A beautiful conversation

Do you ever feel short of words for expressing what you feel for your loved ones? This happens often to me, especially when it comes to wording my emotions towards my husband darling. In a casual conversation with my best friend, I realized how much faith I have in this man.

Me: I had visited the hospital yesterday for a tour for expecting parents. (Yes, I am pregnant.) It was scary to witness everything. I am anxious, nervous and happy of course, but the hospital air is scary.

She: Don’t worry everything will be fine.

Me: I told husband darling about my feelings on returning home and he said, I am there, what are you worried about. Together we will sail through this and return home healthy with our child. And there are professionals at the hospital to take care of everything. Every woman goes through this experience once in their lifetime at least. You will be fine, my sweetheart, don’t worry I am there.

She: Hmm…

Me: And then I was fine and smiling, rubbing my belly responding to my child dancing inside me.

She: Is it so easy for your husband to explain you. You get convinced so easily?

Me: Hmm, not usually. But when it comes to him, it is. The moment he says it will be fine and he is there with me, I know everything is going to be fine. Having him by my side is a strength and a matter of faith for me. Just his presence Pooja, makes me feel safe and happy.

After dropping the call, I realized how much me, and my husband have grown in this relation. How much the relation has grown in itself. I messaged my friend a thank you for helping me realize the beautiful side of my relation.

Tale of a Mother

Two girls, Maria and Meera were sisters from the same mother. Maria was the elder among two and was a very active and extrovert child. Right since her childhood she knew what exactly she wanted and how she would achieve it. Meera on the other hand was a happy go lucky younger one. Not very high on ambitions and a very content little child.

As kids, Maria always insisted on having a Barbie and Meera would settle with any doll that she got as long as it was a new one and it smiled. Papa was a little short-tempered man and always found Meera easy to deal with and hence he loved her more. Mom, like any mother could never love her one child more than another. She loved both equally. Of course, she had her mommy moments when she would feel tired, exhausted with having to deal with two different personalities altogether, but no mothers ever give up on their kids.

There were nights, when she would lay awake in the bed staring at the ceiling, feeling helpless and clueless when Maria demanded something that they couldn’t afford or when Meera came home being walked over by one of her friend or school mate. She questioned her own parenting skills and often pondered if she was doing something wrong with her two kids. Papa, was an inactive parent and hence she never bothered him, despite her inner voice screaming, “he was an equal partner while manufacturing them, he is responsible too, involve him, consult him, hand it over to him, you need…no you deserve a break.” But she silenced this voice by ignoring her needs. She kept toiling herself as a mother and slowly, gradually the woman in her was being killed by herself.

As a girl, she had her own dreams and once she was married, her husband was always supportive of her aspirations. But things changed with Maria and Meera knocking the doors of their life. Without her attention, she had become a mother and her dreams had evaporated. Her husband had begun to think of his wife as a mother now and forgotten all about her dreams and aspirations.

After 25 years when Maria and Meera grew up and had their own careers charted out for them, they came and asked their mother, “Maa, you wanted us to become successful and have our victory moments. Did you ever feel about having such moments for yourself?”

She smiled and looked at her husband, who had guilt written in his eyes. He wanted to speak but was stopped by her as she answered, “Seeing the two of you successful in your lives, witnessing the happiness on your faces, is the biggest victory moment for me my girls. You are my life and what matters to a mother more than her kids.”

That night as the husband and wife laid on bed, they both starred at the ceiling and today was a night when he would speak. He said, “I am sorry sweetheart, I don’t know if I can ever make up for my mistakes, for my ignorance, for my selfishness. But I promise you to help you live your dream from here on.” She smiled and forgave the loving husband who had taken 25 long years to see the reality.

After a year today, mother of Maria and Meera is an entrepreneur who runs her own book café in the busy city of Mumbai. Maria and Meera along with their father helped her achieve her dreams of having her own book café.

Merrily and happily, the family sleeps each night now with love and gratitude filled in their hearts.

True Love is Rare – Sheila Roberts

I am currently pouring into a beautiful book from the Icicle falls series, ‘Home on Apple Blossom Road.’ It’s a beautiful book, where two childhood friends are sent on a treasure hunt to find their inheritance by their dead grandmother.

Turns out that these two were in love and had broken off – credit to trust issues. I am still to read the end, so I am keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that they reunite in the end. Sad endings steal my smile, happiness and joy for a couple of days after I finish the book.

I came across a beautiful line in the book today. It reads, “There’s the kind of love you settle for, but the gold standard kind of love, the soul-searing, true love variety, that’s pretty rare. It’s also fragile. It bruises easily.” Something in my heart tucked when I read these lines. They made a connect with my psyche immediately.

Did they tuck your heart too? Go ahead and read the book if you like to read some light romantic books, it won’t disappoint you.

