Loving my kid…

We, in India, are having a long weekend now. 15^th August is the day India got its independence of British rule in the year 1947. It is a national holiday on that day. There is another holiday coming up on Tuesday, 16^th August for a Hindu (a religion in India) festival. The prospect of a long weekend, prompted authorities of most of the organizations around India declare 14^th August too as a holiday, so that their employees get a long weekend to unwind themselves. Not able to withstand the thought of missing spending this holiday with her parents, my wife left for her native the very next day. Along with her, she took our kid too. She will return only next Wednesday.

Good, I thought! My kid is 4 years old, going to a nearby nursery school, but only for 3 hours during the day. Rest of the time, he is at home. He is quite mischievous and doesn’t listen to us most of the times, without putting in his own conditions while doing so. Why, even if want to go to the toilet, he wants us to count from 1 to 10! When he is around, he just loves to run around at home, making noise at the top of his voice. As if that is not enough, sometimes he invites his friends too to our home to cover up for those missing decibels! Too much, most of the times my wife is tired of dealing with him, so am I. Of course, we love him a lot, but at times we feel like giving him two nice beatings. Many times, I had wished that this guy grow up a bit fast, so that I can peacefully carry out my work.

But, when he is gone, things became entirely different. With him gone, the house looked so empty and totally silent. It feels desolate without a kid around to run around, screaming. I felt so lonely, so bored with nothing to spend my time on. I watched a movie, played games online in the internet, surfed through some of my favorite websites. But, after all that, still I had plenty of time left, and I don’t have a clue how to spend it. Without my kid running around, to play with me, I felt a kind of void. I began to think about how it will feel like, when he is grown up. When he is big, he will walk away with his friends, and maybe, just maybe, not even care for his aged parents (that is us, me and my wife). I can’t imagine such a thing happening in my life, anytime, but such stories about parents being abandoned by their ‘grown-up’ kids are nowadays so common. We are being westernized a lot, a real lot…

With all these thoughts, once again, I looked around in the bed. It looked so empty without him on the side. One or two tears came out of my eyes…