Friday, December 26, 2008

Mithi at the Age of 8 Months


why i need to write about my life with mithi

it's not that i always wanted to tell everybody about our lives together..it's not an extraordinary life at all..it's just that life has given us a challenge and we are doing what we think is right and of course what our resources allow us to....i mean to say, when resources are limited in the material sense, that's visible, but when our intellectual resource is limiting....it lames us, and it blinds us too.
here i am trying to tell, how we are trying to overcome those limitations of life, which become all the more profound when life puts up challenges before you............one after the other........

many times people have told me that i take very good care of mithi,and also that, not many parents can do that.....this makes me wonder,is it so uncommon to take good care of a useless offspring [believe me i am choking right now,she is not useless for me at all, but nobody seems to understand] a vegetable child, as many people call her.................the truth for me is.........she is my daughter and she loves me...what more a mother can ask for.
all the doctors we have seen for her, have tried to counsel me, though sometimes reluctantly, to detach myself from her, some other people too have advised me so............i could not..........mostly because i didn't feel the need to do so.

how could i be away from her when she needed me,how could i ignore when she needed all that nursing and caring.............up to the age of two years, when she was such an adorable and loving child, she had given me so much of joy ,happiness and above all, contentment of being a mother, that detachment was completely out of question...............i had to learn to deal with it..........it was not easy, i was in denial of the situation for a short period of time....asking myself again and again,what wrong had i done to deserve this....and she might have done to suffer like that.

i was strong enough to learn fast, mithi always cooperated in whatever way she could, as i saw that even when she could not talk,she could under stand me, and though her reflexes were not under her control, she could connect with me in a strange manner. but somewhere i think, i could not convince this to the people around me, i never tried though, i am an absolute eccentric for them.....at the same time i feel very lucky to have a husband like arvind [ i am choking again, strange...] who is completely in tune with my eccentricity. what more i need to say about him.
he loves mithi so much that he is a different person now, on an emotional level i know he is not mentally as strong as me.........he cannot see her in pain and sometimes does not want to see her when she is in extreme physical discomfort, but he compensates this weakness in other ways.........and worth telling, he is learning to face all this pain faster than me now....when i get to a low, he takes over.

still i have not made it clear why i want to write all this.........i have really seen many such children being neglected by their parents or other people...i know most of the time it is unintentional..i was talking of intellectual limitations [ i need a better term for this] which can make us lame .....and blind.....insensitive..........................i had to overcome all this too.................it is very easy to fall prey to self pity.......the next step is .....we try to escape from the situation and do something else to distract [this is when most of the females become cleanliness freaks,upto the level of an obsessive compulsive disorder] , i also started keepin myself busy in cleaning , cooking[it got so obsessive that i started cooking huge amounts of food which evetually got wasted] and other mechanical things to keep my mind away from this.....................at that time i was in a small town in jharkhand, dhanbad, where my husband was posted. ..........as no good advice of any kind was available in that place,i had to analise myself, what i am doing..............doing all this after mithi's requirements ,was physically very demanding and i became very irritable too [though i had a very good full time maid then]...........soon i understood where my energies need to be directed.....................that is what i want to tell everybody.........it's all about making peace with the situation............otherwise it goes on into a whirwind of sorts.............i have seen people becoming insane.

i want to write more about it and would do it soon as i get some more time...mithi has got up.......got to go.