My Wonderland.

Alice got lost in wonderland.

I am Alice. I got lost in the Library. Today, I checked into my neighborhood library after two months.

Oh what all I missed!

But you know? Parenting/Motherhood changes a person a lot. From the inside.

As I spent more than 40 minutes strolling my the children’s reading shelves, I just wanted to bring my kids here, or take every interesting knowledge-filled book and give them to read.

Read is a small word. It is as good as actually travelling into another dimension altogether.

I want my kids to discover the planets, the stars, the solar system, the earth, the forests and their animals, types of people around the world. I want them to discover these things the way my dad introduced them to me. Through big, thick, colorful books and encyclopedias.

I can still recall the small of each of those books, the wonder filled in my eyes as I read about and looked at each new thing in this big wide world I did not know about.

Oh what a journey it has been! I cannot carry a lot of books. Hence, I had to sadly, filter out some of them and take only some.

The library being a 15 – 20 minute walk from home is now a heavy huge task for me given the Canadian snow and weather and my own heavy condition.

When people search for homes, they look out for convenience of things and stores around them. Now, the Library is on the top of my list. It is truly a refuge. A refuge from wasteful stuff I scroll aimlessly on Instagram search and Facebook scrolling.

There is so much to learn. So much to read. So much to share the reading fantasy with the kids. I really pray if not all, at least one of my kids takes on my passion for reading the way I do. (And, eventually, that will become my most favorite child :] ).

People say a lot about Islam. Muslim think about Islam from various perspectives. The one first thing that endeared me was the very first revelation. The very first word, that came down from the heavens to mankind. The very, very very first word.

“IQRA…..IQRA BISMI RABBI KALLAZI KHALAQ.”

This translates to: Read!  Read In the Name of your Lord, Who has created (all that exists).

That is the first thing asked of mankind. To read. About everything the Great Lord has created. Of every thing, around and inside. In our minds and in the world that we can touch and feel and smell.

Wow. If I could get another lifetime, I would just want to read. Just read…

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Defining Life.

I am tired of defining life.

My son’s ear tube surgery went well. Amidst my emotional torment, I heartbreakingly admitted my tiny son in a hospital, dressed him in a hospital gown and watched him walk into an operation theater. Alone. I had tears, but I wiped them myself. I had to be strong. For my own self. I had to be strong. Then he came out. And walked home that evening like nothing happened. I was grateful to God for that.

There are a lot of moments I am grateful to God for.

But all those moments are sandwiched between such pathetic struggles and sorrow, I cant explain.

I am stuck. I hate being stuck. When I came to Canada, I thought a new leaf had turned over in my life. But no. Its just a new routine. New wonderful location. Even more tempting opportunities to achieve my dreams.

But no, life is not going to give them to me. Not so soon. I am still having to be stuck in this fucked up sinkhole. I thought I was done. But no, I have another huge time to spend watching my life spazm me multiple times while I watch helplessly as it shall continue to do so.

My blog posts, earlier my poetry, is a sad tyrade of feelings. Always been the same.

There is so much to do. There is so much I want to do. I have bound myself with my own stupid restrictions and fears and the moment time slips out life is out there with a whiplash. It smacks me right and left so hard, I collapse in my own puddle.

Tomorrow I celebrate 7 years of marriage. If there is one thing I would regret it is this:

Be like a diamond that is found very rare.

Not like a stone that is found everywhere.

I thought I was being a diamond. I thought what I was doing and how I was being was like a diamond.

Stone? Heck I wasn’t even being a tangible thing. I was being like water.

If there is one thing I would tell my 22 year old self that day that many years ago, I would have said to be myself.

I was proud of who I was then. I was sure of every step I took. I always knew what I was doing, why I was doing and what I was getting into.

Now, I lost myself. In this vast abyss of emptiness, in my struggle to find my true self, I am lost.

I want to take apart my life and join it back differently. I need to be brave and stop this overthinking. I need to stop over deciding.

There are some things I do that I feel are Holy or worthy or benefitial. Maybe I need to look at life at a different angle.

