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

Unposted Letters : To someone I knew years ago…

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.

To someone I knew years ago…

You pretended to be my friend and to be on my side. But you truly never were!

How naive of me to believe that we, who had nothing in common…not even a song or book we both liked would go on to become life buddies and best friends forever. When I cried, you patted and hugged me but what you were doing is making notes to share with your “other” friends over your Friday drinks. Why couldn’t I ever see through all that? When I replay old scenes doing a slow motion rewind, I realize that there were clear signs which told me to move on and find a new friend. But I did not!

Today, I am much older, it’s been over a decade and a half and we have gone our separate ways. I choose my  friends wisely and these friends and I have stuck with each other during personal moments of grief and in happier times.

I see you on social media, having fun, posting updates and with close to 1000 friends to boast of. It doesn’t bother me that you have not dropped me a line but it does bother me that you laughed at my expense, had conversations poking fun at me and today there is not a hint of recognition when we bumped into each other at the coffee shop?!

 Anyway, I am going to add this so called friendship to my list of experiences that I have collected over the last three decades. There is a lesson that I will teach my young daughter which can be applied to many areas of life and I learnt these life lessons from a friendship (?).

Don’t be afraid to make the hard decisions and don’t beat yourself up…we all live and learn…

– From a more mature human being…

Guest post writer : Aarti Iyer at http://flyingbubbles.wordpress.com/

a revisit to the land of FAIRY TALES

A few days back, my mother referred to herself as fairy godmother. While we notorious kids laughed at her, there was a pinch on truth in what she said.

Fairy tales. We have all heard them. But when I started writing this post, I could not list more than 4-5 I remembered. My list was:

1. Snow white  and the seven Dwarfs

2. Aladdin

3. Red Riding Hood

4. Cinderella

5. Rapunzel

When I hit the Google, I found a huge list of fairy tales. So I could fish for a dozen more fairy tales- the I have heard before sleeping at night. I loved those tales, all of them. The idea of happy ending lingered on even after the tender years of childhood. Thanks to my mom, and her reference to herself 😉

So as a tribute to her, I made a list of qualities of the Fairy Godmother, as told by Disney. And compared with my mom 😉

• Personality :

1. Sweet – Check
2. Kind – Check
3. Motherly – Check
4. A bit absent-minded – Check

• Appearance :

1. Short – Check (she is the shortest in the family)
2. Obese – Check (not really – but we love to call her that)
3. Elderly – Check 
4. White hair – Check (a few only actually)
5. Aqua robe with pink inside hood, large lavender bow on the front – hahahahaha NO

• Occupation : Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother (in retrospect, she does that for a living)
• Goal : To help Cinderella , To look after Cinderella (Oh, she does that all day long)

Thanks to her, I re-visited my sweet memories. The blissful age of going to sleep without tension of tomorrow. The splendid age of no worries and a belief in perfect endings. The fun age to compare ourselves to the protagonist fairy 😉

Oh, well, that fun age isn’t gone I feel. I mean, aren’t a few of us still waiting for our prince charming 😉

**

Interesting links :

a fairy tale on YouTube 😀

Fairy God Mother on Twitter 😉

a cute website on FairyGod Mother 

***

# thanks to the illustrations which I found here

smile at strangers : probably make their day better

Many a times it has happened, my heart was breaking inside and I had to show no emotions on the outside. I know how difficult it is, and I have (believe me or not) been in such situations way too much.

What pulls me along on such a day, is a reason or excuse to smile. Absolute stranger, who was probably thinking about someone else and smiling, or was remembering a sweet memory and smiling, or talking to someone on phone and smiling. But somehow ended up smiling at me, and out courtesy and reflex, I smile back.

This doesn’t happen often, but when it does, momentarily I forget the pain inside me and its easier to pretend that nothing is wrong with me today.

Blame my over thinking nature, this occurrence and phenomenon struck to me only after I sat and thought at the end of the day, how come it dint go THAT bad. And the reason would be simple.

Some stranger made me smile!