I am lost in a dead zone. There are no thoughts, no points of view. I feel frozen in time and space, incapable of thought or motion. Something is still beeping on a machine, faint blips of hope, that the next minute would bring with it a burst of energy, action, inspiration. But that’s all it is; just a machine registering faint blips. I am staring at my computer screen, my fingers frozen over the keyboard, eyes focused on the television.
Martin Bashir’s interview of Michael Jackson is being telecast yet again. I am watching with immense sadness because Michael Jackson has always left me sad. Life somehow conspired to rearrange his circuitry to a point where he became unrecognizable to me as someone I could stereotype or judge or assign to a special box on a shelf in my mind. His talent was astonishing but everything else about his life and his untimely death leaves me despondent.
That’s just a passing thought. The news registers, however tangentially.
There’s also a creeping note of frustration at my inaction, my boredom, my inability to make every minute count. Michael Jackson was probably trying to fill a crater that was gouged into his soul at a very early age; he was trying to recreate an unlived childhood perhaps. What am I trying to do? I have led a charmed life, surrounded by loved ones…but something is missing…as though life is one gigantic jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece.
I try things with eagerness, hoping to complete the picture but nothing fits and I stand around, stunned and rooted, with flailing arms until even the flailing falls into a pattern and takes on mechanical precision. Precision gives way to chaos and confusion and confusion dovetails into precision with unfailing tenacity. I resent both ends of the spectrum and so I trap myself in the middle seeking comfort in stagnation.
If there is a prescription for this condition I want it. I want to be excited about what I do every day. I want my work to be meaningful even as the smug shrink within whispers, “Define meaningful”.
These thoughts are not worth compiling, not worth mentioning. This may be the reason why I haven’t written a word in over a month. This sort of stuff is worse than whining. It's pitiful. And I can’t stand whining…yet here I am.
The funny thing is that after typing these 465 words I am starting to feel better. The fog is clearing, I can see beyond my longish nose.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!
I have been sitting here thinking about my inability to express anything in words lately. It isn’t as if I’ve run out of things to think about. I still wonder, still contemplate. Sometimes astonish myself at a particular insight. But I can’t pin down the thought. It is gone before I can explore it.
Some themes remain the same. Nostalgia is always on the top shelf. If my brain was the cereal aisle of a supermarket then nostalgia would be the sugary, gut-busting stuff that is always within easy reach.
Some recollections delight, some leave me astonished. Some are just remembered with fondness. I often question my seven year old about whether or not she remembers things that happened three or four years ago when she was three or four and she usually doesn’t remember most things. The things that stand out for her are moments which required an emotional investment of sorts, for instance a loud disagreement between her parents where a phonebook or a cordless phone might have gone sailing across the room. I can’t say I have fond memories of a very pleasant Himalayan city in north eastern India – Shillong – because I recollect my parent’s minor cold war more clearly than any other scenic delights. Happier moments are similarly recalled and bring such joy when they are revisited, either in person or even vicariously.
When a friend in India told me she was headed for Mussoorie, India, I casually asked her to find a massive lion from my memories, carved onto a wall somewhere in Mussoorie. I told her that I remembered being cranky about something, all those years ago, at the age of 4 or 5, and my Dad hoisting me on to the lion and taking a picture. I don’t know if this is a famous lion or if every person who has visited Mussoorie has seen it. I didn’t expect my friend to “hunt” this lion down. But she returned from her trip and told me she had found my lion! I am inexplicably delighted at her find. Decades have gone by and this lion is still around and my friend found it and is about to write a short vignette entitled, “Pragya’s Lion”! It’s strange but I live for such moments. Good old nostalgia at work again.
It struck again when I looked at my red, toy binoculars. It used to be quite a favorite and I remember getting it when I was six years old. My Mom had saved it all these years and she gave it to my daughter who loves playing with it now.
This is how it looks:
And this is how the back of the box it came in appears:
Note my best cursive attempt from that time, a spelling I guessed at and my grade, 2nd grade, in Roman numerals. It’s like being an archeologist of my own life! And just to think that something I used to own is now yellowed with age. I used to think that yellowing and fading colors and sepia tones were reserved for folks a generation or two before me!
