Tag: life lessons

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.

Yellow suitcase

On By Indu PatikkalIn Childhood memories, father, growing up, Happiness, holiday, life lessons, Random thoughts, travelLeave a comment

The big suitcases have come out of hiding. Opening them and laying them out on the floor is when the excitement begins. Before this specific act, there are people asking me, are you excited? I say a half hearted yes, to not disappoint the excitement in their voice. But, it really kicks in when the packing starts. Counting the number of days equal to the number of dresses/clothes I need. Add two for buffer. Pick out the dresses/clothes and stack them neatly. Then I see a bunch of them need to be ironed. I diligently iron them. Then the night clothes and essentials. Again equal to the number of days and two for buffer. Once the clothes are decided, then come out the pouches from hiding. Each pouch will serve a purpose. Medicines, makeup, jewelry, daily needs. Then there is the matter of footwear. I start planning footwear way before I pick my clothes. One footwear that makes sense and will go with all my clothes. A simple, comfortable pair of shoes. Somewhere after the footwear and before the clothes, comes my checklist on my phone. Randomly watching TV is when I start building the checklist. Once everything is laid out on the bed, a day or two before the departure date, all these carefully handpicked items move from my bed to the suitcase. Then it is a countdown feeling. Two days from now we will be at this place, doing this or eating this. That is when the excitement kicks in slowly.

The checklist is checked top to bottom and bottom to top, just to be sure. Everything in order, and we get to the airport. Once there, every aspect of mundane life recedes to the background. It is excitement and anticipation of the time, the boys and I will get to spend together 24×7, exploring, joking, laughing, discussing, wow-ing and taking in all the sights the place has to offer.

I guess this euphoric feeling of seeing the big suitcase coming out is something that has grown with me since I was very young. My family owned a yellow VIP suitcase. It was a hardcase, the top came down and there were metal snaps, that you pressed to shut them close. This is before suitcases had zips. What the current generation would call ‘Retro’. There were number locks, I dont remember if this particular one had a number lock. The inside covering was a golden yellow machine embroidered cloth, I think. Maybe my love for yellow started then. That suitcase coming down from the seven foot almirah meant we were going from Bangalore to Kerala for vacation. Lack of time and money stopped my family from taking vacations to new places every year. Those did happen once or twice, but vacation meant boarding the Bangalore-Kanyakumari Express from Bangalore Central Reservation on Sleeper Class tickets to Shoranur Junction. We got off there and took a bus with this yellow suitcase to my grandmother’s place. After a few weeks there, the suitcase went with us to Kannur, to my paternal grandparents place, filled with more uncles, one aunt and a handful cousins. A ‘fewer’ weeks there and then the suitcase boarded an overnight bus to Bangalore. Somewhere towards the end of maternal grandmother’s house and before the paternal grandparents house, my father joined us. My father preserved a lot of things. The original magazine covers from the 1970’s where my mother’s picture appeared on the cover. In the pile of junk I cleaned out, I found my 9th grade report card. My boys saw my marks in general knowledge and added it as a weapon in their quiver (smh). One thing I did not find, is the yellow suitcase. When I was small, the yellow suitcase seemed big. I guess now that I am big, it wont be bigger than a carry on. I dont know, I never will.

There are things in our life, objects that remain memories. We don’t have pictures that our eyes can see, but stark images in our mind, stored forever. Like the blue metal folding chairs in my house, which I don’t know how many times I must have opened and folded. The gas stove that my father bought, many many years ago, that didn’t need a lighter, the knob had ignition built in, This one I don’t have to imagine, because my father still used it until his last day. It was waiting for him in the kitchen when I went to clear out the house earlier this year. There are so many objects that we use everyday, but they slip away with time.

If there was only thing I could do in my life, that would be to travel, to every nook and corner of the world. I believe there is so much to see, so much to experience. So this time, the suitcases are out, getting filled slowly, as we jet set to the UK, checking off a place that has been on the boys and my bucket list for many many years now. The excitement, like the bubbles in a glass of champagne making their way to the surface. The suitcase is not significant looking. A dark teal colored companion I bought earlier this year to accompany me on my journey of the world. Let’s see how many places she and I will see together.

Silence

On By Indu PatikkalIn Random thoughts1 Comment

Have you sat on your couch and listened to the silence around you? It’s almost 8pm where I am, I look out the window and the leaves are dancing after a rain. I don’t hear birds, I don’t hear the wind chime. It’s absolutely quiet. Pin drop silence. The only noise in my head is the search for the next word I need to type. the sky is a blue-grey. If I hit the letters on the screen of my phone, I can hear a faint tap. Other than that, it’s silence, outside and inside.

It’s my zen state. There is no place I need to be, there is no task I need to be doing, there is no expectation of me. In this moment I am transported to the pool in Mexico where I am floating aimlessly, my face towards the sun. All the noises around me are hushed and all I hear is silence.

Last night, as the movie “96” ended, I started crying. In the past when I have watched this movie, I have cried, because the story has similarities to my life. Yesterday, that wasn’t the case. As the closing credits rolled, I cried like my chest was about to burst. I wanted to scream, “Appa died”. It’s been 7 months since he left, and yesterday it hit me. Not sure why. But in those tears I let go, of him and of all the men and women who failed me. I let go of all the unhappiness of forty four years. Is that even possible, you ask? I don’t know, I am just finding out. This morning it was raining when I went to drop my son to school. On my way back, the skies cleared up and as I turned onto my street, I saw a ray of the sun, shining brightly. As I searched the skies, there it was, a beautiful rainbow. I felt cleansed.

I can still hear the silence. It’s a kind of peace I have never known. The world is just as it should be and my world is just perfect.

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.

What makes people happy?

On By Indu PatikkalIn Random thoughtsLeave a comment

Is that question right – what makes people happy? Why should some “thing” make people happy? I witnessed a beautiful sunset today, the sky magically turned from a dull blue to a fireball of red and orange. That vision made me happy. But isn’t it because I was already happy that I was able to embrace the vision? A little bit of a chicken and egg?

Some “thing” or “event” can make you sad. And then you are in that state of sadness, when the situation changes you move to the next emotion. Anger, sadness, embarrassment etc are emotions triggered based on an event. Unlike these, happiness is a constant state you can achieve by looking within you. Happiness doesn’t warrant a situation, you can be simply happy. People latch on to this zen state, as I want to call it, at different stages in their life. Probably like what Buddha felt when he attained enlightenment. I don’t know. It is deep inside you, you have to find it. But once you do, all other emotions feel baseless. To put it another way, the span from feeling unhappy to the state of understanding why you are unhappy, is much shorter. It is so easy to spring back to the state of happiness.

I like to believe that babies are born with the only emotion of happiness, characterized by their first smile, until we infuse all the other emotions by the way we treat them. It took me some time, actually a long time to figure out why babies cry with anger, it because we don’t do something for them. We confuse the heck out of them. Because we have unstable minds, we pass on a slice of that instability to them. Ultimately parents are responsible for teaching their young ones all the emotions there are in the world by being the cause.

Narcissists are not born (I guess). They become that way because of their environment and what they see. I keep going back to narcissism because I have spent time trying to understand why and how someone acquires narcissistic behavior. So if you think of it, a human life begins with a state of happiness, is polluted with all other emotions and then spends years trying to get back to the center of happiness. Not everyone is dumb as me and takes this long, my bestie had this figured out way back, she is my inspiration in finding your normal and sticking to it. But I guess environmental factors like the people in your life could contribute to the prolongation of finding your center. Honestly, it’s crazy and kind of ridiculous. When I see people much older than me who haven’t found it, I chuckle. They always skip the line of happiness, and in some, I see them skipping the line and I think “fuck, you missed it again”. There must have been someone who looked at me and thought the same. But in this zen state, you don’t care about what anyone thinks. Do what feels right to you, there is nobody in this world you need to convince. And that state is “zen”!