So I have been struggling with this happiness question for a long time. I decided to blog this story less to write about it, and more to promise myself to reflect upon it……….and maybe find it.
So my mom (Because it is always about my mom) an absolute fireball of a woman. Everything about me is shaped by her, directly or when I was rebelling against her. But either way I am me, the good and the bad, by her. I grew up in Bombay, with her, my dad and my brother, and I may not have been the normal-est kid but I was in the appropriate range. I was a stay at home person, which meant school, classes and the comfort and security of home and consistency of my mom’s ‘padar’. She wore sarees a lot when I was growing up, and that part that hangs from the shoulders, easy to clutch in crowded areas, or when you’re too far behind: Padar. No matter what happened on the playground, in the class, in a horror movie I just had to yell “Aai!!”, and lo and behold my mom’s Padar was wrapping me in warmth. No matter what happened, I knew I was going to be okay when I get home, which was usually in a couple minutes. And that for the longest period was my happy place. My aai’s padar
It took me a while, but I grew up, and I slowly realized I had a mind of my own; doesn’t work out well with Indian parents, that. And the same padar that was warm and comforting now felt a little too tight. I no longer wanted a class to home to class kind of an existence. So in the middle of utter chaos, fights and threats, I left home when I was 17. For my undergrad.
Thing about happy places is, you only notice their absence when you are not happy. The whole purpose of a happy place, is to provide contrast to everything around you falling apart. So when my happy place was gone for a while, I didn’t notice because the excitement of my new life was enough. Until it wasn’t.
Have you ever been to a party where you had to poop, and there is a bathroom there, but you want the comfort of home. So you just distract yourself until you get home in a couple of hours. With me, this became a 4 year problem. Once the initial euphoria died, I was living a transient being, going from week to week, pushing stressful emotions under the rug, because in my mind it was going to be okay when I get home….. only this time, it would be in 6 months. Boy, my mom and I cried, wailed and then slept like babies the first couple of nights when I came back home.
After undergrad, I chose not to come home, this time for my job. Parents weren’t too pleased with this, but hey, I wasn’t ready to close down shop yet. I still hadn’t lived, still hadn’t seen enough to go back to a routine, rut, monotonous existence. So home visits were fraught with disagreement, yelling and whole lot of pressure to settle down in life. And as I reflect on this, I realize, that this lack of access to my happy place encouraged me to move in with my boyfriend too soon, barely a month into our relationship, yes crazy ….. because I couldn’t find my happy place anymore. Because I needed someone else’s padar to warm me. Because it was NOT going to be okay when I got home; because at that point I didn’t feel like I had one.
The last straw that left me broken, with no place I could call my happy place was my last visit home before I left to come to the US. It was 3 months of #whyMBA #whyUS #whyBoyfriend with my conservative parents. I came to Business School, utterly drained, emotionally exhausted and completely despondent. I was not prepared to face the intensity of the courses, the recruitment, the rejections or the move to a culturally divergent country. And it took its toll. I was at THAT party again, with the terrible bathroom. Just this time, I didn’t know when I’d go home. My boyfriend was too far away, I couldn’t really talk to my family, I hadn’t made many friends.
I immediately, subconsciously, assumed other homes. Apt #811 and #3506. I don’t think they understand it, the first friends I made at Booth had become my surrogate Mother’s Padar. But of course things change, especially during the aftermath of recruitment, when I simply couldn’t burden my friends with or sweep my emotions under the rug anymore. I just needed to be volatile on an as-needed basis. So I backed off from my friends. All I wanted was to get back to my happy place.
Even when my boyfriend made it to the US, it just wasn’t the same thing. I realized slowly that I was becoming a nuisance if I kept expecting another person to be my mother’s Padar. And it was no one’s fault, obviously. I realized if people who love me so much, and who I love so much cannot be my happy place, maybe I need to think about this a different way.
So I talked about it in one way, shape, form or another through therapy, through support groups, now on here. And after the many conversations I have had , I feel okay knowing I don’t have a happy place. Maybe no one does. It’s a construct of childhood and I have been clinging to it for far too long. It is time to stop finding a happy place, and potentially build one, inside, that would be with me, no matter where I go. I wish I had a happy ending saying, I have found a way to do it. But I have not. It took me 7 years just to get to this liberating thought; the realization that maybe it is time to let my Aai’s Padar go.
Thoughts on the edge 