One family to next

It was D’s birthday yesterday and the birthday blog was shaping up in my mind since the day I started preparations – bought gifts, ordered for a photocake (inspired by Mama Mia) invited friends over for a surprise party at 12, booked movie tickets.

But now when I sit to share it with my blogger buddies, an inexplicable pain is welling up.... I realize I have not shared it with somebody I have been sharing just everything from stomach aches and heart breaks, to new dresses and broken toe nails, since childhood. Brooding, I also realized D’s birthday is just one of the piles of events and incidents that have affected me in the near past, which I did not bother to tell them the way I used to. Not that they’re altogether unaware. We talk often. But the ‘need’ to download upon them is no more there. It was more of reporting a piece of news than sharing an experience.

Conjoined to D, it feels improbable that I belong to a different family, that I am bonded to somebody else with flesh and blood. Did Maa feel the same when she moved in with my father? I do not have the heart to ask her this. We were a nuclear family and without siblings, they were ALL I ever had before I got married. No emotional involvement has been so strong to wean me away. But today I feel different and this makes me feel so very guilty.

Until recently, my understanding of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ was – all those things I can tell MaPa are ‘right’ and those I cannot, are ‘wrong’. And I do not have the heart to tell them that I am drifting away, unconsciously, and do not know what to do!

Boomer, my son (so I believe) is just a dog, practically. Every time he’s under the rush of his hormones, he acts ‘differently’ and I feel let down. I tell D it hurts to see him get so mad for some wench (‘bitch’ I mean) when I have cleaned his pee and poop, fed him, rushed him to the hospital when he was sick (D was out of station), prayed to God to take away days from my life and give it to him, stayed awake entire nights to feel his heartbeat. And all this in just a year and a half! How would Maa Pa feel when after 27 years I tell them I cannot feel the way I used to feel about them? Not that I do not love or care for them anymore, but the relationship has changed.

It’s killing me.

D confessed to feeling a same sense of alienation from his parents. The question is whether to accept it as a natural phenomenon that happens to all men and women after they're united in matrimony or find true companionship, or to make an attempt to re-correct the equation? Or is it because both D and me have grown up in nuclear families and have not witnessed the attachment children have with parents post marriage that is making it seem so unusual?