Fragrance of life..

I seem to be losing the energy and spontaneity with which I opened the blog every day. I wrote with joy and with a happy carelessness. I got so much love and encouragement from friends and unknown readers. I lapped up the love and at the same time lost the spontaneity. I started considering how readers will rate the blog. I lost sight of the purpose of my blogs – to write down my ramblings, to archive my memories of my children’s fleeting childhood, to chronicle the moments when I first met my husband, how I fell in love and how we grew together. I did not visit the blog site for so long. Yet mama thought. She thought of how to keep her children safe, how to love them more, how to meet deadlines, how to balance expectations, disappointments, work, romance, needs and wants. And she thought of loving her blog again. She thought of writing here her ramblings, her dreams and hopes, snippets of her life – life as it happens to her and as she sees it.

I wanted to document a few conversations as Sahana turned 15. The first one happened at dinner a few weeks back. The topic was types of parenting and a fifteen year old’s feedback on it. Sean and I were curious to know what she considers good parenting, objectively. She said:

‘Well honestly, for us, you can do nothing right at this point. If you are involved and take interest in what we do, we consider you smothering and extremely annoying. We try to elbow you out. And if you let us be, thinking you are giving us space, we consider you apathetic and uncaring. We feel sorry for ourselves. So yeah, for these few years, mom and dad, you can do nothing right!’

Sean and I turned around and high fived each other. The pressure was off. We did not need to change a thing. We could not win. Oh, joy!

She laughed with us. We all laughed at the incongruity of the situation, the absurdity of it all, and the clarity of her realization and her observation.

The second conversation took place at a trattoria while having an Italian dinner in honor of her fifteenth birthday. Her words have stayed with me:

‘You know, I am very happy mom that you belong to another country and dad does the job that he does. You have always taught us that there is another world out there, our perception of the world we live in is simply a part of it. It is because of you we got to experience a wider world and different culture. And I am glad that daddy does what he does for work. He brings back the stories of the world he travels to which make both Ryan and I realize how blessed we are to have what we have. It teaches us not to demand but be thankful.’

It was her birthday, yet she gave me a gift.

Last night while we heated up food for dinner, we talked about our evolving relationship as she gets older. She gets angry with me often, whenever I deny her what she wants, yet in her ‘lucid’ moments she knows we are forever in love. She wonders how it will be between us when she is a woman. I said I will always be her mother yet at a certain age we will be primarily two women – confiding, needing support, love and affection. Two women who will know in their hearts that they have each other to fall back upon if the world fails them. The relationship attains somewhat of an equilibrium as the daughter grows up. She seemed to like that.

And this morning I saw these beautiful words:

And I wondered, is this how they will remember me? First love, first friend, first enemy, fragrance of life?