Skip to main content

Feeling Love

Recently while discussing her boyfriends and heartbreak with by young friend L, I found myself thinking about the nature of love and how the moments when I have most intensely experienced it bordered on pain. The birth of J was one of them. Holding her in my arms was a life changing experience. From being frail, vulnerable and unsure about what next in crumbling marriage, I went to feeling like I had some super-power that could not be contained. Yet there was no euphoria. A mundane analogy to describe it would be a dry faucet on a hot summer's day that suddenly starts to gush water furiously and will not stop. There comes a point after which thirst and need is satiated but the flood continues unabated. 

 Thinking back that was my first contact with true love. It is hard to know what exactly to do with it. The second experience came much later in life and it was borne out of sharing the deepest pain, willingly letting myself experience another person's darkest days as if they were my own. Not knowing where exactly my life separated from theirs. There was a consuming sense of One much like the time I held the new born J to my heart. There was the same sense of invincible though the circumstances were very different. 

 I was trying to explain to twenty year old L that it is not real love until you have experienced such connection with another person that it is no longer possible to separate part from whole; have no words to describe that limitless, unbounded feeling you experience because that person exists in your life.
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