Rekha's Ramblings

 When my children were in school, we always went somewhere during their summer break. We would look forward to that trip all year, that getaway, spending quality time as family.  It had become our tradition.  In 2019 summer, we had planned to go to Banff national park in Canada. They said it was one of the most beautiful places on Earth. To those of you who do not know me, I live in the US now but grew up in India and my family lives in India. I used to call my mom almost daily, if not every other day. Since I lived thousands of miles away, that was the least I could do. Since we were going to Canada and the phone network might be spotty, I called her the night before to tell her about our travel plans and to not to wait for my calls for the next eight days. She did not answer the phone, instead my sister did. She said mom had fallen and broken her leg that morning and she was in tremendous pain and in the hospital. My heart sank. My mom had suffered from Rheumatoid A...

Recently, we had the pleasure of traveling with my sister and her family and got to spend some quality time with my nieces walking around the streets of NYC. It had been more than a decade when they had seen the photographer ;  “the crazy about pictures” side of me. In fact, they remember me breaking two cameras in 2 days when the last time all of us were together at Disney world, when they were visiting the US for the first time, and I wanted to capture every moment of it. This time it was New York city, capturing every detail. No more carrying an actual camera, those days are long gone. It is only a smart phone. My phone memory is always full whenever I return from any trip. All the cousins were discussing my obsession while we were sitting down outside the Magnolia Bakery, talking about how many pictures I take, and I realized at that point that they hardly took any pictures. My children said there was no need for them to take any pictures because they knew I had them covered....

In one of my blogs posts I had posted a while back, I had referred to myself as " just a mom."   One of my friends pointed it out and said, what do you mean by you are "just a mom?  Do you realize what all the things you have accomplished or done to raise three beautiful, kind children?  How can you say that  you are just a mom?" Until then, I had not realized the weight of those words, the negative impact of my own words, on my own psyche, my mental health, belittling myself and reducing my worth to "just."  I was downplaying my role, always had. Not until he pointed it out, did I reflect on the fact how demeaning it was, how I had reduced the time and energy I had poured into raising my three children, the countless sleepless hours  and being available to them as a default parent to "nothing", and summed it into the 3 words, "just a mom", and had labeled myself as a "just". Being a mom is not the title of a job. I was lo...