My husband’s help

Christmas came and gone. Children came and left. The house is empty now, except for the leftover foods in the refrigerator, dust and mud on the floors, wrapping peppers in our living room and the hamperful of dirty laundry!


One of our children couldn’t make home on Christmas this year. We missed her terribly! However, we managed to do the “face-time” with her several times during the Christmas day. 


We did the face-time again on New Year Eve with her. We also chatted a few more times on phone and exchanged massages during the holidays. She knew her siblings left home yesterday and this morning I received this e-mail from her:


“Hi mom,

How are you doing? It must be a lot quieter now that the other kids are gone. You have your house back!

Love ya”


Well, I don’t want to sound like I didn’t enjoy our children’s visit. I enjoyed a lot! But I didn’t actually get the house “back” the way it was before the kids visited until about 4PM today.


I started my venture with the bathrooms yesterday. After I finished changing the bed sheets of the second bed, my husband became sympathetic to me. He told me that he would do the vacuuming for me when he comes for lunch today. So, I did all other things: picked up the things from floors, put the Christmas decorations away, dusted and started mopping. By then it was one in the afternoon. My husband came home. He was inspired by my work and started to vacuum before he reached for his lunch.


Two minutes after my husband started vacuuming, he called me “Bina, can you see if I’m doing the job properly?” I left my mop and ran upstairs to see my husband vacuuming. “This is perfect, Raja,” I said and thanked him with a big smile.


I was still mopping, my husband called me again “Bina, can you go downstairs and check if the sensor in the box is in its place?” I ran downstairs to the basement and check the dust-sensor if it was out of its place in our central vacuum box. The sensor was where it should have been. No problem there. I hollered my husband back “Its fine, Raja”.


I started mopping. My husband called me again “Bina, can you look at the brush?” “I think the brush is not spinning properly.” I was still mopping, but left the mop and went for his help with a pair of scissors. The roller bar of his sweeper was snuggly wrapped up with a massive hairball.


I cut the hair loose and pulled all out of the roller bar strand by strand. My husband’s vacuum cleaner now worked beautifully. But I’m too tired to go back to my mop!

Nonie’s story

Nonie isn't my real name but you can call me by this name. I’m nearly 60-year old woman who hasn’t had the experience of child-birth and, since I don’t remember if I had sex with my husband during the few months I was with him—rather, he was with me, because he was the one leaving home--you can call me the virgin-Nonie if you like.

I’m a fun-loving person. I can read and write a little. I’m still pretty, people say!


I was married only for a brief period of time, as I wrote earlier. I’ve no children of my own but I often forget this. You see, since my husband left, which was a long ago, I’ve been living with one of my brothers’ family. This brother of mine has a sweet wife. Together they have eleven children. I’m so involved in raising these children, I often forget the kids are not my own. You know what I mean?


I was with my sister-in-law when each of her eleven children descended one-by-one into this world. Sometimes holding her hands and other times putting a wet cloth on her forehead, I was there with her each time she gave birth to her children.


I feel like I had the pain my sister-in-law was enduring during her childbirth. I’ve felt heat in my forehead and sweated with exertion. I felt the urge to push every time my sister-in-law was asked to push. People say I even wailed with my sister-in-law in pain a few times!


I remember each of the little precious thing emerging from my sister-in-law’s narrow birth canal--their black head piping out first and then their tiny shoulders and finally little feet... Their body covered with bloody white slimy cheese like substance that felt so slippery to touch, but I didn't feel yucky the way other did. I was only afraid of losing the newborns from my arms when washing them. 

Seeing my nervous face, the sudunis (midwives) used to laugh at me. They used to tease me, “Sanu-bajai, you look more nervous, more distressed than your vauju”. Bajai is Brahmin -woman and sanu mean small. “Who is giving the birth here you or her?, they used to ask me.

But I was worried about my sister-in-law's health. I had lost my mother during her child-birth. I didn’t want to lose her, also, you know?


Anyhow, my brother’s children are grown up now; the youngest is 19 years old. However, the slightly lopsided head of this boy I still remember!


You may ask what happened to my husband, is he dead? Well, no. He is not dead, or even if he is dead, I’ve not heard of it. As I said, I was married only for a brief period. I was 16 when I was married. He was 18 or 19 years old, people say. I really don’t know, but he was tall and handsome. He was strong and his voice was deep. I also remember going to bed that night and him being in a deep sleep. He was snoring. But now that I think about it his snoring was fake, because when I woke up at mid-night he was gone. I didn’t hear any noise what so ever that he might have made when opening and closing the door of our bedroom.


