Family and imperfection

I cannot tell you how fun it is to be a mother. But, I also cannot tell you how frustrating it is sometimes. If you are laughing your heart out with your toddler this moment, next moment you are fighting your heart out in how not to shout at him/her. Once you are a mother, each moment of your life is a mixture of different emotions. But on a positive note, the positive emotions almost always win the negative ones.

One day, I reached home from my office to find that the carpet in the sitting room had three big holes and the heater was all burned out and black. I was to learn that my three year old daughter, Dechen, burned the candle (a big rectangle shaped candle) on the heater. She imitated cooking food. She told me that she burned a cup, but I could not really figure out. I didn’t understand that there would be no trace left of it. Her words were, “I put a cup on the heater. Now there is no cup to cook food in”. When I asked my 71 year old mother who looks after her in my absence during office hours, she didn’t think it was a cup. But she also didn’t know that it was the candle that was burnt.

My mother was washing her clothes (which she does despite our repeated request not to). When it started producing so much smoke, Dechen went to her grandma saying, “heater is producing so much smoke”, (heater gai mugu shona, is what she said as my mother later narrated to me).

Imagining that moment of chaos and fear of them had me turned upside down. My heart leapt at the thought of what it would have been like if Dechen put her hands into the hot, melting candle, or worse yet, causing a fire on the house. But we have been lucky so far. You always have such near escape of heart attacks and accidents with children.

The need to sweep the floor more than five times a day, or the delay that is caused in your schedule because just when you are about to leave, he/she has something you want to do for them is needless to speak. Or when you have got into the bed and he/she is about to fall asleep, you will have to wake up because there is just something that he/she needs.

But let me tell you, it is all okay, because at the end of day, as you watch him/her sleeping peacefully next to you, there is nothing you would want to change. It is at that moment that you see all your frustrations falling apart, all your anger forgotten, and all mischiefs forgiven. If you ask me, “if you had the chance, what would you change in your life,” I would say, there is none. I would want my life to be exactly the way it is now. I know it is imperfect, but that is the beauty of it.

Note* The motivation for this article came from the link Tashi Lhamo shared on facebook about a story contest on the theme, ‘family and imperfection’. Between the  office works, I took a frail attempt to at least update my blog.