When I look at my sister, I admire her. She strongly stands up for what she wants and she gets it. She stays firm and breaks down for no one. When I look at me, I am a bunch of excuses. Why? Her question is always so right, it pokes me. She asks me why am I such a people pleaser? She asks me what am I doing to myself?

I don’t have an answer. Just another bunch of sorry excuses that I hide behind.

I am still harsh on my daughter. I am watching myself mess up my relation with her. With the new baby coming around the corner, I don’t know how worse it is going to get. I don’t know how my relation with my son will turn out to be.

As I struggle with this emotional madness inside my head, I am slowly watching my life spiralling out of control. Everything. I have just three more months of waiting. Then a whole new wave of whatever life is going to hand out to me will be hitting me.

I am unprepared. Totally unprepared. For the tsunami about to hit me. My strength keeps buckling beneath me. And I give myself fake hopes. Its the only thing that has kept me on.

Midway…

How do you love halfway?

How do you meet halfway?

I don’t know how to. I don’t know how to love at times and at times to be aloof.

How do you not love completely?

Is that another feeling that I am unaware of? Does it have another name? The feeling? That you can express emotions of affection with utmost sincerity and enjoy the moments like there is no tomorrow, and then suddenly, you think of all the other people in the world, and you can’t see me in the infront?

What is that called?

Role-playing.

You called it role-playing. Thank you William Shakespeare for your f***king poem about the “”World being a stage and all the people are players/actors/role-players””. Really?

Maybe this rotten guy never met anyone or himself never lived with full blown emotion called LIFE.

In true LIFE, you don’t pretend, you don’t mould, you don’t act. Life is NATURAL.

Love, excitement, happiness, sadness, anger, betrayal, satisfaction, enjoyment, peace. None of these can be faked. Not for long. I don’t know any way how to pretend these emotions.

But you know the amazing thing about life? Its goal is to teach you everything you DON’T know.

How I wish I did not know real feelings. So life would show me those.

Instead I know real feelings. So now life is teaching me what all I don’t know. I don’t know how to be hurt but still stay I am okay. I don’t know how to be ill and pretend I am healthy. I don’t know how to love someone or something with all my heart but hide all of it. I don’t know how to not yell with happiness or joy. I don’t know how not to let my people around me know every joy or sorrow I go through. I did not know how to run life and separate emotions and feelings from it.

But now, I almost learnt it all. I am a robot now. You can see me in my eyes and see me smile but you can not know, you can never know my deep pain or tears falling from my eyes. You can see me walk with poise in moments when my soul is screeching with joy. You can see me strong yet you can never see the shards of brokenness within.

I can walk through any of you and you won’t ever feel it.

Piece by piece, I am watching me shed the layers of strength and abilities that had taken me these many years to build. I don’t know if I am actually destroying myself. Or if I am shedding the old me to build a new me. I just don’t know.

Strangely, there is no confusion. No fog. Everything is crystal clear to me now. I thought clarity would scare me. It did not. It brought back my focus. It made see the shades of everything and everyone I was refusing to see through my blindfold.

I am growing. In age and in heart. My heart is no longer a huge chamber that I thought it was. Maybe it really was. A place where I thought I could keep all those I love.

All I ever thought about was love. All these years. Is love enough? asks every actor and actress in every movie I see. It never meant much to me until now. As I hit 30 in a couple of years, I realize just for running after Love, I destroyed, with my own two hands and my very own mind and head and heart, everything else that I held dear. All my passions, dreams, things, ambitions everything. Everything. The only thing I held on to was love.

And now that the word is just a facade, a temporary youth feeling, as it fades away like the clearing fog, I am now just barren. Completely.

Who does this to themselves? Who goes so immersed in a weird imaginable fantasy land for years together. Undoing everything they stood for. Fools like me.

Fools. Poets.

There was a section of the world, there is even now, that abhors poetry and poets. Calls them mad people and lost wanderers.

My tears run dry. Why yes. Lost.