And so it goes! Nostalgic fondness for things half forgotten, half remembered. They keep making futile comebacks, messing with our minds, fostering a dependence of sorts. We cling to our memories as if they were the Raggedy Ann dolls or tattered “blankies” we preferred as kids.
In my case a few things happen when the idle mind is aswirl in nostalgia and the illusion of time. I think about how centrally true to my character I really am. A part of me is unchanged, has remained unchanged through the years, an ageless part of me, inquisitive, reaching, grasping for newness. All the other manifestations of change seem frivolous, like the wainscoting on walls or the curlicues on Queen Anne furniture. Sometimes one hears of a sculpting metaphor being used in describing our development as self actualized individuals, just like a beautiful figure is carved out of an undefined block of marble, a process of subtraction, of losing things we once cherished. Perhaps that is the course our lives appear to take. But what if addition is more the norm? Our essence preserved and indestructible, ensconced within a steadily growing and hardening carapace?
And just like I have a favorite Beatles tune for every occasion, the one that plays back automatically in these times is: There are places I remember/all my life/but some have changed…
The other question that haunts me often is the question my Dad asked me a few months ago, “Do you ever wonder what old people think about?”
I wonder why it is so difficult for me to answer this question.
I do wonder about the passage of time, about aging, constantly. I give to charities that serve the elderly. I worry about my own old age. I think of the uncles and aunts who passed away before I even understood death, I think of those whose lives began and ended during my lifetime and I ache for the depth of grief their parents have had to live with. But none of these thoughts or concerns are appropriate responses to the question about my wondering about the thoughts of older people.
The question makes me uncomfortable for many reasons. My parents are only twenty-six years older than me and twenty-six years are not that many years. I was in high school twenty six years ago, the memories are still fresh. I still own some clothes from that time, clothes that still fit!
Could it be then that I do wonder what old people think about, since I am gravely infected by the disease that has been called a certain “nostalgia for the future” (first came across the phrase in Paul Auster’s book – The Invention of Solitude); seeing one’s own skeleton facing one at every turn? Like looking at a distant mirror when one looks at one’s parents…
Do we think different thoughts at different ages? Or is there one line of inquiry that remains constant through all our ages? Do we look at the future with a mix of awe and trepidation, sometimes with a generous dollop of euphoric optimism or do we increasingly dwell on the glory days as we pass our twenties, thirties, forties…and beyond?
Why does the past fascinate us so? And why does this fascination always remind me of the stories of the pointed interest that elephants show in the bones of other dead elephants in an elephant graveyard?
What are elephants thinking about?
Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas
Some themes remain the same. Nostalgia is always on the top shelf. If my brain was the cereal aisle of a supermarket then nostalgia would be the sugary, gut-busting stuff that is always within easy reach.
Some recollections delight, some leave me astonished. Some are just remembered with fondness. I often question my seven year old about whether or not she remembers things that happened three or four years ago when she was three or four and she usually doesn’t remember most things. The things that stand out for her are moments which required an emotional investment of sorts, for instance a loud disagreement between her parents where a phonebook or a cordless phone might have gone sailing across the room. I can’t say I have fond memories of a very pleasant Himalayan city in north eastern India – Shillong – because I recollect my parent’s minor cold war more clearly than any other scenic delights. Happier moments are similarly recalled and bring such joy when they are revisited, either in person or even vicariously.
When a friend in India told me she was headed for Mussoorie, India, I casually asked her to find a massive lion from my memories, carved onto a wall somewhere in Mussoorie. I told her that I remembered being cranky about something, all those years ago, at the age of 4 or 5, and my Dad hoisting me on to the lion and taking a picture. I don’t know if this is a famous lion or if every person who has visited Mussoorie has seen it. I didn’t expect my friend to “hunt” this lion down. But she returned from her trip and told me she had found my lion! I am inexplicably delighted at her find. Decades have gone by and this lion is still around and my friend found it and is about to write a short vignette entitled, “Pragya’s Lion”! It’s strange but I live for such moments. Good old nostalgia at work again.
It struck again when I looked at my red, toy binoculars. It used to be quite a favorite and I remember getting it when I was six years old. My Mom had saved it all these years and she gave it to my daughter who loves playing with it now.
This is how it looks:
And this is how the back of the box it came in appears:
Note my best cursive attempt from that time, a spelling I guessed at and my grade, 2nd grade, in Roman numerals. It’s like being an archeologist of my own life! And just to think that something I used to own is now yellowed with age. I used to think that yellowing and fading colors and sepia tones were reserved for folks a generation or two before me!
