Year Six - Time Flies
Raising Lila while managing two careers and trying to have some semblance of kinship and culture makes time fly. My days can be long sometimes, but the years tend to stack up and go by so quickly. It's hard to believe that it's six years ago today since Mom passed.
Lila and I started a nightly ritual a few years ago. We read a book together and then turn off the light, and I pick a memory I have of Mom and create a story around it.
It always starts with "Once upon a time in a land far, far away called Bombay, there lived a little girl called Minnie." These stories make me smile as I ponder through the many roles my mom played. She was a great sister, daughter, wife, friend, aunt, and overall human who had her own life's purpose, and she illuminated all of those she touched.
Over the years, I have extended our nightly ritual to add more family and friends that come with their subplots, and she loves to guess who the person is, and she chuckles with such glee that she has all of these people in her life.
With the quarantine, Lila has recently used kids messenger, calling Dad and asking him stories about his childhood. I can hear my dad telling her stories from the other room that even I haven't heard.
After every story, Lila finds something in common with the person in the story, and it has made me wonder if this is how to nurture temper nature. I wonder if storytelling is how we start to uncover how we fit into a larger picture, whether it's our families or discovering ourselves in the grander scheme.
So many of the stories I tell Lila have been passed down to me by Mom. She was the keeper of stories in both the Bhalakia and Shah families, and she passed her reflections and thoughts on to me. We never ran out of things to tell each other. As I think about the stories every night, it's nice to dip into that well and find a never-ending storyline stretching back three generations.
I see so many of these memories in a new light by retelling them. The struggles or triumphs will reveal themselves to me. There were so many cautionary tales about the unwritten rules about etiquette and expectations.
Having been through many life stages, I deeply understand people's love, duty, honor, and family choices. All of the stories that stayed alive with her are ones that touched her or taught her something she had never imagined.
If I can say one thing about my mom, she never had to go far to have an abundant life. I was lucky to have seen up close and personal her evolution as she went through life. When I was young, I was her shadow and followed her everywhere she went. This turned into writing letters and sharing phone calls when I got older.
In many ways, she and I were very different. In the same way, Lila and I are very different. I was lucky that she was a very accepting parent of the differences, and even though we struggled with some of those, we never let those differences drive a wedge between us.
As we continued to share our stories about the people around us, she reminded me that I could choose the future I wanted for myself but helped me imagine the consequences. She taught me the art of weighing the pros and cons and used her life lessons to reframe my chosen unknown path.
Over the years, I have realized I am a lot more like her, so here she is, shaping me from the beyond. She has left me with a legacy of being able to share in the human experience through good times and bad, through the mundane and the magical. Her superpower was finding a way to connect to somebody else, no matter how small a role they played in her life.
Mom's untimely death for me has freed me from the things that drove me - ambition, envy, worry about an imagined future, and rage against the "systems." Somewhere along the way, the utility of those drivers has fallen to the wayside.
I have started to live every day like it is my last and think about the stories Lila is watching and creating as she sees me go through life. The broader questions about purpose will reveal themselves with time, and I hope that every single day I can prioritize the people in my life in all of my spheres, whether it's family, work, or friendships.
I am blessed to have the richness of connections that I do, and I hope to continue serving you if life lets us.
