Missing my Amma
K is peacefully napping the car, having fallen asleep on the ride back from the airport.
My mother has left back for India, leaving us to our lives as a nuclear family. On many occasions in the last year since K was born, I have felt an anxiety to get started with this our "real" life. But I also knew that it must mean another separation from my parents. We have to peel apart again and separate our lives after more than one year of joyous togetherness.
Just as I am feeling the pain of my baby going to daycare, I am feeling the pain of my mother leaving. Since I myself became a mother, this is the most I've felt like a little baby. There is no pacifier to make me feel better. Just time.
If the void that I feel on my mother's anticipated and scheduled departure back to India is so great, what must a void feel like when a parent passes away. I cannot even bear to imagine it.
Although my mother has been a wonderful resource and the best caretaker for my child, surpassing my own caregiving skills, what makes me feel like I've been punched in the stomach has nothing to do with my child. It has everything to do with me being the child, and loving my mother as a friend and a person.
Of course, I have some anxieties about learning to balance this new life as a mother (without help). In particular, I have to be far more disciplined about my time than the presence of my mother has afforded me being. And I do know that my child is going to miss the loving, one-on-one nurture and education that she has been gluttonously consuming from her grandmother.
But more than anything I just want to have my mommy with me. It feels a little like it did when I left home at 17, to start my new life as an individual alone in college. It has been a long time since I felt emotions so powerfully that they made me feel physically ill. And perhaps this is the first time I've felt it without really having the time to focus on myself and let rationality seep back in. Wish there were some ritual attached to these moments to allow us to have a method to channel our emotions and package them up.
Sigh, this blog is the maximum luxury of emoting I can allow myself before I return to my own motherhood.
My mother has left back for India, leaving us to our lives as a nuclear family. On many occasions in the last year since K was born, I have felt an anxiety to get started with this our "real" life. But I also knew that it must mean another separation from my parents. We have to peel apart again and separate our lives after more than one year of joyous togetherness.
Just as I am feeling the pain of my baby going to daycare, I am feeling the pain of my mother leaving. Since I myself became a mother, this is the most I've felt like a little baby. There is no pacifier to make me feel better. Just time.
If the void that I feel on my mother's anticipated and scheduled departure back to India is so great, what must a void feel like when a parent passes away. I cannot even bear to imagine it.
Although my mother has been a wonderful resource and the best caretaker for my child, surpassing my own caregiving skills, what makes me feel like I've been punched in the stomach has nothing to do with my child. It has everything to do with me being the child, and loving my mother as a friend and a person.
Of course, I have some anxieties about learning to balance this new life as a mother (without help). In particular, I have to be far more disciplined about my time than the presence of my mother has afforded me being. And I do know that my child is going to miss the loving, one-on-one nurture and education that she has been gluttonously consuming from her grandmother.
But more than anything I just want to have my mommy with me. It feels a little like it did when I left home at 17, to start my new life as an individual alone in college. It has been a long time since I felt emotions so powerfully that they made me feel physically ill. And perhaps this is the first time I've felt it without really having the time to focus on myself and let rationality seep back in. Wish there were some ritual attached to these moments to allow us to have a method to channel our emotions and package them up.
Sigh, this blog is the maximum luxury of emoting I can allow myself before I return to my own motherhood.