Category: realizations

Parenting 2.0

On By Indu PatikkalIn Children, learning the hard way, life, life lessons, mother, opinion, parenting, Random thoughts, realizationsLeave a comment

I am a single mother of a 19 year old and a 17 year old. For the longest time I have raised them on my own. Not because I was single, but because of my emotional and physical involvement in raising them. As one is navigating college and the other is preparing to enter college, I am in kindergarten learning the art of letting go. I guess it will take a good while to learn this lesson, because it is not about just letting go. The skill I need to acquire is to know when to let go, when to be available, when to hold on. Its a full length practical class. And suddenly I feel, all the parenting lessons I learnt in the last 20 years, doesn’t really matter. I thought I was now proficient, not skilled or advanced, but proficient in parenting, and just then comes racing towards me another curve ball.

Children this age are being themselves, learning, exploring, pushing the boundaries, testing the waters, seeing how deep they can go before they have to come up to catch some air. My mom made it look so easy, when the adamant 17 year old me decided to go to Manipal, or the 21 year old me, decided to travel alone from Bangalore to different parts of the country to meet my partner. I remember seeing some fear on her face, but nevertheless, she stood there, smiled and waved at me as the train pulled away. If she were around, there is only one question I would ask, how did you do it.

It is a conscious decision I make everyday, again and again, its ok, let them do it. Its ok if they fail, its ok if they fall. I have the life jacket, rather, I am their life jacket or their oxygen mask. They know when they need it. They will grab it. So many metaphors I can think of from around us, in our world that equate to this situation. Like, I’ve taught them how to use their wings and now they are jumping off the cliff. They will land, maybe all nice and clean, maybe with a few broken bones, but they will survive. It is something I need to and tell myself everyday, because there is no other way of navigating this phase of parenting, other than being calm and patient. They do not want to walk in my shadow, because they are ready to feel the sun on their face.

In Life of Pi, the character says something to the effect of, finishing a puzzle is deeply satisfying because you have tried every misfit and found the perfect place for every piece. When the puzzle is finished, every piece has found its place. Life is never that way, so a puzzle fulfills your intimate need to bring order to the chaos. We have so much chaos going on inside our head. The puzzle pieces are flying everywhere, we are trying to put each one in its place, but most times it just does not fit. Parenting is one such huge puzzle, maybe the last piece fits when you stop being a parent, with the last breath of life. Elizabeth Gilbert said being a parent is like getting a tattoo on the face. It takes all your life to understand what this tattoo looks like. It is painful, it hurts, you appreciate its beauty, gives you joy, sometimes it oozes, and takes a lifetime to heal.

All said and done, would I do it again, without a moment’s thought ‘yes’. Being a mom fills my soul. I have to be honest, it is not always a bed of lilies, sometimes it sucks. But, there are no guarantees to anything in this colossal mess called life.

Its a process

On By Indu PatikkalIn depression, divorce, Dreams, growing up, Incomplete, learning the hard way, life, life lessons, realizationsLeave a comment

Healing is a process. Healing from everything, from loss, from letting go, from sickness, from trauma. Each one takes its own route and time. In the process you discover new things and you start seeing all the gaping holes in your soul that need careful needlework to sew and close. Each one takes its time. I am in therapy, yes, there is so much shit to process. I am on depression meds, yes, because I don’t know when that devil is going to hit me again. It is like metamorphosis I guess. Inside the cocoon, I am slowly evolving to emerge as a beautiful butterfly. And emerge, I will.

Recently, events of my earlier life unfolded to me, and gave me a perspective about my life, which I had never seen before. The car accident from when I was in 3rd grade, left scars on my left cheek. My father who held race, skin color, beauty in high esteem, ask me to pose for photographs with my right side only. If I don’t smile from ear to ear, there is a manufacturing defect to my smile, its one sided. He would say, don’t give me that side smile. My brother to this day rolls on the floor and laughs when he narrates an incident when I tried to ride a bicycle and went and crashed into a house. I don’t know how to ride a bicycle to this day. Maybe three years ago, he said jokingly whats the point of taking my picture, I look like a cylinder anyways. I remember my mother once saying to a neighbor, ‘so what if she’s dark, she’s elegant’.

I am five feet tall, ‘short’ as per ‘unknown’ standards. I am brown skinned, ‘dark’ as per ‘unknown’ standards. At 5 feet and 120 pounds, I was ‘fat’ as per ‘unknown’ standards. In the eighth grade, my eyesight went poor and I started wearing glasses, ‘soda glasses’ as per ‘unknown’ standards. To add to this, my parents and brother were a lighter shade of brown. So, all my childhood, I blamed myself for not meeting these ‘unknown’ standards. My life was a waste, a curse I told myself looking at the mirror.