And so it goes! Nostalgic fondness for things half forgotten, half remembered. They keep making futile comebacks, messing with our minds, fostering a dependence of sorts. We cling to our memories as if they were the Raggedy Ann dolls or tattered “blankies” we preferred as kids.
In my case a few things happen when the idle mind is aswirl in nostalgia and the illusion of time. I think about how centrally true to my character I really am. A part of me is unchanged, has remained unchanged through the years, an ageless part of me, inquisitive, reaching, grasping for newness. All the other manifestations of change seem frivolous, like the wainscoting on walls or the curlicues on Queen Anne furniture. Sometimes one hears of a sculpting metaphor being used in describing our development as self actualized individuals, just like a beautiful figure is carved out of an undefined block of marble, a process of subtraction, of losing things we once cherished. Perhaps that is the course our lives appear to take. But what if addition is more the norm? Our essence preserved and indestructible, ensconced within a steadily growing and hardening carapace?
And just like I have a favorite Beatles tune for every occasion, the one that plays back automatically in these times is: There are places I remember/all my life/but some have changed…
The other question that haunts me often is the question my Dad asked me a few months ago, “Do you ever wonder what old people think about?”
I wonder why it is so difficult for me to answer this question.
I do wonder about the passage of time, about aging, constantly. I give to charities that serve the elderly. I worry about my own old age. I think of the uncles and aunts who passed away before I even understood death, I think of those whose lives began and ended during my lifetime and I ache for the depth of grief their parents have had to live with. But none of these thoughts or concerns are appropriate responses to the question about my wondering about the thoughts of older people.
The question makes me uncomfortable for many reasons. My parents are only twenty-six years older than me and twenty-six years are not that many years. I was in high school twenty six years ago, the memories are still fresh. I still own some clothes from that time, clothes that still fit!
Could it be then that I do wonder what old people think about, since I am gravely infected by the disease that has been called a certain “nostalgia for the future” (first came across the phrase in Paul Auster’s book – The Invention of Solitude); seeing one’s own skeleton facing one at every turn? Like looking at a distant mirror when one looks at one’s parents…
Do we think different thoughts at different ages? Or is there one line of inquiry that remains constant through all our ages? Do we look at the future with a mix of awe and trepidation, sometimes with a generous dollop of euphoric optimism or do we increasingly dwell on the glory days as we pass our twenties, thirties, forties…and beyond?
Why does the past fascinate us so? And why does this fascination always remind me of the stories of the pointed interest that elephants show in the bones of other dead elephants in an elephant graveyard?
What are elephants thinking about?
Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
Monday, May 04, 2009
"No Wire Hangers...Everrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!"
I didn't want to do a thing this weekend. Some weekends should just be about lounging around and popping in sugar free bonbons. But it wasn't meant to be. When I glanced at the mirror in my bedroom for once my visage was of no interest to me; the appalling heaps of clothes piled up on the footboard, the headboard and the rocking chair in the corner grabbed my attention and left me speechless.
That was the end of my "do nothing" weekend. It was swiftly replaced by frenzied washing, drying, sorting and ironing activity. I was a woman with a mission and a woman with eight arms. That wasn't the worst of it though. The worst was yet to come. When I walked into my walk-in closet I tripped over unpacked luggage from our impromptu weekend trips, I stepped into old shopping bags and various unidentified sharp, blunt and tangled objects.
I tread gingerly and gradually made my way to the rod where I was about to hang some ironed clothes. But I wasn't able to create enough space there. I tried forcing the issue but only managed to dislodge every shirt that was resting unbuttoned on the hanger and every boat neck, wide V neck or unzipped dress that was hanging on for dear life on one or more of the ubiquitous "We 'Heart' our Customers" wire hangers from dry cleaners, who couldn't possible "heart" their customers as much as they said they did.
So now I had even more clothes on the floor! I was still trying to transfer ironed shirts from my aching arms to the closet's rod but the wire hangers refused to give and when they gave they tumbled down in a tangled mess of wire, all interconnected in a spidery, spindly and extremely annoying web of wire. That's when I lost it completely. Not much unlike:
Over the next four hours every single wire hanger came out of my closet and landed in a three feet high pile on the bedroom floor. Yes there were some minor nicks and scrapes but they couldn't diminish the general, wire-free aura of immense satisfaction I now wore! Even the looming problem of the disposal of twisted, tangled, barbed metal couldn't diminish the euphoria.
