BIRMINGHAM: Mothers make sacrifices and if you are a working mother, challenges are manifold.
Punam Yadav understood it the hard way when she had to leave her infant daughter Priyanshi, months after her birth, when she decided to return to the weightlifting arena.
In the last two years, she would often feel mentally exhausted by the separation anxiety but would carry on the game with a promise to herself that -- little Priyanshi won't be let down by her mother.
When she is back with her, toddler would fiddle with a gold medal wrapped around her mother's neck.
But fate had other ideas as Punam failed to complete a single successful lift in the clean and jerk section, thereby finishing last.
It's not her failure that's bothering her but not being able to do it for her daughter that breaks her heart.
"Isse bada dard kya ho sakta hai ek maa ke liye (There could not have been a bigger sacrifice than this for a mother)," Punam, who came back to active competition winning a gold at the Patiala Nationals three months after her daughter was born, said.
"Jitna naseeb mein hota hai, utna hi milta hai -- everything is pre-destined and you can't change your fate. We just have to keep doing our duties without thinking about the results," Punam told PTI after her failure to win a third successive CWG medal.
She narrated an incident how she would have to keep her worries aside when her daughter would fall sick.
"Initially, my daughter used to regularly suffer from illness like cold and fever for days and days and I would remain disturbed, solely focused on winning a medal for the country."
Then in March this year on the sidelines of the Bhubaneswar Nationals, she finally got to see her daughter again, and how?
The train from Delhi to Bhubaneswar had a stop at her hometown Mirzapur where her husband handed over the kid and she took her to Bhubaneswar, where she created a national record in snatch (98 kg) with an overall lift of 214 kg in her new weight category of 76 kg.
"She was not even two years old but she never disturbed me during the competition and it went off smoothly. It seems she's deeply understanding, I'm so proud of her," she said.
So what's next?
"At the moment, I'm blank. I don't know what's in store for me. My husband is very supportive. We will see how it goes from here on," she said.
"I've to accept reality and move on. As I said everything is predestined, I just have to keep giving my best," she concluded.
