Unposted Letters : Do forgive me someday

Often it happens, what is want to say to someone – remains unsaid. That silence and mum for years builds up in our hearts and minds. Here is a series of “Unposted Letters” which will feature emotions – feelings – thoughts of people who have something to say.

Dearest Antara,

I have been meaning to write this letter to you for the last eight years but every time I put paper to pen guilt got the better of me and I couldn’t write a single line.

We worked together for two years and all this while I never understood why you were always in a rush to go home from work. I always thought, “What was the big deal if you had left your one-year-old daughter at home with a maid?” I thought that did not allow you to skip your responsibilities at work and find some pretext or other to leave office early when all of us were slogging it out late into the night.

Although age-wise you were older to me but I used my senior position to tell you at times to stay back like all of us. I knew this annoyed you.

At that time, since I was not a mother, I never realized how hard it must have been for you to leave your precious child all alone with a maid and come to work.

I remember we even got into an altercation about this once when our boss, who understood your predicament better since he was a father of two, very tactfully ironed out our differences telling me it was not easy to do the balancing act between motherhood and a career. I never understood then. I thought you took an equally good pay pack home so you needed to put in equal number of hours at work like all of us.

I never realized that you time-managed well enough to meet the deadline while all of us, who had husbands coming home late or were single, spent quite a lot of time in the cafeteria, in the smoking room, at coffee breaks and then stayed on late  at work to make up for lost time.

I hope you will be able to forgive me one day. Today I am a mother and I precisely know what you felt every minute you spent in office. I am sure your daughter occupied your thoughts all the time and you were worried if the maid was feeding her, bathing her and keeping a watch on her properly.

Now I realise how brave you were to have come to work every day with a smiling face and perform to your best. Today I feel sad that I created such a fuss about your leaving early. I guess this much of support you deserved from your colleagues.

I remember when my son was a year-old all the paranoia I went through when I got a new maid. By then I had given up my job because I wanted to be at home with him, but when I went to the bathroom while my son was asleep I locked the front door because I feared my new maid, whom I hardly knew, might run away with my sleeping child. Then I thought of you and instantly knew the fears that you locked in your heart every day.

Hope you will be able to forgive me one day.

Amrita

Guest post by Amrita