Perhaps the next weekend can be a "do-nothing" weekend. I'll stay away from the horrors of mirrors, who knows what will come into sharp focus next time.
That was the end of my "do nothing" weekend. It was swiftly replaced by frenzied washing, drying, sorting and ironing activity. I was a woman with a mission and a woman with eight arms. That wasn't the worst of it though. The worst was yet to come. When I walked into my walk-in closet I tripped over unpacked luggage from our impromptu weekend trips, I stepped into old shopping bags and various unidentified sharp, blunt and tangled objects.
I tread gingerly and gradually made my way to the rod where I was about to hang some ironed clothes. But I wasn't able to create enough space there. I tried forcing the issue but only managed to dislodge every shirt that was resting unbuttoned on the hanger and every boat neck, wide V neck or unzipped dress that was hanging on for dear life on one or more of the ubiquitous "We 'Heart' our Customers" wire hangers from dry cleaners, who couldn't possible "heart" their customers as much as they said they did.
So now I had even more clothes on the floor! I was still trying to transfer ironed shirts from my aching arms to the closet's rod but the wire hangers refused to give and when they gave they tumbled down in a tangled mess of wire, all interconnected in a spidery, spindly and extremely annoying web of wire. That's when I lost it completely. Not much unlike:
Over the next four hours every single wire hanger came out of my closet and landed in a three feet high pile on the bedroom floor. Yes there were some minor nicks and scrapes but they couldn't diminish the general, wire-free aura of immense satisfaction I now wore! Even the looming problem of the disposal of twisted, tangled, barbed metal couldn't diminish the euphoria.
Perhaps the next weekend can be a "do-nothing" weekend. I'll stay away from the horrors of mirrors, who knows what will come into sharp focus next time.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Grandmas, Moms, Daughters and Granddaughters
It has been so long since I wrote anything that I am having some trouble taking the first few steps again. I feel as though I might stumble and fall and I picture myself falling off a wheelchair, crawling ahead while a glowing figure in white beckons, signaling me forward saying, “Come on, you can do it, you can do it, it’s just like riding a bicycle!”
(This all knowing, glowing figure in white didn’t do enough research to find out that I never learnt how to ride a bicycle either…but that’s a discussion for another day.)
I was reading obsessively and thinking about things while I wasn’t writing. I felt (actually knew it with certainty) as though everything I would ever want to say had already been said and that my thoughts and ideas weren’t novel and there wasn’t anything unique or singular about my perspective. So why write?
I am trying to overcome that particular speed bump today by telling myself that if I can’t stand out from the multitudes then perhaps I should add my voice in unison and just write about whatever everyone else is writing in this viral world of ours.
My friend Shankari tagged me on a mommy post yesterday (I doubt there are any blogging mommies left who haven’t received this tag yet…time to move on to daddies). This was a rather welcome tag because there was some hope that it would pull me out of the writer’s block in which I find myself firmly cemented.
(The last few paragraphs are still me crawling on all fours toward the muse-like figure in white. I am struggling with the ordering of my thoughts, struggling with coherence. Perhaps this entire post will be a long struggle, followed by some warm-up exercises, some stretching; some flexing of fingers with the hope of eventual culmination into an ordered and coherent march of words. Readers would have to sit through some meandering and random thoughts and lots of backstory before I actually get to the Mommy tag. Also, note that I said I have been reading obsessively so be prepared for some random quotes.)
I don’t have the words to explain how I felt when I saw a black and white picture of my mother from the time when she was five years old, c. 1946. I had never before seen a picture of my Mom as a little girl. There were tons of pictures of my Dad at every age but no pictures of my Mom in any family albums. As a kid I used to go through the old scrapbooks with their quaint little corners painstakingly glued to each page and each picture carefully inserted within. But they were pictures of my Dad, my paternal uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins. The first time my Mom was ever photographed appeared to have been after her wedding. We wondered about the absence of photography in her family (as I write this I feel like spoofing "The Flintstones" theme song - Jha-jis/ you were the Jha-ji's/ weren't you a modern stone-age fam -i -ly ...don't be mad, Mommy!). It wasn’t as though photography wasn’t relished by all in the 1940s.