So what happens when you go through about twelve years of this cycle (age 5 to 17), these standards get ingrained in you. You blame yourself for your inadequacy without realizing that you are unique. All of this is what makes you, you. You start trying to become someone else. You apply loads of ‘fair and lovely’ cream in the hope that you will become light skinned, like them. You wear heels, to feel taller. You apply make up (this part I couldn’t afford) to look perfect. You transform. You feel forced to build this alternate image of yourself to please the people around you, to feel accepted. In this situation a small compliment, an acknowledgement is like hitting the jackpot. When my teachers chose me to give out the speech on behalf of the 10th grade outgoing students, I was shocked. Why me, I thought instead of thinking, why not me.

We start making adjustments to ourselves, a little here, a little there, to fit in, until we don’t recognize ourselves. We lose our identity. To this chaotic situation, comes a person, your first boyfriend or girlfriend, who is just the escape button your soul needs. You give them infinite chances, so much so that a friend comes and asks you ‘don’t you have any self respect’. In hindsight, it’s funny and he was right. But back then, I was so offended. I was busy moving from one act to another. Then another comes, who promises you the moon. Who claims cannot live without you. Suddenly you have this one person who is making you feel worthy. You jump right into the trap. He sets the stage with all your favorite colors, there’s the moon, there’s the bench by the river you dreamt of. Slowly when he’s understood that you are comfortable, he pulls away the colors one by one. He shows you the beautiful picture now and again, while slowly pulling the rug below your feet. You again pretend, try to be the person who fits his environment. The brother, the mother, the father are all there, so you switch from role to role, losing your self identity completely. Analyzing why they did what they did, the only answer I arrive at is that, they felt responsible to fix this ‘flawed’ being.

Until one day, if you are lucky enough, a friend comes by and points out the horsecrap of a life you have. And then you start the process of rediscovery, of healing, of seeing who you really are. 44 years of my life paying up for ‘I have no fucking clue’. It’s a struggle, everyday, I guess this is how babies learn to roll over, crawl sit up, stand, walk and run. I think I have just rolled over. I need to start crawling, crawling my way back into me, the person I am meant to be.

They say relationships are hard work, yes, even the one with yourself, that’s the hardest one. Everyone faces challenges in different ways. Staying sane through everything and finding your purpose, I guess, is the ultimate goal of life. At the end, maybe everyone does what they think is best, in the process if they poke a few holes in another’s soul, I guess, that’s collateral damage.

Little red seeds

On By Indu PatikkalIn Blessing, Childhood memories, depression, father, Friends, Happiness, holiday, life, life lessons, love, manjadikuru, Random thoughts, realizations, travel2 Comments

I got back from India about three weeks ago. I was there for twelve days. I traveled to five cities. I met so many people. People from as young as eight months to people in their eighties. These are people with whom my paths have crossed at some point in my life. People I have not seen in twenty two years, twenty years, eight years, six years. I smiled, I laughed, I cried, most importantly I felt loved, every moment I was there. These are my people, they have all played a part in where I am today.

It is common knowledge that when an Indian born living outside India, goes back to where they reside, depression sets in for a few weeks. I had heard of this, but this is the first time I experienced it. I went into depression, the real stuff, where I don’t have an appetite, I am sad, but not really sure why, I don’t have the drive to do anything. All I want to do is lay somewhere and look at something mindlessly. I tried to wake up from this slumber, but I just couldn’t shake it off. During this time Grey’s Anatomy came to my rescue. 18 seasons on Netflix, that’s what you call a treat. I was glued. Three days of winter storm, at the end of it, by lower back started hurting, because I was on the couch for hours, escaping my depression.

This morning when I woke up, I decided that I will not watch another episode, until I empty out the suitcase I brought back from India. It has been lying in my living room, open, with undergarments, unused sanitary pads exposed. I simply did not bother. I walked by that suitcase everyday, many times a day, yet it was like this thing, that if I went close to, would burst some bubble and I would gasp for air. Today, as I was talking to my mental health clock (she keeps me in check, almost everyday), I picked up some hangars from my closet and started pulling out the dresses one by one. Each one had a memory. I remembered when I wore them, with whom I was, the happiness I felt. It was draining. I found the photographs, that I had taken out of an album I found in my father’s house. The ones that didn’t have any meaning, my friend held on to those, the rest I found, today. I got that old plastic bag with the heap of one, two rupee notes, that I found in my father’s steel almirah, of forty something years. That almirah is like a person who lived with us, since when I remember. I finally ransacked his secret compartment while looking for property documents. He never let us open that compartment, because his valuables were stored there, lenses, cameras, his salary. I found so many old lens filters and gave them away to his friend. A very long time ago, when he came back from one of his official trips, he’d brought me a purple glitter pencil, where you remove the used lead and push it back at the top of the pencil, so a new lead emerges out at the writing tip. He never gave it to me. I found that pencil and took it. I found old coins, 1 paise, 2 paise, 3 paise, collector’s stuff…

