Mumma, Where Is Papa?

By Harshita Tanwar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN8fpo2HcOI

After a long tiring day at work, my head fell on the pillow. My eyes were getting heavy but my brain refused to shut down. I kept my eyes closed and just as I was falling into the deep slumber of a blissful nap, a voice startled me “Papa!!!”. My heart started beating fast and I sat up, startled by the voice of my two and a half years old son Raaghav. He sat beside me watching YouTube videos on my phone. He was watching a video of a little girl running into her father’s arms shouting “Papa…”. He imitated her with the same enthusiasm.

My sleep was long gone. I was wide awake now. My already reluctant-to-sleep brain now went into thinking mode.

He is too young to know anything now. But I dread the day he will be grown up enough to ask “Mumma, where is Papa?” and I won’t be able to just brush it off. He would need an answer then. I am scared of the day. Very scared.

Just like any other 25-year old girl, I got married with my eyes full of dreams of a happy married life. I had a settled life before. I was living with my parents, completed my masters, had a fulfilling job in IT and I was enjoying my life to the fullest with friends and family. Suddenly, out of nowhere, this marriage proposal came like a storm and uprooted everything. I uprooted my parents and moved them to a new city, uprooted my job and found a new one in a new city. A city I had never been to before. And I did it all by my own will. I was SO in love. In retrospect, I was literally blind in love. This one human became more important to me than anything or anyone else in a matter of months.

It would be wrong to say that everything was perfect in this relationship. There were SO many red flags, spread everywhere. But you connect the dots only in retrospect. I chose to ignore each one of them.

“What are your expectations from your marriage?”

“I just need food on time”

“What?”

“Come on! I’m joking! Give me a kiss”

He wasn’t joking.

“You speak too much for a girl. Once you come to my house, I’ll have to stuff your mouth with something”

“What!!”

“Oh, it’s a joke. You need to work on your humor”

There was no humor.

“My mom is the coolest mom you will ever meet. You should feel lucky to have her. And me”

“You are so lucky you are getting to marry me without spending much”

“You are so lucky you are getting world’s best mother-in-law who will support your career”

There was no luck.

And SO many such things I just chose to ignore, simply because I was madly in love. He was everything I ever wanted in a man. Or so he made me feel. I was too naive to know what I really wanted. I just kept believing what I was made to believe. I thought my love would be strong enough to overcome all challenges. Little did I know that a relationship takes two. Two whole people who commit to be with each other no matter what. No one person can fulfill an incomplete relationship, even if they multifold their love to compensate for the partial absence of the other one.

Hope is a terrible thing. It doesn’t allow you to let go, even when you know it’s only going to descend you into a black hole of lifelong misery. I wish I lost hope sooner. I wish the truck of all the deception, lies and cheating blew up in my face sooner than it did. But when it did, I could never go back to being the same person. I could trust no more. I could love no more. It was over. I became emotionally numb for a long time. It ate me up as a person who thrives on emotions but I was protecting myself from being terribly hurt again.

Do I regret hopelessly falling in love with him? No! It gives me the strength that comes from knowing that in this merciless world, I am capable of giving so much love to someone, despite receiving nothing but disappointment in return. It takes courage. And it’s a privilege to know that I possess that courage. But I do regret not loving my own self with the same intensity then. I was insecure. I didn’t believe I was complete enough on my own. I thought love would conquer everything. It is true, but that love is the one I have for myself, not anyone else. I realized that now. I just hope it’s not too late.

I have made many mistakes in my life. A lot of them. I never regretted any of them. I made mistakes, learnt from them, hoped never to repeat them and moved on for good. Just like mistakes, I made my own decisions and completely owned the burden of their consequences. But the worst one I made was to put the burden of fixing a failed relationship on a completely oblivious baby. He is the sunshine of my life. Still, every single day, I can’t help but regret the fact that I was selfish enough to bring him into this world thinking he will fix the problems in my marriage. Our marriage that had no “Us” in it.

It took me almost three decades to know what I know now. How would I explain these complex dynamics to my young baby who would only find himself the odd one out amongst his friends and classmates? How would I explain to him that me staying in that marriage would only have ensured a traumatic childhood for him?

The day he asks me “Mumma, where is Papa?” makes me scared. Very scared. I just hope to have better answers when the time comes.

By Harshita Tanwar