The story we were told was that all my Mom’s pictures had been spirited away by her younger brother, my uncle, the self-appointed family archivist. He had left home early for studies and then for a mining engineer’s job in coal town – Dhanbad. His visits back home were infrequent and he was never with his albums on the rare occasions that we did see him. I don’t recall our family ever making a trip to Dhanbad. Whenever the subject of pictures came up we were told that pictures existed and that my uncle had them all.
So my brother and I had always been very curious about how our Mom looked as a kid, who were the people she had been photographed with, what unique expressions characterized her childhood.
My uncle, who had been so distant to us and to the rest of his family over all these years, is closer to us now in this era of super connectivity through social networking. We still never get to see him but we chat with him often and he is now scanning some of the pictures from his collection and emailing them to us. The first picture to have arrived in our mailboxes the other day was this one:
When my brother first saw it I was told he said, “I’ve waited 39 years to see this picture!” He started waiting for it the year he was born. I am a couple of years older but I really have been waiting that long to see it.
To other readers of this blog this would just appear like a faded picture from a stranger’s past but when I first saw it a few weeks ago I couldn’t stop staring at it. Even after these past few weeks my fascination with it hasn’t waned. I click it open once every day, just to take another look. I am not sure why it holds my interest to such an inexplicable degree. Perhaps it’s the uncanny resemblance between my Mom at that age and my daughter now…the style of her dress, the headband in her hair. Perhaps I am surprised at my oldest uncle sporting sunglasses; an image of him that I can’t reconcile with how he looks now. My archivist uncle is standing in the middle. My grandma, in whose expression I see glimpses of my own, is holding her fourth surviving child (her seventh – she had five others after him) - a late and favorite uncle who grew up to be an artist, a musician, a sculptor …someone who burnt bright before he left us all in 1986.
But it’s my Mom who holds my interest the most. She looks exactly like her granddaughter would look sixty years from the time when she posed for that photograph when she couldn’t even imagine that one day she would be a much adored grandma.
I look at the picture and I think about the things that could have been going through her mind. I wonder if she had a similar relationship to her mom that I've had with her and that my daughter has with me. My grandma's attentions had to have been divided between four young kids at that time. Did she have time to pamper my Mom as a five year old should be? Or is pampering an invention of our time?
I also can't help thinking, had I seen this picture when I was a child I would have thought of it as unbelievably ancient. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, the 40s felt too distant to contemplate; heck it was "pre-Independence"! Now, when I look at this picture I feel as though this wasn't so long ago...as if the passage of time is a meaningless construct of the mind.
Anoushka, at seven, thinks about the things that happened to her when she was four or five and says,"Mommy, that was such a long time ago!" I am always momentarily stunned when she says that because that was only three years away for me. I moved to the US twenty one years ago. It's as though I blinked and lost twenty one years in the process. So the photograph above is only three or so blinks away, by the "blink" standard I've devised today.
What was it like for my Mom when I was seven? Or for that matter when I was seventeen or twenty seven? Did she wonder about the passage of time? Through all those years I was nothing if not entirely self-absorbed. Most of my thoughts were about me, the selfishness was perhaps natural for that age but deplorable in retrospect. I can't say I've changed much now but I am certainly trying.
Today I wonder what it was like for my Mom to be my mother over those years, did she sacrifice her dreams and passions to feed the monster that was our selfishness as kids? What did she think about when she wasn't thinking about me or my brother or my Dad? What was her inner world like; a world where she wasn't Pragya or Samir's Mom but herself, just herself?
I remember her enrolling for French classes at the Alliance Francaise in Delhi for a brief period. I liked it when she did that. I do remember feeling proud that she was doing that for herself. But it was a superficial thought, a fleeting one, after which I retreated into my world of schoolgirl anguishes, wants, needs etc.
I read an article about moms and daughters this morning, in The New Yorker. It made me think about an amusing incident from the day before when my Mom, who is well versed in email, Internet and social networking was suddenly stumped yesterday while chatting with me when I casually used the abbreviation "brb" with her. I had a visitor in my office and I needed to tell her that I would be right back (brb) but she was quite flummoxed at that. She typed, "What is brb?" before disappearing from chat. After my visitor left I had to call her back to tell her I wasn't being rude and that brb simply meant "be right back". It was fun to call her back and explain that bit of chatting jargon to her.
