Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You are the bows from which your children
As living arrows are sent forth.
-Khalil Gibran-
When he was two I’d often ask my son how old he was, to which he’d respond, “I’m twenty-six!” with all ten fingers raised. I’m not sure from where this came but it was endearing and though I corrected him, “sweetie, you’re two! Say two?” – he stuck to his double digits.
One morning as we were cuddling in bed I squeezed him and said, “I love you”, to which he answered, “I love you”. I told him he could say, “I love you too”. The immediate come back was, “Mama, I love you twenty-six”.
Sindri Desai Gíslason is now an adolescent. Fifteen years old, on the threshold of being a man. He’s (almost) the height of an NBA player and if he listens to this memory one more time, the eye roll will be accompanied by, “Moooom, stooooop, this is so lame, I’ve heard it before, like, thousands of times”. He will not understand that in the retelling of it, he becomes my small child once more, something so pure and so fleeting, that reliving the memory is the only way for me to cope with him hurtling toward adulthood. And so far away from me while he’s doing it.
I was a young-ish mother, delighted to have this perfect human being in my life. The realization that I was capable of such deep love for someone caught me off-guard. This wasn’t what poets wrote about, around what movies spun glistening webs. Up to that point, romantic love was where everything lay – all glorious celebratory emotion. And yet. This overwhelming oxytocin charged sensation coursing through my body was my unconditional love for my child. Genetic biologists refer to this as a need to protect progeny in order to ensure the procreative process has not been futile, and they will go on to inherit the earth – that is, it’s all about survival, the passing on of our (strong) genes. With our intelligence, we have emotionalized this basic instinct, we’ve made it about love.
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This kind of love is huge. It’s full of highs and lows – the win of the medal in the sack race, the fall from grace when he wants to be friends with the cute little girl blonde but she only has eyes for the cute little boy blonde, the constant Band-aid applications, the bad dreams, the delight of a Lego finished well under time, the ache of an average grade despite his hard work.
How does a mother cope with the loss of these small gifts? How does a mother move on from motherhood like this – the kind of role that defined her actions, her thoughts, her raison d’etre? Where does she find salvation once the die has been cast out into a relentless hard knock world, where the phone calls needing her peter down, where the worry is locked unmentioned, where unprotected and uncontrolled, the young man she has loved since he was a baby, now goes forth to conquer his realm, armed with a sense of youthful bravado and little else.
He reached all his targets a little too early – when he started walking was when he started running. He was in the ninetieth plus percentile in his growth chart. He learnt how to read sooner, he matured quicker. He’d run to defend his friends against bullies, and cry because when they hurt, he hurt equally. His sensitivity and kindness were boundless. His kindergarten teacher told us they had trouble putting him down for afternoon naps, he required a steady stream of stimulation. And when he hit his teens, he was the first amongst his peers to sport a fuzzy growth on his upper lip. He also left me at fourteen years of age, to live with his father (we divorced when Sindri was five) three continents and nine time zones away.
It was a decision we made collectively as a blended family – the opportunity to study in New York at a prestigious school outweighed the benefits of the education he was receiving in Dubai. He was also at an age where he needed his father as a male role model and needed guidance on how to be a man. I realized as he moved through his early teens with me that I was unable to be both mother and father to him. And his father, was welcoming and excited to have him be with the new family (of a wife and baby).
So here I am now… eighteen months into this painful umbilical separation wondering who I am if I can no longer mother him actively. When he was with me in Dubai, we rescued a dog from the kennel (who was returned because the building threw a no-canine contract in our face) and then two very loving cats. An odd family for sure, a single mother, a single child, a single quiet cat and a single sanity-questioning one. It was ok, it felt like something with truth and meaning. But of course, with a whole future ahead of him, this was not enough for Sindri. And – then, was it enough for me?
After all, I’d started writing young, my talents were put to use by my birth country’s leading national newspaper. At seventeen I had a byline in the Times of India, I was earning an income, fraternizing with important and beautiful people. I continued my journalism career in London, turning from print to broadcasting, reporting for the BBC World Service on everything from dwindling wild tiger populations to the effects of mixed marriage on religiosity. It was a heady time, I felt liberated with my self power. And yet, I remember that moment I told a colleague that if I didn’t get pregnant by thirty (I was twenty-six), I’d adopt a child. I was clear I wanted to nurture and love a small human being despite the absence of any large romantic ones at the time.
When Sindri’s father and I met and married, the greatest gift we gave each other was this wonder – wiggling around, needy, yelling to be held, to be cleaned, to be fed, totally helpless. And now, fifteen years later, he’s pushing back, totally owning his independence, totally not needing anyone for anything. A rebel, no causes. A tall cocktail of contradictions, logic and reason, emotionality and anger, completely self absorbed in teenage rage, hormones, unconnected neural pathways which lead to behaviours I don’t understand. Not even when I recall my own angst at his age.
To be continued…
