A lot has happened in my life the past few weeks and I am unable to blog about it. Everyday, I open the blog tab on my laptop to update the blog and every single day I ask myself, is this something I want my sisters to know about? And I end up not updating. This blog was a place for me to write whatever is bothering me and I loved the sense of relief it offered me. But now I am just lost.

So, we will leave the bad things out.

The good things

Yaya is home. She came back couple of days ago and my son and his gf came with me to the airport to pick her up. I counted down the hours till her flight landed and the moment I saw her, much as I was happy to see her, I also felt a bit sad.. How many more Christmas do I get to have all my children  home? They are all flying out of the nest and creating their own nest. In 2 years, my youngest will leave home. I can’t imagine a Christmas without my kids. But that is inevitable. I have started to write a list of things I would like to do once the kids leave home. I want to learn to sail a yacht and perhaps spend a year or two at sea.

My son is busy working and his shifts now ends after midnight, which means instead of driving back home which is a 45 minutes drive, he goes to his gf’s house which is 30 minutes away.  I would like to be magnanimous and say that I really don’t mind him spending the night at his gf’s house. But the truth is, I do. I have so little time with him before he leaves for Uni and I want it all.. every single second of the time I have left. I know I sound so irrational. It isn’t that he didn’t spend the last 17 years with me.

That brings us to the Ammai amma role I get to play. I remember the word my grandmothers and other older women in my family used every time a new girl arrived in our family after the marriage. “parishkaram”  I have no idea what would be the ideal English word for it, so I apologize for not translating. The first parishkaram in our house was the toothpaste. My washroom is small and the mirror doesn’t have a decent light. As I am blind as a bat, I use the common washroom (Bigger mirror and better lights) to brush my teeth and to put my makeup on. I have so little time to get ready in the morning and my blood comes to a rolling boil when I look for the toothpaste and not find it. She brushes her teeth while she is taking her shower and leave the paste in the shower. My son has also started to do the same for he thinks it is really cool to brush the teeth while the shower is running. The simple solution would be to have two toothpaste..one for the idiots who use it in the shower and one for the rest of us. But I don’t want to have a two tier household. My house, my rules. Toothpaste on the toothpaste holder next to the sink is where I decided to keep the toothpaste  and it is where I expect to find it. (Don’t I sound like a typical mallu mother in law? I swear all these traits are in our genes)

Couple of days ago, I was at work and I received a text from his gf. The message said ” tell your son, his room is worst than a pigsty”  I knew what brought this up. She bought Brie and crackers to eat and was running late for work. As she was leaving I heard her telling my son to ” please remember to keep the Brie in the fridge ” and my son said “yes, I will do it” She came back three days later to find the Brie rotting on the table and she was pissed.

Should I get offended because she thinks my son is a pig? Nah. My son is messy. If she can make him get his acts together and keep his things clean and tidy, I am all for it.

I know I sound a bit bitchy about my son’s gf. I am not. I adore her. However, I do find the role of an ammai amma a bit hard to play. I wish there was an ammai amma school where I could go and learn few skills.

As for my daughters, I was surprised to see that they do all they can to make my son’s gf a part of their lives. Yaya summed  up her brother’s relationship perfectly. She calls it a microwave relationship. According to her, a relationship is like  Christmas ham in an oven, it gets cooked on a low heat over a very long period of time, till it is done to perfection. According to her, a microwave relationship is the one where no one has the patience  and rush the relationship like cooking food in the microwave.

And that is that

I know I have not been updating the blog. I had a week off and went to do the Bibbulmun track in Western Australia. I am tired and sun burnt, but my soul is at peace.

And today I thought I would write about the minefield my son is traversing at the moment.

Before we go any further, I want to mention that when I was his age, all I ever wanted was someone to love me. I grew up wanting to be loved because no one in my family cared about me. Sometime ago, there was this thing everyone did, write a letter to the 17 year old you. If I did that, I would have told myself, it is ok to look for love, but check first if the guy is worthy of your love and also mind the expiry date of your relationship. When I look back and think of the days I shed tears for the guy who broke my heart, I would tell my old self that I really had a lucky break. There indeed is a guardian angel that kept me safe from living a terrible life with a guy who was not worthy of my love. What I was trying to say was that, when I was young, I was all out to please the guy because all I wanted was to be loved. Clearly I was an idiot.

And now I watch this relationship my son has ,going through various stages.

My son is attending Chemistry bridging class at the moment from 8.30 to 5 pm and after that works from 5.30 to 9,30 pm. He came to pick me up from the airport few days ago in the evening and in order to do that he had to take time off from his  work. He also went to pick up his gf from work and she did an 8 hour shift that day. I was too tired to cook, so we ordered a pizza. After dinner, my son went on to play the xbox (first time in about 8 weeks) and the gf who was exhausted from her work slept off laying down on the couch.

Next morning, I heard this argument where the gf was accusing my son for ‘not paying enough attention to her and ignoring her and  for playing xbox”

I heard my son reply, “i thought you wanted to rest, especially after an 8 hour shift at work”

They argued back and forth and there was no clear winner.

I didn’t say anything because it is not something that concerned me.

But I do know that my son will have tough time if he doesn’t learn what a woman wants.. and I guess this is a good learning experience for him. I just hope he won’t come out as a cynic at the end.