These past few days have been the saddest days of my life. I have never been this sad in my entire life. For how does a mother’s heartache when her teenage child hugs her and tells her, “Mom I don’t want to go. Please keep me with you for a few more days!”
Since then, my eyes have been wet every waking second. I look for nooks and crannies to hide my brimming eyes. Not that you don’t love your other child but there is always that little one who takes up wee extra space in your heart. She clings to me so hard, day and night, as if trying to get back into the womb, the first known secure place for a child!
I have always considered myself to be one of the grittiest persons in my circle and I got over the pain of separation from my younger one within a few days when I first left her a thousand miles away at her college. However, this time, her words keep reverberating in my ears as I go about doing my daily chores. I can’t cry at home for the fear that she might see and feel all the more disheartened than she already is.
So the other day, when I reached college choked with emotions, my jaw trembled uncontrollably as I nodded to my colleagues’ ‘Good mornings’. Unable to control any longer, I rushed to the college ground. It was a bone chilling, frosty morning with the wind lashing at your face. Not a soul was around to witness the unrestrained barrage of water flowing like rivulets down my cheeks as my heart exploded into a million pieces. As I walked, incessantly, around the oval-shaped ground, I recalled Katherine Mansfield’s story ‘The Life of Ma Parker’. Ma Parker, in the end, unable to control her grief, had walked into the rain where nobody would notice her tears mixing with the waters from above and thereby, she could cry her heart out.
Unmindful, I kept walking and wiping my face with the back of my hand till the lachrymal glands refused to produce any more of the saline water. I know, my heartbreak is nothing compared to Ma Parker’s tragedy or the misfortune of some others, yet it’s a mother’s heart that wants to tell her little ones, “It’s all for your own good” but is failing miserably.
At this point, I felt the need of a horse into whose sympathetic ears I could pour out my grief just like the horse carriage-driver from Anton Chekhov’s story ‘The Grief’. Anyone who would just listen to the travails of a heart-broken mother and tell me that it will be over soon- this unbearable pain. I could not and so I decided to pen-down this heartfelt note for all the mothers out there who are sailing in the same boat as I, to help me by sharing the ways and means to get over this unhappy state. Like Pablo Neruda, I wish to write, “Tonight I can write the saddest lines…”
I have always been poor with the ‘spoken word’ especially when it comes to expressing my emotions but am aware that ‘written words’ rarely fail me. So, I write this plea to all the mothers out there reading this, to share their secret recipe of dealing with separation from their children because I, for one, am finding it too difficult to handle.
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