The article was about the emails Moms of a certain age send their grown up daughters and the daughters thinking how these missives were often amusing and "quaint". It was an enjoyable read. But within this article was a mom quoted as saying:
"Children are always at the center of the parents' universe and parents are always at the periphery".
That quote certainly gave me some pause as I thought about the one-way street that parental love so often is. Parents of every generation end up at the periphery of their children's lives. I can almost picture neverending concentric circles, from the beginning of time, with peripheries and centers constantly flowing out into each other, ad infinitum, underscoring with such undeniable certitude that our roles in life are nothing more than being transmitters of the human genetic code through time. All other concerns, anxieties, angst, plans, joys, sorrows are just fleeting images during our code-carrying lives.
As I think about these things I finally feel ready to add my bit to the mommy tag where I am required to write about the five things that I love about being a mother.
I had mentioned to Shankari that this was a tough tag in many ways because I doubt I have ever thought about the things I love about being a mother. When I look at my daughter I think about the things I love about having a daughter.
I suppose the selfishness and self-absorption that I talked about earlier in this long ramble hasn't quite left me yet. Within me there is still this desire to be at the center of my own universe as well as hers. I am still very resistant to the idea of accepting with grace that no matter how it seems during these early days of my daughter's childhood, there will come a time when her world will not revolve around me, when she won't need me as much and there would be times when she wouldn't even want me around.
But what I love about being a mother and having a daughter at this point in time is that I am learning to share my central spot, in my own universe, with my daughter. She is slowly but surely bumping me to the edges of my existence, but I am enjoying the gentle bumps and am still very much in the center. I like sharing that spot with her, I love not being alone in this spot.
I love the finesse with which she manages to strip away from me my creeping cynicism, with one twinkling look in her eye.
I love to watch her sleep; I can stare at her for hours on end without any desire to tear my gaze away from her. She enchants me and leaves me at a loss for words to describe how I feel about her and when I am so lost for words the meaning of 'love' finally becomes clear to me. This vast feeling of ever expanding joy and fullness that I feel when she falls asleep in my arms of drapes her arms and legs all around me as she sleeps.
My heart breaks at the slightest thing that makes her cry. She shed anguished tears last night when her pollen allergies made her eyes itch and burn and when she couldn't sleep at night because her nose was blocked. Tears were streaming down her face as she told me how much she hated the allergy season. These were tears of frustration at minor discomfort, not extreme sadness. But they wrenched my heart and all I could think about was getting her to smile again. In that instant I wasn't thinking about myself at all. She was my only thought, my only concern, her immediate comfort my only goal. I love the fact that she can bring out that side of me, she makes me feel human, grounded, capable of providing comfort, care and hope.
I think about my own asthma attacks as a kid and how panicked my Mom used to be. My Mom also tells stories of the time when she was ill as a child. She says she was weakened by illness and her parents used to keep watch at night, all night to make sure she was still breathing. She was the first surviving daughter after three who hadn't made it.
I love being a Mom because my daughter puts me in touch with the part of me that's good and wholesome, the part that's not on an endless quest for illusory satiation.
And that very long ramble, my friends, is what I have been thinking about for the last few days.
(This all knowing, glowing figure in white didn’t do enough research to find out that I never learnt how to ride a bicycle either…but that’s a discussion for another day.)
I was reading obsessively and thinking about things while I wasn’t writing. I felt (actually knew it with certainty) as though everything I would ever want to say had already been said and that my thoughts and ideas weren’t novel and there wasn’t anything unique or singular about my perspective. So why write?
I am trying to overcome that particular speed bump today by telling myself that if I can’t stand out from the multitudes then perhaps I should add my voice in unison and just write about whatever everyone else is writing in this viral world of ours.
My friend Shankari tagged me on a mommy post yesterday (I doubt there are any blogging mommies left who haven’t received this tag yet…time to move on to daddies). This was a rather welcome tag because there was some hope that it would pull me out of the writer’s block in which I find myself firmly cemented.
