Abi's Best Friend

My daughter who is 2 years and five months old is very fond of her grandmother. As soon as she wakes up, she runs to the other room looking for her. The other night, when I was breastfeeding her and putting her to sleep, I asked, ‘Are you mummy’s best friend?’ She answered, ‘No, Abi best friend’. I had a very hearty laugh, to which she gave a confused smile. I laughed not because I found it funny. I like the fact that they love each other like mother and child. And I think that they are born in the same family for a reason.

I sometime wonder what they do all day while I am at the office. It is surprising that she doesn’t show any signs of irritation until late evening, despite the failure to sleep during the day. She still needs a sleep in the afternoon, which she usually fails to get. From my experience, she starts getting irritated after 2 p.m. I sometime carry her on my back and make her sleep. But the willingness to be carried depends so much on her mood too. Anyway, my point is that, it is surprising that they have so much to do together. From early morning – my mother gets up around 5 and Dechen doesn’t sleep beyond 6 a.m. – they would sit in the verandah and talk to the pigeons. She sings, ‘Phutu, phuto, tha odo’, which means, ‘pigeon, oh pigeon, come here’. She is very fond of singing. She turns any conversation into a song. Her knack for making up songs keep us amused all day.

Besides such wonderful days, there was a time when she was hurt because her grandmother couldn’t catch her when she played with her by climbing up her back and fell down. Another time, they were lying down in the bed playing and when the notoriety got the better of her, she started kicking and jumping and her kick accidentally landed on my mother’s fragile head (she had a brain operation in 2008 and she has no skull on the left hand side of her head – can’t get the medical term for it). This made her limbs feel dizzying. But it subsided. Whenever they take long to answer the knock, I get worried that she was hurt accidentally and lying unconscious, Dechen not knowing what to do. I am glad that such a thing has not happened. I pray that it will not happen.

I want my daughter and her best friend to have the best of time together. I know she learns a lot from her. She already counts 1-4 in Sharchop. She goes, ‘thur, niktsing, sam,..’. All this kind of enchants me. During a phone conversation with my sister, she asked me if Dechen stays well with her grandma. When I told her how much they are fond of each other, I was told that my mother during her younger days had the ability to console any notorious child. Am I not blessed to have a mother, who is not only my best friend, but my daughter’s too?

Despite the feeling of being blessed, I do feel guilty that she now has to look after my daughter, thus compromising her time to go for Kora. But I think the only right thing I can do is to be kind, and thus have an open heart.