And now the age old feeling that everyone talks about, the one about turning back time and undoing some things. Yes. I always thought I would never regret. I always always believed I was very conscious when I was doing all this, I thought I was sure. I thought there would never be a time that I would want to undo what all I did.

I was so sure.

Why was I so sure? Why? My brain asks my heart, my heart asks my soul, my soul asks my brain. The famous never ending circle of blame and why’s.

*sigh*. My problem? I know the solutions to all my problem. Always after I made the problem myself for myself.

Another rising. Another learning.  Another decade…….

Milestones…

If I had a personal mountain where I could put up a flag at each victory, at each achievement, at each milestone, I would put one up today.

Something went whacky and my son developed a hearing problem two months ago. It got so bad he couldn’t hear his dad calling his name more than a dozen time while sitting right beside him.

My son did not know a word of English. The first month at school and thereafter, I saw him sitting on a bench by himself. Alone. I was afraid loneliness would befriend him too.

He began mumbling and losing home language words too.

I had to shout at him. 10 times. Then when he would finally hear me and look at me, he would be horrified to see me so anxious and yelling at him.

Today, he has gotten better. He can hear a little better. And speak some more words.

Its God’s greatest blessing. The happy heart of a mother. A feeling you may tell everyone in your life, but no one can feel it like you do.

I saw him today at school. At home time. It felt elationd beyond cloud 9 to see my baby son talk to other kids. Kids that don’t look like him. Or speak like him. But they are now his friends. I feel a proud mama, walking home with my son, half a dozen kids waving him goodbye and yelling out his name. And him waving them bye!

It warms my heart, to finally see his teachers happy when he turns up to school in the morning. His cute goomoning to his teacher. And her big cute smile. Totally heartwarming.

Thank you God. For opening my eyes. For making me see the happiness around me. For noticing milestones. For overlooking things I don’t have. I thought I would die. I would die being ungrateful. I thought I would bleed out and die without having to bow my head on the ground.

Thank you God for letting me live. For saving me grace. For being merciful. For shining light upon me so I can see better.

Thank you God for making me a Phoenix. Thank you for letting me rise up each time, each time I kick myself off a mountain.

Unthankful

You know what happens when one gets above and beyond their need, one sometimes forgets to be thankful. One forgets to be grateful.

And then this happens. Time gives you time. Guilt pokes you. And for impertinent fools like me blessings then become the biggest challenges of my life.

It is not of my nature to be ungrateful. But I did. I forgot to be thankful. I forgot to acknowledge my blessings.

And now, I have become a ticking disaster. Every thing that was my blessing is slipping from beneath my feet. And the good news I got?

It became my nightmare.

As I walked home from the subway, in this very chilly windy weather, I felt like the fallen leaves. The faded autumn.

I was clearly an ass. I had a wonderful summer. A wonderful early autumn. I got what I yearned for. Everything..and even more. And like a fully bummed ass, like a stoned fool, I let time pass. Being grumpy about the things not in my hands or what I don’t have.

So now, I am paying for my mistakes. For being unthankful. It’s easy to make up to man. But to God?

How do you tell God you are sorry? How do you tell God that you forgot to pray. Or that you remembered to pray each time but it off, binge watching some stuff that would never do any good anyway.

I had came here with so many hopes and dreams. And now, I don’t know.

But then no. I am a phoenix. I rise from my own dust. I shall plead with God. To forgive me. For not Thanking Him. For not remembering him for this unbounded favor. I have had a little difficult life. But now when it got easier and fun, I forgot God,

We get so easily hurt by our dear ones when they forget us. We are so dear to God. Why was I so lazy?

Just like the spring, I have to come back, To give Thanks again. To pray again. To be grateful again…..

 

Unfixable

There’s a wrist watch in my house. It belongs to my hubby. Pretty cool watch. Digital and all.

Somehow someday, an alarm got set on it. It would ring everyday at around 9 am. Annoying time to ring.

We fidgeted around with it trying to shut it. The alarm.

We couldn’t. All we could is change the alarm time, somehow to a random 11:45 pm.

