila’s existence which really began to hinder her own purpose in life. If Laila could not even fill a spot in her mother’s heart next to her brothers, why was she alive at all? Laila asks herself this in the following quote: “people shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all of their love to the old ones.” The quote proves from Laila, the toll that the absence of her mother’s love was taking on Laila. I also found it interesting that the situation was mirrored when Laila has her own children and finds herself worrying that she will not be able to love Rasheed’s child as much as she loves Tariq’s. Multiple times throughout the novel Laila introduces Mariam as her own mother and this is due to the fact that she needed to fill that own void in her heart that was from the lack of love and nurturing from her own mother, which Mariam could provide for her.

The motherly relationship between Laila and Mariam eventually reaches a place of blissful love and devotion to each other. At the end of the novel when Laila alludes to naming her next baby girl Mariam, the motherly bond seems to make a full circle in the novel. The absence of the motherly bond from their biological mothers actually pushed the women to become better people who were able to have better relationships than those of their mothers. Ii can honestly say that I like this result a lot better than what I truly believe the outcome would be in a situation like this in reality. I believe that the women would have in reality probably been bitterer about their lifestyles even if they only did what they needed to in order to survive, and this bitterness would have affected who they were. Despite these feelings my favorite line in the novel and the line which I find the most inspirational remains to be the following: “Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand splendid suns.”