This day...

He looks at me with eyes full of pain. I don’t notice the pain or I do, but I choose to ignore it. I am filled with anger fuelled by worry as always. “Why do you just sit there?” “Why can’t you show an interest in something?” “You aren’t a potato for god’s sake, say something!!?” “Stop that weeping – why can’t you just tell me what you feel!” I scream all of this and the pain hits me like a wave.

I don’t cry because I am mad. Mad at a fate that can gift me with a son I do not know how to handle. I worry insanely night and day about what it is he can do with himself. There are moments when I feel carefree but that is only because of one newfound friendship that makes me behave like a young girl after ages. When that ends, I’ll have to go back to being in pain nearly always yet again.

I am not untalented. And yet I have earned nothing for myself monetarily. All the years I spent in so many hostels at college were not of much use except to earn me the degrees I needed to be marriageable material. How could I work when there is no one else to be home for my son when he needed it? So yes I resent him for that as well. All this negative feeling pops up when the worry strikes me hardest. Otherwise I leave well enough alone and we are both reasonably happy.

I realize that life has no answers sometimes and the questions can be very tormenting. I also realize that there is no point beating one’s head endlessly on a wall – the wall’s still there and you have a blasted headache to top it all. And indeed on most days humour comes to my aid and I pull through. But there are always those days that I dread where I don’t see a chink of light in the gathering gloom; where I am swamped with the kind of fear only a mother knows; where I regret every single thing that I have done in my life – today perhaps is one such day. Tomorrow I will be alright – I shall see the shadows for what they are and glimpse the light behind it but for now, I am hard-pressed to simply get through this day.