Thereafter we couldn’t do anything about it. No matter what button we pressed, neither the alarm time budged. Nor did the alarm shut.

So what did we do?

Learnt to live around the beep beep.

We race to bed each day. If we got to hear the alarm, we’re late to sleep.

If no alarm heard, perfect early night.

I guess some problems in life are as permanent as our wrist watch with an unfixable alarm. We need to learn to live around problems that cant be fixed by us.

Somehow they stop looking like problems. But milestones of progress….

Movie Review..”Secret Superstar”.

So for the past 6 months, I have watched a lot of movies and Dramas.

While some of them were really awesome and I really wanted to blog about some of them, nothing compelled me to write about as much as today’s movie did.

This world is such a facade. People give out so many opinions and sometimes the opinions sound so real and everyone believes in them. More than the actual thing.

There was a muslim girl band from Kashmir that was banned from singing. Those were girls in Hijab and were trying to sing. They were trying to break the norm and rules. But they were silenced.

A few months later, a movie was released titled Secret Superstar. This movie was distributed or I should say sensationalised in the lines of the Kashmir incident. The lead girl sings hidden in a Hijab.

False.

That is not even close to what the story is about.

I am a big fan of movies that star Amir Khan. That is because each of his movies has a strong impact on the viewers and they are not silly chummy romantic bandwagon. They are always laced with emotion and fragrant with a message.

Such is the secret superstar. It has everything to do with a Mother’s level of sacrifice and strength for her children. The wall of resilience and the window to the open skies.

This story has nothing to actually do about singing. Shallow is the public who thought this was about a girl not being allowed to sing so she sang secretly and then won the award.

This is about a mother who fought with the society to give birth to a girl child. A mother who withstood physical torture but protected her children from everything.

A mother who recognised her child’s abilities and nurtured them. Never let the cruel world stomp down on the dreams of her children.

The West may not understand. But to come from an Asian household where you are a girlchild, and you are talented, you would understand. You have take your dreams and make chutney out of it. You are supposed to study like a normal girl, no matter you top the class or win a medal or prize or anything. You study, then you marry, then you birth children, then you make them study, make them marry, grow old and die. The end. That’s an Asian girl’s life summarised.

Not every household is like that though. Take Sania Mirza for example. The gorgeous talented super duper Tennis star. Her parents saw her talent, her dreams and cheered her on.

Just like this girl Insiya in the movie. Her mother sells her only Gold Necklace to buy a laptop so her daughter can record her songs on youtube. Just so that the cruel barbarian dad doesn’t break her guitar because he thinks its just a wasteful teenage phase of his daughter where she should have been studying instead, her mother gives her the idea of a secret superstar.

Beyond all odds, she stands up for her daughter, realising that sometimes standing up for yourself and your dreams is very important because a human isn’t a machine and God doesn’t give ambitious dreams to everyone. Those who get this God gift, must know that they are chosen and they must follow it. Fight the world if you are convinced you are chosen. Fight the world if you know you can fly. Everyone laughed at Einstein and every other big guy and girl of this universe. But years later their hardwork paid off. We write essays on their work from school age and we dress up like them. Why?

Because they knew they had a dream, a talent. They protected it, they fought for it.

Salute to you Amir Khan. Extremely fine storyline, concept. Although your character in the movie was just a little breeze, the theme of the movie is a Blockbuster.

Mother.

The beginning of life. The first touch. The first face. The first voice. Everything is Mother.

It is not easy being a mother. Constantly feeling guilty that you aren’t good enough. The society holds the most special spices to sprinkle at a struggling mother. Still she never bends. Wiping her tears away, she will roll away at the kitchen, or type away in the office, or drive, or teach, or write or do anything. Anything she can so that her children are strong, they have everything and become someone great.

We need to love our mothers more. They aren’t wrong. They are just doing their utmost best.

Its not simply said that Paradise lies beneath the feet of the Mother.

It should be there. At the Mother’s feet.

Meri pyarii ammiii….