(The last few paragraphs are still me crawling on all fours toward the muse-like figure in white. I am struggling with the ordering of my thoughts, struggling with coherence. Perhaps this entire post will be a long struggle, followed by some warm-up exercises, some stretching; some flexing of fingers with the hope of eventual culmination into an ordered and coherent march of words. Readers would have to sit through some meandering and random thoughts and lots of backstory before I actually get to the Mommy tag. Also, note that I said I have been reading obsessively so be prepared for some random quotes.)
I don’t have the words to explain how I felt when I saw a black and white picture of my mother from the time when she was five years old, c. 1946. I had never before seen a picture of my Mom as a little girl. There were tons of pictures of my Dad at every age but no pictures of my Mom in any family albums. As a kid I used to go through the old scrapbooks with their quaint little corners painstakingly glued to each page and each picture carefully inserted within. But they were pictures of my Dad, my paternal uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins. The first time my Mom was ever photographed appeared to have been after her wedding. We wondered about the absence of photography in her family (as I write this I feel like spoofing "The Flintstones" theme song - Jha-jis/ you were the Jha-ji's/ weren't you a modern stone-age fam -i -ly ...don't be mad, Mommy!). It wasn’t as though photography wasn’t relished by all in the 1940s.
The story we were told was that all my Mom’s pictures had been spirited away by her younger brother, my uncle, the self-appointed family archivist. He had left home early for studies and then for a mining engineer’s job in coal town – Dhanbad. His visits back home were infrequent and he was never with his albums on the rare occasions that we did see him. I don’t recall our family ever making a trip to Dhanbad. Whenever the subject of pictures came up we were told that pictures existed and that my uncle had them all.
So my brother and I had always been very curious about how our Mom looked as a kid, who were the people she had been photographed with, what unique expressions characterized her childhood.
My uncle, who had been so distant to us and to the rest of his family over all these years, is closer to us now in this era of super connectivity through social networking. We still never get to see him but we chat with him often and he is now scanning some of the pictures from his collection and emailing them to us. The first picture to have arrived in our mailboxes the other day was this one:
When my brother first saw it I was told he said, “I’ve waited 39 years to see this picture!” He started waiting for it the year he was born. I am a couple of years older but I really have been waiting that long to see it.
To other readers of this blog this would just appear like a faded picture from a stranger’s past but when I first saw it a few weeks ago I couldn’t stop staring at it. Even after these past few weeks my fascination with it hasn’t waned. I click it open once every day, just to take another look. I am not sure why it holds my interest to such an inexplicable degree. Perhaps it’s the uncanny resemblance between my Mom at that age and my daughter now…the style of her dress, the headband in her hair. Perhaps I am surprised at my oldest uncle sporting sunglasses; an image of him that I can’t reconcile with how he looks now. My archivist uncle is standing in the middle. My grandma, in whose expression I see glimpses of my own, is holding her fourth surviving child (her seventh – she had five others after him) - a late and favorite uncle who grew up to be an artist, a musician, a sculptor …someone who burnt bright before he left us all in 1986.
But it’s my Mom who holds my interest the most. She looks exactly like her granddaughter would look sixty years from the time when she posed for that photograph when she couldn’t even imagine that one day she would be a much adored grandma.
I look at the picture and I think about the things that could have been going through her mind. I wonder if she had a similar relationship to her mom that I've had with her and that my daughter has with me. My grandma's attentions had to have been divided between four young kids at that time. Did she have time to pamper my Mom as a five year old should be? Or is pampering an invention of our time?
I also can't help thinking, had I seen this picture when I was a child I would have thought of it as unbelievably ancient. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, the 40s felt too distant to contemplate; heck it was "pre-Independence"! Now, when I look at this picture I feel as though this wasn't so long ago...as if the passage of time is a meaningless construct of the mind.
Anoushka, at seven, thinks about the things that happened to her when she was four or five and says,"Mommy, that was such a long time ago!" I am always momentarily stunned when she says that because that was only three years away for me. I moved to the US twenty one years ago. It's as though I blinked and lost twenty one years in the process. So the photograph above is only three or so blinks away, by the "blink" standard I've devised today.
What was it like for my Mom when I was seven? Or for that matter when I was seventeen or twenty seven? Did she wonder about the passage of time? Through all those years I was nothing if not entirely self-absorbed. Most of my thoughts were about me, the selfishness was perhaps natural for that age but deplorable in retrospect. I can't say I've changed much now but I am certainly trying.
