Magic spoon!

Last night I was laying down in my bed trying to sleep off a migraine attack. Yaya made coffee for me and came to my room while stirring the coffee with a metal spoon. I don’t know if I am the only one, but when I have migraine, every little noise is exacerbated ! The clanking sound was going on in my head as if it is the sound when the space shuttle takes off!. I was tempted to scream, but that would have made my head ache even worst!
She came and sat next to me.
I took the coffee cup from her before she spilled the whole thing on my bed.
“mom” she whispered
“hmm” I answered.
“Do you remember my magic spoon?” She whispered again.
“hmm” I whispered.
“Mom” She called softly again. It was the kind of a call that you know your child wants to tell you something.
I opened my eyes with great difficulty and looked at my beautiful daughter.
She grinned when she saw me looking and told me something I hoped I would hear one day.
She told me
“mom, do you remember the time we went to Langkawi? You know that is one of my best memories?”

She gave me a kiss and took the empty cup to the kitchen. ( and I can bet my last dollar that she wouldn’t have rinsed the cup, but would have left it in the sink for me to wash later!)
And I remembered the magic spoon..
Yaya and I went to Langkawi when she was 16 months old. I was expecting my son then and wasn’t allowed to fly. So I took the overnight train from KL to Arau, took a cab from the station to the Jetty and then took a ferry from the Jetty to Langkawi.
I did doubt my sanity then because the journey was a nightmare. She didn’t sleep at all during the train trip and I was exhausted by the time the train reached Arau.
Apart from my back pack and the baby bag, I also carried a cooler box filled with nutrigen..that too strawberry flavoured ones.
When I stopped breast feeding Yaya, she decided not to drink milk or water. Only nutrigen ( yogurt flavoured drink).
If it happened now, I would have let her starve ! cause I now know  that no child would starve to death on their own volition! But at that time, I became a mother after waiting so long and I was suffering from the ‘guilt’ of not doing enough !! If she was going to drink only the strawberry flavoured nutrigen, then that is what I was going to provide ! And I didn’t want to take a chance of not finding the strawberry flavoured ones in Langkawi.
We stayed in Langkawi for a week. Each morning Yaya and I would go to the beach and make sand castles. Then when she was hungry, we came back to our chalet, I made maggi mee for both of us. ( Yeah, I know,, what kind of a mother eh, feeding her child such unhealthy food!). That time, the maggi mee came with a free spoon that changes the colour when you dip in to hot water. Our magic spoon.
She had a small cup and I zapped the water for a few seconds in the microwave, she stirred it with her magic spoon and made innumerable cups of (pretend)coffee for me. Each time we pretended to be a different character from all the story books we read and  sat outside on the balcony and played with the magic spoon for hours.
My child doesn’t remember the train,taxi,ferry trip.
She doesn’t even remember her loving, kind, caring mother carrying a cooler filled to the brim with strawberry flavoured nutrigen!
But she remembers the magic spoon.
And to think that all the toys I spend money to buy didn’t create any special memories for her..a free plastic spoon that came with a packet of noodles is remembered fondly..

And just in case you think that I was crazy for travelling on a train etc with a toddler, there were people for whom such a trip was the only option!
When I was in India, during one of my ‘famous’ train trips, I travelled on the Kashmir Kanyakumari train ( not the full stretch) and met a Malayalee mother who was travelling to Kashmir with her two daughters aged 2 years and 3 months respectively. Her husband was an officer in the Indian Air force and has been posted to Kashmir.She had come home to Kerala for the delivery and was going back to Kashmir to be with her husband.   Imagine having to travel on a train alone with two kids, that too on a journey that takes more than 7 days!… time before diapers..bottled water..plastic feeding bottles..

2 thoughts on “Magic spoon!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *