“Where did this fear start, this indelible urge to hold on with such force our fingernails threatened to fall off?” A reflection on motherhood that holds within it the hard truth that nothing last forever…
by: Saroj Kunnakkat
I remember when my daughter was just over a year old. Her hair was in long pigtails, their ends jagged, seeming to erupt from her temples like inky fountains. In her small hands — stubbornly enrobed in baby fat — she held magnet tiles which she attempted to assemble. I sat alongside her on the playmat in the middle of our living room in our old Cleveland home. As I watched her tinker around, I built a house out of the remaining magnet tiles, partly to foster parallel play in her, and partly because it was an excuse for me to tap into the world of play I hadn’t known in years if not decades. The house I built was decidedly commonplace with its symmetric windows and sloping roof, like a child’s drawing of a house. With a fluidity that belied her one year, my daughter suddenly stood up and smashed my house to its foundation. It was a lesson in impermanence I had been taught repeatedly since her birth.
Nothing lasts forever.
“I remember when my daughter was her age,” a man once told me as I was walking around the nearby elementary school track with her not long after. He was thin, as though constructed out of chicken wire, and had been doing laps on the track when he saw us together.
“How old is she now?” I had asked him.
He smiled in the way people do when nostalgia blends with wistfulness. “Twenty-one.” He looked at my daughter, reaching back into his own past and fashioning his daughter out of snippets of memories from when she barely grazed his thigh. “Enjoy these moments, they don’t last.”
Every time I see more of my daughter’s ankles peeking out of the slacks and fleece bottoms we had bought just months earlier, I weep. Every erupting tooth and every word that becomes ensnared in them is another step away from the squalling, toothless newborn who fit perfectly in my arms. But that energy, that hunger for the world, and the way it gets distilled into personality, judgment, and attitude, it’s a ride I’ve come to relish and resent in equal measures. The tower gets built higher until it is smashed, only to be rebuilt again with additional, new tiles.
Before my daughter was born, I held on to things with a tenacity and desire that I realize now was misplaced. They were tangible: smooth papers full of notes, and frayed clothing with threads standing out like tendrils. They were relationships and the rose-colored glasses through which I viewed them. Like anchors around my legs they sat and I dragged them miles and miles as my legs bowed and the shackles ate into my skin.
Where did this fear start, this indelible urge to hold on with such force our fingernails threatened to fall off? As babies, our grasp on permanence only manifests months in, sometime after rolling over and and around the time they are able to sit up unassisted. With the world in full view, we can take stock of it. Impermanence is always presented in terms of rotting carcasses or changing seasons, but maybe it’s when we watch our loved ones first fade out of view down the hall or out the door that our grip on the here and now first begins to tighten.
Impermanence is a final breath and a last farewell we didn’t know was coming. Nothing lasts forever.
I watch myself in the mirror, the gray hairs multiplying before my eyes. I remember my mother telling me stories from when I was a baby. I was only a few months old when she took me to India. I was barely able to hold my head up but in possession of my very own passport. I was held firmly on her hip as she would walk down the narrow streets, and at four months, I had a full head of hair.
“Jet-black myr,” passers-by would reportedly say, using the Malayalam and Tamil word for hair.
“Amma, your hair is black like mine,” my daughter would say years later.
“Thank you,” I remember saying, secretly relieved.
“With some white,” she added.
A sigh as I close my eyes. Nothing lasts forever.
I have put clothes aside for donation, the ones I clung to thinking “style is a cycle” and “those five pounds are just months away.” The scrawled hand-written notes from classes whose classrooms I can’t recall have long since been recycled. Some shackles have been released. My daughter and I still play with magnet tiles, and in the two years that have passed since she was gifted her first set, we have shifted cities and her collection of tiles has nearly doubled. Her hair has been through a handful of visits to the children’s salon, and now it sits tamed, the edges just grazing her small shoulders. I watch her, stacking and angling pieces, willing towers and turrets into existence with a speed and ease that at times is dizzying. Her vision soars along with her towers until the foundation shudders from the burden, sending pieces tumbling.
“No! Why are you doing that?” she cries to the heaps of magnet tiles, pieces scattered around the room.
I gather her to me. She no longer carries the sweet smell from her early newborn days, so much like sugar cooking on stovetop. “Don’t worry,” I tell her, “We can build a new one.”
She considers her surroundings, the chaos, and as her eyes widen, I see her weaving plans together. She detaches herself from me and sets to work on a new creation. It will last as long as it needs to.
Saroj Kunnakkat is a neurologist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. She has been previously published in Literary Hub, Vogue India, and The Razor Literary Magazine. When she is not in the clinic or on the wards, she is spending time with her husband and young daughter.