What are you reading these days? Let me know in comments.

Expressions and relationships

There is something about expressing your emotions in relationships. Be it a parent-child relation, be it a bond between two friends or be it a relation of the lovey-dovey spouses, expressing what you feel in the relation is important. We ought to provide the other person in the relation the comfort and liberty of expression. We as humans have been truly blessed with the power of words, the power to communicate. Not all breathing and alive creatures around us have this privilege.

Some use this power and make others feel good, bring smiles on their faces and love into their lives whilst some use it and end up hurting someone’s emotions. At times, I have found myself to fall in the latter category of the two. But that was until I had realized it and then made a decision to be conscious of my own words. Once I had made this decision, it’s only with my husband and my mom that I take this liberty to talk whatever I feel even when I am angry. These are two relations in my life which have given me ample of liberty and comfort to feel what I want to feel and speak what I want to. I do not misuse this liberty but at times when I need to vent out, these two are the only relations I know have got my back.

My other ways to express myself is through gifts and appreciation letters. I stay miles away from my family and friends who have known me since my teenage years. In the beginning, I missed them, I craved for the affection and love and all the pampering that I received from them, but then I had to accept the reality and make peace with it someday. Today when I miss them, I write letters and attach some beautiful pictures to these letters and send them home. Sending letters overseas isn’t a very economical affair, so I wait for the pile of letters to gather up a size and send it to my mom and from there she dispatches the letter to people intended, sometimes to my sister, sometimes to my brother, sometimes to my friend and once even to my ex-boss.

After a while, I have learnt that if I don’t express, I feel choked, the relationship can’t blossom as much as it would if I communicate. Since the time I have learned and become conscious of my expressions and my communication, my relationships have bettered, there is more peace in my life and there is a much lesser space for misunderstandings in every area of my life. Yes, I have made myself vulnerable trying to express at times, but that is not a very heavy price for the luxuries I get in return. The explanation lies in the quote from Brian Jacques in his book Taggerung, “Don’t be ashamed to weep. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of is sealed inside to comfort us.”

What is your best way of expressing your thoughts, your emotions? Which is that one relation in your life which helps you to be yourself completely?

Image courtesy: Alamy Stock Photo

 

Relationships

As I enter my balcony today I find it in an appalling condition. My mother and I had planted all these lovely plants with a lot of love and affection. I feel the tiny little beings screaming at me for not tending them for a last few weeks. My ignorance towards my plants had led to a complete chaos in my balcony, some creepers had extended their boundaries and flailed at any random places, one of my favourite rose shrub had attracted insects on it and my Tulsi plant ensured that it had its springs in all her neighbouring pots.

 After looking at them closely and talking to them a little sorry, I immediately started on my mission “Re – Beautifying Garden.” As I removed the weeds from a few of them, replanted those who had outgrown their sizes of pots, fertilized each of them, trimmed those extra stems from almost all the plants and plucked those lifeless Chinese roses and a few withered leaves from all over the balcony, I realised how the principles remain the same for our relationships too. To end my mission successfully I watered each of them and gave the colourful crystals their nice soft, insect free bed of mud back.

  As I sip my hot steaming cup of tea, enjoy the weekend, I still linger on the beautiful smell of my balcony and the thought of relationships. How elegantly has that little corner of my home revealed the significance and the secret of relationships to me today. In all my busy life how easily I had kept aside one of the most significant part of it – My Relations. I realise how important it is to revisit each of the relations that I belong to, to remove the weeds of misunderstanding and assumptions. It is essential for me to trim those moments of mistakes that each did while playing their role in the relation. I need to be vigilant and remove the insects of expectations and doubts from the relation. The ego issues and that need of sorry from the other person had allowed the distance to flay beyond boundaries.

 I need to fertilise each of my relation with trust and then to completely nurture it, I had to water with the adequate quantity of love. If my plants are watered more they develop algae and a few of their leaves turn yellow. Similarly with relations, if I pour my excessive love on them, I initiate a need of wanting to control it, to possess it and leave the other person to feel throttled. If I do not water my plants sufficient, they start showing the roots at the surface and so does the relations  those are not nurtured with enough love start showing their feeling of devoid in open and leaving it open for the world to draw scars upon.

 One plant from my garden that day I had to part ways with because no matter how much I would fertilise and water it, the roots were dead and this plant had lost its strength to live again. It was difficult for me to bin that tiny little plant. Next day when the maid came and saw that dead plant over the dustbin her response taught me one final lesson from my garden. “Tai, don’t throw this, the dried leaves can be used as the fertilizer to other plants, the stems can be used by us as fuel to cook our meals for a day.”  Relationships similarly need to end if they only provide you with the hurt and when there is no respect left between each other, but the lessons and the memories that the relation has provided us with shall stay with us forever.