As I took them out one by one from the suitcase, I found the kolhapuri sandals, that my friend and I bought on Commercial street, bargaining, a skill neither she nor I like or know anything about. We went into those shops, looking for oxidized jewelry, I found those as well. One by one, they all came out. Lying around the suitcase in hangars, piles, organized by where they will go, in my closet. At the bottom was a red Tommy Hilfiger pouch I received as a gift eighteen years ago. When my kiddo was one, when life was simple, when everything was happy. I opened the pouch and found those old coins, the oxidized jewelry, the fancy stuff I took from here, but never wore, and among them scattered were the little red seeds I had packed in a tissue.

My besties and I went to a resort for a day. A day where it was just three of us in some tiny corner of the world, talking about everything and anything. As we walked on the grounds of that resort, we saw a little red seed on the ground. I got excited. My friend looked up and said it was a tree of the little red seeds. She and I picked the seeds, one by one, like little children. She gave me a handful which I tuck away in my pocket.

It wasn’t the clothes that I was pulling out of that suitcase, it was the memories. The friend and her family who opened her house and her arms to me, my father’s friends from even before I was born, who made me feel that he lives on in our thoughts, the eight month infant, who looked at me with her big round eyes, like she knew me from another life, the aunt, who couldn’t say a word, but in the end, took my hand and kissed it, my little buddy whom I taught ‘see you later alligator, in a while crocodile’, my friend who tears up every time she seems me or lets me go an epitome of what affection is, the family, the love, the happiness, the warmth. I was pulling out each one of this from the suitcase.

As I always say, depression is real, depression is hard. There is no way around it, but through it. As my therapist says, one foot in front of the other, baby steps. The light will seep in through the crevices. It always has, it always will.

This moment

On By Indu PatikkalIn depression, learning the hard way, life, life lessons, Random thoughts, realizations1 Comment

“The way to suffer well and be happy is to stay in touch with what is actually going on; in doing so, you will gain liberating insights into the true nature of suffering and of joy.” No Mind No Lotus – Thich Nhat Hanh

I started reading the book No mind No Lotus at the recommendation of a friend. When I ordered the book I did not notice the words in the center of the front cover. When I opened the amazon package I saw it ‘the art of transforming suffering’. Interesting, was my first thought. I started reading the book and am only a few pages into it. This is a book I want to read slowly, savor the lines, because this is what I need to learn, the art of transforming suffering.

In the few pages I have read, I realize the zen Buddhist teacher wants us to realize how important it is to live in the moment. I am anxious to unfurl the rest of his wisdom in the book. A few weeks ago my mind was clouded, I was stressed, I was depressed. If I was reading something, it flew past me. I could not register a single word. There was a dense fog clouding my mind, with zero visibility. My therapist kept reminding me that I have been here before and the fog has cleared before. I did not, rather could not believe a word she said. It felt like forever. I was living with ghosts from the past in my head. I thought I needed a higher dose of my depression meds. The news of my son’s college admission did little to clear the fog. A few hours of happiness and I was back as an ass with the heavy load.

It is difficult to explain depression, it is not like fracturing a toe that one can see in an x-ray. It is not possible to see the moment, let alone live it. It is like a web of your past, your anxiousness of the future, woven so intricately, that you cannot seem to find the edge. The more you try to get out, the more you are entangled. With a bone fracture, you can get a cast to set it right. With depression, you can get meds, but you alone have to make small changes, take baby steps to come out of it. My baby step as pointed out by my therapist was to make a list of the things clogging my mind. Separate them out as those that I can control and those I cannot. It is an extremely simple thing to do, but put the serenity prayer into action.

Coming out of trauma is not a small ordeal. It takes time, you need to give yourself time. The longer you have been in trauma, the longer the road to rediscovering yourself. It takes effort, sometimes it feels like every ounce of you is at work. It is hard, extremely hard at times, but that small voice inside you somewhere, the superpower hidden beneath the layers, kicks your gut, pushing you, every moment, every day. There are different categorizations of people, but emotionally there are only two. The ones who have been abused and the ones who have not. It is that simple. The world shapes up based on this.

