Category: Motherhood

I went to an all-girls school. We had little awareness of the budding magic of our young bodies, we did not have boyfriends, a party was a sleepover with amateur manicures and gossip. We did not have any internet, our reputations were built on the quality of our grades and who was in detention more than once that week (me, often). So though my teenage years were crammed with tumultuous loneliness, they slink off in shy deference to my son’s upheaval filled ones. What Sindri has experienced in the last few years is nothing short of Icelandic weather – storm clouds at the ready to hail down and four minutes later the Artic sun smirks through, changeable.

He was born in London. He’s been to five schools so far: two in Reykjavik, one in Mumbai, one in Dubai, the latest in NYC. He’s collected several friends along the way. He has understood something of the world in a framework others his age in one place would not. He’s the product of mixed ethnic heritage and two people who could not be more unalike. Now Sindri straddles the bridge between his own identity and the world as he has experienced it – diverse, packed with human emotion. He has seen first hand his mother – at times reluctantly –  adjusting to live in cultures in stark contrast to her own context. He has experienced his father’s metamorphosis from a very grounded personality to one of more fluidity. He has spoken English, Icelandic, French from an early age, gathering Japanese and smatterings of Arabic and German along the way. He plays Chopin and Rachmaninov but listens to Drake and Stormzy. One minute he wants to be a zoologist, the next study political science, the next a journalist. Too much for such young shoulders, perhaps not enough for a boy of his intelligence, curiosity and grit.

Yet, who is this person growing up and away from me? A runaway balloon the receding string of which I grasp at uselessly? How did he get to this place so damn fast? Why did he not come with a warning label “Caution: Secretive when coaxed. Learn to let go with age”? Why do I feel this incessant need to know what he’s going through, to protect him? Is the animalistic mother in me unwilling to accept I am no longer responsible for his journey?

It’s hard to walk the other way in the fork in Life’s road, watching him become a mirage – close enough to feel I know him – this is my son! – yet the more I reach out, the greater the illusion he’s just a few miles gone. And the prayer, dear god, keep him safe! Let him make sensible choices! I am not around to tell him off, I can’t rescue him. Help him learn to rescue himself.

In Finding Nemo, Nemo’s father Marlin and his friend Dory are inside a whale’s mouth when Marlin cries, “I promised him I’d never let anything happen to him…” Dory, the film’s Quixote quotes, “Hmm, that’s a funny thing to promise. You can’t never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him. Not much fun for little Harpo.” (She keeps forgetting Nemo’s name). I have some Doryish friends who remind me it’s all going the way it’s supposed to… I need to focus on my career, my other relationships, my relationship with my spirit. After fourteen years of having a strong sense of one role, I need to switch and learn new skills…

Like how to think of myself first.

Like how when I cook, I only have to consider my own diet.

Like how while choosing a movie to watch, its age rating is no longer relevant.

Like how when I look at the empty bed with a Sindri shaped crater in its mattress, to smooth its sheets, rearrange a pillow and send him a silent plea – be careful, be kind, be calm.

How I don’t need to be home from work every evening to fix him a snack. How I can be where I want, when I want, with whom I want without the umbrella of Sindri’s care to contain those movements. How in a place separated by many seas, Sindri is waking up to his day as I get into bed ending mine, our prayers for each other different in askance, the same in tone – please let the other always know I care. How love is a word needing no other presence except in the heart of those who feel it for each other.

And so Life goes on.
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Bedtime – for Sindri at two years old

I say “once upon a time” as I put you to sleep and hope you will dream
of mako sharks and kings with wings
and the elephant god

While I lie eyes wide open near you
recounting each instant each hope of mine
framed around your breath

I tell you of Zeus and Hera, the love for three oranges and a dancing cow
so you cannot see me
clutching at my nervous heart

The daggers are drawn, the duel begins
but before it ends you drift off
padded by white sleep

I am still in my story I can’t complete it
I don’t know the end for I keep changing the beginning
As I stay awake wondering about it near you

31 January 2006, Reykjavik

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…