Skip to main content

For Me on Mother's Day

I wrote this on a mother's day when J and I had been far apart for a while and my heart ached beyond belief. I wished for togetherness and a wildflower for a gift. This year I have both. Ms W helped J and her class make flowers with finger paint and construction paper for Mother's Day. I feel utterly grateful for delayed gratification.

A Mother of Another Kind

A mother of another kind mea culpa,
I have forgotten the smile, the touch and the kiss that made my world go round
instead my heart is etched with many sudden memories
seared by despair and agony of a soul ripped in two.
That a time will come when I will hold you close to me again,
that we will go for a walk hand in hand on a bright summer day like today.
That on such a day you may be wearing a straw hat with a satin ribbon flapping in the wind
That you may stop to pick a wild flower and say "For you, Ma."

Such is the soft dream stuff - my "prana" my will to live.
Should a thrifty fairy to grant me two wishes instead of three -
I would ask to live my days to the last
To see you ever joyful and serene.
And on a dark winter night, should I be alone,
I be able to reach you - rest in the warmth of your home and heart.

But, I will not cry nor be sad this summer day
when the flowers give their best,
and the grass is greener by far than hope new born.
I will instead send out a prayer to Him who has counted all my heartbeats unto now
and knows how many more I have left.
I will ask him to hear me and one little angel playing
in the courtyard of my childhood home - hear our dreams of togetherness.
I will ask him to save the debt of my "Karma" for another life
and give me this one to just be a mother of the real kind.

Published as NM (my pen-name)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more