Letting go!

It is that time of my life when I am learning yet another lesson in letting go. I wonder how my little one has grown up so soon! It feels just like yesterday when he had taken his first baby steps. He had faltered and fallen and stood up with determination again. I had beamed with pride and fussed over him at his effort! He had treated me to umpteen such moments, and had given me ample opportunity to marvel at his little efforts; smiling, rolling over, crawling, walking, teething, blabbering, incoherent baby talk and many more. All the while he had been hinting how he was quietly growing up, but none of these prepared me for his next major step. Going To School!

From the day we completed his admission formalities (which was 6 months in ago, yes, 6 months! Haven’t admission procedures become ridiculous? ) I have been fretting and complaining that his age is not quite right, he is too young to go to school and maybe we should have waited one year more. But the school authorities and hubby dearest had managed to convince me how the kid’s age was ideal and how he would be too old for Pre-KG next year.

Since then I have been religiously coaching my son about every aspect of school, the fun he will have there, the friends he will make, the things he will learn, the new things we will buy for him and so on and so forth! My little one has never left me for a minute and I was very worried whether he would leave me and go to school. Hubby dearest has looked on with amusement at my non- stop chatter about his schooling and has more than once remarked that he wondered if I was preparing the child or myself for the separation! Maybe he was partly or even wholly right! I was perhaps preparing myself for the separation. Because as much as it was true that he had never left me for a minute, it was true the other way round too.

As we went through every step of the preparation, buying of new uniforms, shoes, bag, books, etc, my heart grew restless with worrying continually over him. And as for the man of the hour, my little hero, he would nod his head and say “No!” when anyone asked him if he would go to school. Fears multiplied manifold, I could not sleep the whole week before school opened for pre-KG!

My dad recounted how defiant I had been going to school initially, actually for 5 whole months and had kicked the life out of the ayah with my shiny black shoes, when my dad passed me on to her at the school gates! Brace yourself, he warned me.

The D-day finally arrived and I thought my little one looked rather cute in his new school uniform and shoes. He was all smiles posing for the camera and we tried to capture his first steps in school. But the minute we handed him over to his teacher he was screaming his lungs out trying to break free. My heart went out to the little child, who was stretching his little arms out and calling out to me. I could have cried myself, had hubby dearest not taken me away from the place. We were told to collect him back in an hour’s time and to me that hour seemed like eternity!

I had been continually worrying how he would be faring and hubby dearest got sick of my incessant chatter.

‘For God’s sake, calm down, your child is not the first one to go to school and we have not left him in the jungle with a bunch of lions, so stop worrying, he will be fine’, he said, his voice soaked in sarcasm.

But a mother’s heart does not understand that, does it? And it continues to worry, about the well-being of her child, knowing at all times, that she cannot hold her child with herself forever. Neither in her womb nor at home. He will eventually break free from her. And she will have to let go.


Image: courtesy google