People who have not been abused have a strong sense of self. They know what they want, they know how they will react in a certain situation. Their highs and lows are closer to the normal. They don’t get too excited or too sad instantly because their center of emotional gravity is deep rooted.

The abused are the utterly confused strata of society. They have absolutely no fucking clue, of self worth. You cannot blame them, because their reality has been so masterly altered by the abusers that it’s all a haze. Their level of expectation of happiness is so low that anything small makes them euphoric. If they are lucky they go through years of therapy to find some normalcy. But do they ever become whole again? I wonder.. one’s life is so caught up in looking for red flags that they forget to experience the happiness laid right in front of their eyes. It’s always a question, “Can I trust this?”. It’s atrocious how our souls are battered, by another mere mortal. How someone could think that we are a toy to be pulled and pushed and reshaped the way they choose.

It is very difficult for a person who has not experienced abuse to understand. There is so much to unlearn and rediscover, not something that’s out there in the world, but yourself. A whole lifetime wasted on this unlearning and being able to trust again. I wonder how many years of therapy it will take to be whole again.

I write so much about trauma and abuse and healing and depression, I wonder if people who are reading this are bored. But then I feel the awareness is not there, and it is very sad. In this age and time where information is at our fingertips (overused phrase, I know), millions of people who don’t have the avenue to get out abusive relationships and get access to a good therapist who will help them move forward. Through therapy I have relived the suffering to be able to heal from it. At the other end of this reliving is joy, a release of the pain, my version of it, a person listening to it who has my emotional wellbeing in front and center.

If you are thinking, she is so broken, yes I am. And this is unashamedly, me. Healing is more difficult than the suffering. You are a constant work in progress to calm the waters, settle the waves down to reach that state of serenity where water is one with nature. People will come and throw a stone, because they don’t like anything still. There will be ripples, which will disrupt the stillness, but healing is knowing that the ripples will eventually die and the water will be still again. The stone deep inside cannot be moved, it will lie there and in the end we gather many stones, moving from stillness to ripples and back to stillness again..

Grief

On By Indu PatikkalIn Blessing, death, divorce, father, God, learning the hard way, life, life lessons, opinion, parenting, Random thoughts, realizations, The signs, Tranquility, WomanLeave a comment

My father passed on Sep 3rd. The same day my US Passport was issued. It has been tradition that my life progresses when he visits me in the US. The first time he came, I bought my first house and got my green card. The second time he came, I bought my second home, a dream home. The third time he was here, I got my citizenship, and got divorced. The last page was getting my passport and that happened right before he passed. Thinking back, it is strange that my passport was issued on a Saturday.

3 Saturdays later I sit here on my couch watching an SPB concert on YouTube. My younger kiddo is playing on his PC upstairs. A Saturday I have longed for this entire year. There is nowhere I have to be, there is nothing I have to get done today. Even if I do nothing today, its okay. I don’t like roller coasters, I am shit scared, yet this year has been nothing short of a roller coaster ride. A job change, my elder son graduation high school, researched and visited colleges for him, got divorced, cared for my younger son through his wisdom teeth extraction, sold my house, moved to another house, convinced my dad to come to the US for the third time, vacationed with my boys at Mexico, got COVID, appeared for my citizenship interview, saw off my son to college in another state, nursed my father during his last two weeks of life, held his hand as he passed, cremated him. And I am here on the other side, strong enough to tell the story.

The week my father fell ill and the week after his passing were the worst. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would google ‘signs of death’ for my father. But I read each one of them and recollected what my aunts or uncles or mom had mentioned when others in the family passed. It all started on Aug 27th when he started throwing up only to discover on Aug 28th that the endoleak from his aneurysm repair had caused an aneurysm rupture. Almost lost him on Aug 27th and Aug 29th but I guess he was not ready. He woke up like nothing had happened. Nursing him for the one week before he finally passed on Sep 3rd is what I consider as one of my biggest blessings. The last few days of a parent is the absolute last ask they have of their children. There is nothing after that. Absolutely nothing.

I have had some really strong eye openers these past 3 weeks. After he passed, the funeral home tied him in a white sheet, transferred him onto a gurney, strapped him and covered him with a fitted blanket. They loaded him onto the back of a minivan and took him away. Everything one does in a lifetime ends in the back of a minivan. How much we emote, stress our asses off, hold grudges, push and pull in relationships, things we want to buy, positions we want to achieve, the egos we manifest, everything seemed so meaningless in that moment.
I am a believer of the concept, where the soul lives on and the body is merely a cloth that the soul sheds when someone passes. I also believe in signs. Three days after he passed, I saw the brightest light, lighting up my garage as I opened the door in the morning to drop my son to school. I knew he was going. I have never seen that light before or after. The funeral home director placed the bag with his box of ashes in the front seat and fastened the seat belt around the bag. It appeared like he was sitting right there, I spoke him on the ride home. When I got home, there were 4 birds, I have never seen them before waiting on the trees around my driveway. Like they were there to welcome him home. That first night, deers from the neighborhood sat vigil next to the wall where I kept his ashes. So many signs he has shown me, strengthening my belief in the soul.

