Category: Motherhood
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Tectonic Shifts
This week feels like how I have imagined tectonic shifts will feel. Plates sliding into each other, deep underground, sending ripples that compound out into the ocean, until meter high waves crash on the shore or mountains appear where there were once plains. This week’s shift has been years in the making. It started out…
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On Being A Mother
I waffled a long time before typing in the title. I kept typing parent, erasing, and keying in mother. Eventually, mother won out because this is just my experience and it is tied to being a mother than a parent. What’s the difference you ask? I define the difference in terms of the load I…
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Vestiges Of Innocence
“Mom! mom!!” Her excitement is contagious as she bounds down the stairs, her smile stretching from ear to ear, her eyes wide as saucers. I have my AirPods on as I listen to a masterclass on retrograde planets. I pause the lesson and slow my pace to take in what is happening. “The tooth fairy…
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Mother’s Day: Disenfranchised Grief
All of this week, I have been going through the motions at home, at work, and everywhere else that requires my participation. My heart hurts. My head hurts. I feel like an imposter feeling a sense of sadness and bereavement about people I do not know too well. These are deaths in the extended circle…
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Mother’s Day And Motherhood
“I’ll get it Amma…” The snippet was part of some inane conversation in the morning as we bustled around getting ready for school and work. I would have missed it had it not been for the funny flips my heart did when I heard Amma instead of mommy. Motherhood, for me, is the destination of…
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Mother’s Day: The Missing And The Worrying
The late evening sun slants through my open window. It is not yet the kind of Spring I long for. The temperatures hover in the 50s, not cold, not warm. Sometimes a wind blows, the wet kind that harks back to the ill wind that the books I grew up on talked about. The apple…
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Ten Years. Many Lessons.
This week marks ten years since we went from being a couple to parents of twins. Each year I struggle with marking the day. Obviously, it is of import to me. It also is of import to my children in ways I cannot measure or understand. I consciously stay away from anything celebratory. I…
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One Walk At A Time
It is growing dark. Pattu’s flashlight bobs up and down in the dusk. I am walking beside her and watching her try to stamp on the beam’s focal point. It is like watching a dog chase its tail. Exhausting and entertaining at the same time. I throw a question at her and hope to catch…
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Mother’s Day: Gratitude
Pattu enters through the garage, her backpack sliding off her shoulder and her right hand clutching a patterned paper bag. I reach out for it and she holds back, her smile leaking through her eyes. She hands me her backpack instead and heads right for her room. Ammu walks in next and brushes past me…
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Mommy Tax
Laddu is on the kitchen island, her legs dangling off the edge. Large sunglasses cover more than half her face. I am feeling reflective and in the mood for conversation. “What is your destiny?” I ask as a follow-up to our discussion on the show Ever After High. She blinks. I go back to the…