 As my Guru Mahatria mentions, “In life, as well as in a good relationship, the past is irrelevant. The present forms the building blocks. Take time to listen and understand. As often as possible, communicate to be understood.”

 Relationships are the lifeline to live this life gracefully. Expressing the right emotions using the right words is inevitable. I vow this to myself today, “By attending and caring for my relations regularly I shall provide my life a fresh and an insect free bed like I gifted the crystals their mud bed back”.

Rearrange your life

A cabinet that held heaps of my books right since my college days was now piling up in a slapdash with my favorite novels and magazines. Each time I picked up one of the unread novels from the stack, I promised myself to clean up the mess once I finish reading it. This one time never arrived until my mother chided me when I walked with a set of few more new novels.

“Deepti, keep these books outside as they won’t get into my home until you clear that cabinet. Give away the books that you have read and criticized. Anymore additions to that shelf and it shall burst out in tears like you when you can’t handle your overflowing emotions”, she continued to chide me.

“Mom it is just three books and I will squeeze them inside and next weekend I promise I will sort the mess mom, please” pleaded the innocent side in me. All my pleading was in vain as she ensured that this time there was no next time.

I cleared the entire shelf and randomly a few books would seek my attention, forcing me to open them, smell them and feel them. I felt nostalgic when a few books I opened held my old photographs; some had the doodles that I drew while I was transported into a fantasy world reading them. I felt overwhelmed as I recollected and even missed a few of the characters trapped in the books those came alive in my heart and mind. At leisure I completed the daunting task at hand, sorting all the books and trying even harder to accommodate all of those in their own home. I had no other choice, but to heed my mother’s advice this time. Fortunately I have a cousin who has a similar taste of books as me and also a friend who periodically conducts garage sale for a few of the charity partners in the society. I was sad and disheartened to part my ways with those books but I knew I had no choice this time.

‘Mom, come have a look at my shelf now, it is so clean and looks beautiful now’

“It looks spacious too, my child” she said as she handed over to me my three new books.

As I was spending that evening, just relaxing, doing nothing, I realized that such was life. I had to “assign” myself this task of clearing the mess I had created in my life too. Each time I had a quarrel with my friends or disagreements with my colleagues I had a tendency of putting the issues under the carpet. The frustration would fill up to the brim until one fine day the explosion would happen. The only buyer for my explosions is my mother because only she realizes that it is the frustration talking and not my heart, only she knows that her daughter has this ill habit of ignoring things. She understands that my inability to be assertive and my credulous nature are reasons for all the relationship issues that confront me.

That evening I made a list of issues that I had to address and the list of friends/relatives/colleagues that I needed to have a coffee with. I knew some of these relations I would feel nostalgic with the memories of the good times; I would feel those happy and joyful moments again. I also knew that a few of the relations I would have to bid a forever good-bye saying them a thank you for all their kindness in my journey of life. The hurt of parting away was inevitable but for the new fresh things to enter my life I had to rearrange things.

We are all like the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, we try to connect with each other, no piece in the entire puzzle is wrong. Each piece has its place and fits only when the neighboring pieces are accommodating. Similarly no one person is wrong, but to live this life we would need those around us who would accommodate us for who we are, who we can accommodate the way they are. We all need that one family and a circle of friends around us, who would accept us for what we are, without the masks of diplomacy, without the fear of being judged, without the fear of being corrected at every single step.

People change and with change here I mean evolve, the amount of time I spent with my friends while I was in college or working as an intern, I can’t spend now while I work full-time. Priorities change as our goals change. Roles change as our designations change. A father cannot be a father all the time to his child; he has to be a friend, a mentor, a partner in crime and sometimes just an observer. The real test of relations would be when this evolution will occur within us, when our priorities will shift. The ones who would understand that, despite all the outer changes and changes in the circumstance, the love, emotions and the essence of the relations still is the same, would stay with us the longest.

Paulo Coelho writes, “Accept what life offers you and try to drink from every cup. All wines should be tasted; some should only be sipped, but with others, drink the whole bottle.” The relations which allow us to be just the way we are, accepts us with all the imperfections, the ones those who understand our shift in priorities and evolution are the ones along with whom we can remain connected all our lives. Rest we taste, we sip and without offending anyone keep our glass down.

I pledge to rearrange and sort the cabinet of my life too, to make it spacious and beautiful, to keep treading on the journey of life and to create a stunning jigsaw puzzle. Let’s connect the right pieces to each other. I will live and let others around me live as they are; without burdening them with my expectations and accepting them with their real without the masks selves.

At the end of the day, we need to empty our jugs of emotions at regular intervals, clean them and fill them again just like we do to our cabinets.