I have been perusing a lot these last two weeks after his passing, and I realized that two roles of my life that I had been playing for years, ended in a matter of months, that of a wife of 19 years and of a daughter for 43 years. I may be a wife again, but I will never have to be a daughter again. And that has been the strangest feeling. We get so used to the multiple roles we play, that of a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a friend, and we think these roles stay until the end. They do, but the realization that we stop being them is strange.

Suddenly I am not so sure what I should grieve for. My son leaving the nest or my father passing or my divorce. Walking into my son’s room and trying to organize his room is the most painful thing. I cannot bring myself to moving his clothes or looking for something in his closet. It is easier to hold my father’s phone or see his shoes outside the door or his glasses on the coffee table. Bringing a life to this world, giving that little human everything you have, taking every chance because there is no rule book and then letting them go is by far the most unfair transaction in this world. In the end parents are just bridges for the first 18 years of their life. When I left him in his dorm room briefly and walked out, I felt something leaving my body, maybe the umbilical cord? Weird.

Then seeing your parents pass and doing everything for their physical being, is just so unfair. And you go through that twice. It takes years to overcome (if you ever overcome) to push the sadness of one, that the other one goes and creates another layer of sadness that you have to push through one day at a time.

All said and done, I am not quite sure what I should grieve for or just let it be. As my therapist says put one foot in front of the other and take one day at a time.

Family

On By Indu PatikkalIn Blessing, celebrate, Childhood memories, growing up, Happiness, life lessons, parenting, Random thoughts, realizationsLeave a comment

We are taught, right from the day we have some understanding of our surroundings, that family is your parents and your siblings. Then you have an extended family which is your aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins. For many years I believed this. Family to me was always father, mother, children. It was an etched-in-stone kind of definition.

The world as we know it as moved away from this definition. There are many women who choose to be single mothers, there are many men who choose to be single fathers. Then there is the gay community, where family is either father, father and children or mother, mother and children. Families now come in all shapes and sizes. Not every family fits into the age-old definition of father, mother and children.

I grew up in a middle class nuclear family. Aunts, Uncles, cousins, grandparents were people we interacted with during the summer vacation. My core was my father, mother, brother and paternal uncle who lived with us. This was my space in the universe. In this space, I was allowed to feel, I was allowed to talk, I was allowed to be me. If I said something out of disrespect, I was corrected. If I said something out of anger, I was given the space to calm down. If I did something wrong, I was told why it was wrong and I was given the opportunity to apologize. My family had a lot of friends and we called them family friends. These were people who lent a hand financially when my parents were struggling to pay my school fees or were short handed at the end of the month. They were there with us emotionally, by encouraging us to push a little higher and have some success in the print world. We participated whole heartedly in each others family events, marriages, death, birth, etc. I have seen more of my parents friends come to our house, have a meal of simple chapathi and curry or whatever was there, than my aunts and uncles.

My concept of family developed through these people. They were family to me, not just family friends, because they were there for us. They didn’t tell my parents that they were trying to do something impossible by trying to set up a print shop. They didn’t judge my parents and say why are you sending your children to the best and most expensive school when you know you cannot afford it. They didn’t comment on the clothes we wore, or the humble living quarters. They sat cross legged on the floor and ate what my mother served. Without asking they brought money and handed it over to my parents. I owe these people a lot and remember them fondly. Many of them have passed, but they were placed in our lives for a reason.

I am a movie buff. A few movies have left a lasting impact on me. One such movie is English Vinglish. After learning English, at the end of the movie, the protagonist defines what a family is, and those words have stuck with me. She says, ‘a family is not judgmental’. That’s precisely how I was raised. My family and everyone around my family, our support systems, never judged us. So that is my definition of a family. A group of people who do not judge you and with whom you can be you.

As I go through my divorce, I have been re-drafting my age-old family definition of father, mother, children. Now my family is mother and children. And that is okay, because for single moms, mom and children is family. My son recently asked me what is family. I told him from my experience this is what I have learnt – a group of people who don’t judge you and let you be you. He said, you took the words out of my mouth. I am glad, rather proud, that my child is not stuck to age old family definitions. That he understands, family is not judgmental.