Saturday, March 8, 2008

the power of solitude...

All is quiet around me now. There's a fridge hum, the sound of a click ticking, tib-tab-dib-dibble of a pair of five-toed beasts dancing away at the keyboard. We've got guests at home - my sis and b-i-l from LA, tomorrow three other family members come. All in time for Megha's first birthday.

Her growth is so tied up with my own. I'm more patient, more forgiving of noise now. There used to be a time when my house had no working clocks because the tick-tick-tick drove me crazy. If the floorboards in the apartment above creaked, I would wake up and have trouble going back. Now that I have M in my life, I can take all this and more - even 10 minutes of incessant crying.

I've become everything that I didn't want to become - a bragger of my child's achievements, a worried mom following her every move with my eyes. I take pleasure in the soothing refrains of childhood poems, the logic and simplicity of numbers 1-10. With her I learn that a TV remote held to my ears is really a telephone. And that small as she is, she relates better to 'little' people than adults, quite like the subconscious way I scan unknown crowds - virtual and real - for brown faces/experiences. Like I go [i]Desi[/i], she probably goes Baby! inside her head.

In maybe ten minutes they all - my west coast dwelling sis and my daughter - will be up from their naps. We will return to enjoying the rest of our day - maybe a trip to a nearby beach, maybe some mall hopping, calorie-conscious-free eating at least till the weekend. See you in a few!

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