Today I wonder what it was like for my Mom to be my mother over those years, did she sacrifice her dreams and passions to feed the monster that was our selfishness as kids? What did she think about when she wasn't thinking about me or my brother or my Dad? What was her inner world like; a world where she wasn't Pragya or Samir's Mom but herself, just herself?
I remember her enrolling for French classes at the Alliance Francaise in Delhi for a brief period. I liked it when she did that. I do remember feeling proud that she was doing that for herself. But it was a superficial thought, a fleeting one, after which I retreated into my world of schoolgirl anguishes, wants, needs etc.
I read an article about moms and daughters this morning, in The New Yorker. It made me think about an amusing incident from the day before when my Mom, who is well versed in email, Internet and social networking was suddenly stumped yesterday while chatting with me when I casually used the abbreviation "brb" with her. I had a visitor in my office and I needed to tell her that I would be right back (brb) but she was quite flummoxed at that. She typed, "What is brb?" before disappearing from chat. After my visitor left I had to call her back to tell her I wasn't being rude and that brb simply meant "be right back". It was fun to call her back and explain that bit of chatting jargon to her.
The article was about the emails Moms of a certain age send their grown up daughters and the daughters thinking how these missives were often amusing and "quaint". It was an enjoyable read. But within this article was a mom quoted as saying:
"Children are always at the center of the parents' universe and parents are always at the periphery".
That quote certainly gave me some pause as I thought about the one-way street that parental love so often is. Parents of every generation end up at the periphery of their children's lives. I can almost picture neverending concentric circles, from the beginning of time, with peripheries and centers constantly flowing out into each other, ad infinitum, underscoring with such undeniable certitude that our roles in life are nothing more than being transmitters of the human genetic code through time. All other concerns, anxieties, angst, plans, joys, sorrows are just fleeting images during our code-carrying lives.
As I think about these things I finally feel ready to add my bit to the mommy tag where I am required to write about the five things that I love about being a mother.
I had mentioned to Shankari that this was a tough tag in many ways because I doubt I have ever thought about the things I love about being a mother. When I look at my daughter I think about the things I love about having a daughter.
I suppose the selfishness and self-absorption that I talked about earlier in this long ramble hasn't quite left me yet. Within me there is still this desire to be at the center of my own universe as well as hers. I am still very resistant to the idea of accepting with grace that no matter how it seems during these early days of my daughter's childhood, there will come a time when her world will not revolve around me, when she won't need me as much and there would be times when she wouldn't even want me around.
But what I love about being a mother and having a daughter at this point in time is that I am learning to share my central spot, in my own universe, with my daughter. She is slowly but surely bumping me to the edges of my existence, but I am enjoying the gentle bumps and am still very much in the center. I like sharing that spot with her, I love not being alone in this spot.
I love the finesse with which she manages to strip away from me my creeping cynicism, with one twinkling look in her eye.
I love to watch her sleep; I can stare at her for hours on end without any desire to tear my gaze away from her. She enchants me and leaves me at a loss for words to describe how I feel about her and when I am so lost for words the meaning of 'love' finally becomes clear to me. This vast feeling of ever expanding joy and fullness that I feel when she falls asleep in my arms of drapes her arms and legs all around me as she sleeps.
My heart breaks at the slightest thing that makes her cry. She shed anguished tears last night when her pollen allergies made her eyes itch and burn and when she couldn't sleep at night because her nose was blocked. Tears were streaming down her face as she told me how much she hated the allergy season. These were tears of frustration at minor discomfort, not extreme sadness. But they wrenched my heart and all I could think about was getting her to smile again. In that instant I wasn't thinking about myself at all. She was my only thought, my only concern, her immediate comfort my only goal. I love the fact that she can bring out that side of me, she makes me feel human, grounded, capable of providing comfort, care and hope.
I think about my own asthma attacks as a kid and how panicked my Mom used to be. My Mom also tells stories of the time when she was ill as a child. She says she was weakened by illness and her parents used to keep watch at night, all night to make sure she was still breathing. She was the first surviving daughter after three who hadn't made it.
I love being a Mom because my daughter puts me in touch with the part of me that's good and wholesome, the part that's not on an endless quest for illusory satiation.
And that very long ramble, my friends, is what I have been thinking about for the last few days.
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