Supermodel & Entrepreneur Ketholeno Kense Vihienuo with her younger child.
Vishü Rita Krocha
Kohima | May 7
“I always said and also stood by it that who I am or how I turned out to be as a woman is because of my mother. Now, after becoming a mother myself, I look up to her more.” These are expressions conveyed by Supermodel and Entrepreneur Ketholeno Kense Vihienuo, who embraced motherhood a little before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world and changed everything.
Now a mother of two children, she bore her second child during the peak of the second wave of COVID-19. In a conversation with The Morung Express on the eve of mother’s day, she talks about her mother, whom, she now sees from a new perspective, and also admires even more. “My love for her is like enhanced. My mother was always my role model as a girl, but now after becoming a mother myself, she has become so much more”, she puts across.
Motherhood has also changed her perspective about life. Raising two toddlers during the pandemic was definitely not an easy task. Being pregnant or having a new-born during the pandemic came with its own set of challenges. “Staying at home during the lockdown was comfortable but we dreaded every hospital visit either for check-up or vaccination of our children,” she recalls.
Adding to the already stressful period of the pandemic, her husband also contracted COVID-19 sometime after their second child was born. Since all of these happened during the peak of the second wave, she recollects that with families not able to visit or help each other, it was such a challenge “emotionally, mentally, hormonally.”
However as she would put it, “it was just too much to take in, but I learnt how to be more patient, how to not snap around when I am sad or angry or bitter, and try to calm down before I say anything.” Referring to the term ‘self-control’ in the Bible in this context, she confesses that “I used to put it in terms of when in anger, but not in the everyday context.”
“Now, it’s every day,” she says and goes on to add, “I had to calm down, control my temper, and also control my wandering mind.”
Also having experienced a little post-partum depression, she articulates, “I wanted to come back to my old self, but I realised now I can never go back to my old self. I have to move forward, let go the old me—not let go completely, but keep on learning and gaining wisdom, knowledge and move forward.”
“I find peace in having my kids well,” Ketholeno further expresses while impressing upon that it is one of the greatest blessings to have healthy children. Another of the greatest joys that she finds in motherhood is that “they lift my spirit up. Even when I am sad or tired, they always keep me on my feet.”
“I cannot imagine life without mothers,” she goes on to say and she feels this very deeply even as her heart goes out to those children who have lost their mothers during the period of COVID-19 lockdown. “I consider myself so blessed,” she relays in this regard.
Meanwhile, with all the devastating impacts that the pandemic has had across the world, she now strives to “be content”, which, she also substantiates is “very important. “I am also telling that to myself. “Try to be content with what you have, with where you are, with small things, because we don’t know…be content, be happy! Enjoy the small things in life,” she affirms.