You see, I was the youngest daughter-in-law in the house. In those days, the daughter-in-law massaged their mother-in-law’s feet and if there were sisters-in-law in the house, she massaged her feet, also. So, by the time I cleared the kitchen and finished all those chores it used to be mid-night. So, he must have left when I fell asleep deep, around 1AM in the morning.

Some people say he left the village with another lady in the neighbourhood. Some others said he left the country with a male friend of his, who was also missing around the same time he did. Anyhow, he never returned home and nobody knows if he is dead or still alive somewhere.


The point of going through my story is that I have been experiencing some discomfort in my body lately. Once in a while part of my body numbs, so I visited my doctor recently. My doctor asked me to take an MRI, thinking that I’ve a pinched nerve. But the test showed a few bubbles in my uterus. Then, I visited a gynecologist to ask what was going in my body.


The gynecologist asked me about my husband and children while preparing me for a test-- she said was “hysteroscopy”. But when I explained my situation to her, she just squeezed my lower abdomen and said since I didn’t sleep with my husband and never had a childbirth, she called me a “nulliparous woman” and explained that I’m more predisposed to the ovarian cancer than the married women with children.

This medical term was new to me. I don’t know what that meant, but she said that I should go for a hysteroscopy to remove my uterus right away. She added “The operation will have to be performed from your abdomen since you didn’t sleep with your husband and you never gave birth to a child”. This is troubling me a lot!


“Hysteroscopy is a major operation but there is no danger of dying from this,” my doctor says. But I’m worried and also embarrassed. I know it was not my fault that I don’t have a man in my life. But from the talks of the doctors and the people around me it almost sounded as if I created this condition for myself.


My doctor says that my problems are related to "psychosocial factors". She said it has something to do with my emotional and physical conditions. My physical body seem to have been affected from my marital status that the doctors cannot operate me the way married women are being operated. I consulted two gynecologists. Both of them say the same thing: “Your operation will have to be performed from your navel area.”

I’m a healthy woman, otherwise. I love music. I dance whenever I get a chance. I’m smart, I think. I would have liked to have a small family with one or two of my own kids. I would have built a small house and decorated it with all my handmade stuff. I would have a pretty garden with all my favorite fruits and flowers. If I had the chance every other woman had, you know?

Have you ever seen a torque blue sky?

I was in my vehicle, crossing the Princess Margaret Bridge in my town, north of Fredericton, and was struggling to hide my eyes from the piercing light of the afternoon sun. It was around 3:30PM Atlantic Time.

When I got around to the half circle-ramp, coming up from Riverside Drive and going towards the bridge, the sky zoomed in at my eyes and I felt as if I was climbing up the sky. I felt hallucinated. I slowed down my car a bit. Gripping my both hands tight on the steering wheels and hiding my eyes behind the rearviewmirror, I looked straight up to the sky – it was bright torque blue!

What’s happening? Am I seeing things?, I questioned to myself.  I looked ahead and up again. There was that bright torque blue sky standing magnificently in front of me. There were a few scattered white clouds also, all glowing as if they were beamed up by the thousands of light bulbs behind them. I wasn’t imagining. The whole thing was real!

I picked my husband up on my way home and told him what I had seen a while ago. He just smiled at me with an expression on his face that said “Yah, sure”.  After reaching home, I looked at the sky, again. This time the sky was in dull baby-blue color and the clouds didn’t shine!

In my bed time I thought about the torque blue sky again. I wondered if anybody else had seen such sky, or that was just the trick of the afternoon sun? After giving a lot of thoughts, I attributed the torque blue sky and the bright clouds to my brother who had just passed away a few days earlier. “He must be in heaven, now”, I said to myself. It was his way of thanking me for donating the bags of food to the food bank in his name this afternoon.

That was the only logical explanation I could make out of the heavenly experience I had that yesterday, and I slept the whole night peacefully!

RIP my dear Sanu dai

Old age and the fragility touche everyone

Old people are perceived as unsightly and burdensome by many societies and a lot of elderlies are condemned --not for doing anything wrong or harming anyone, but simply reaching their “unproductive” stage.


Our societies burry the issues of old age altogether, instead of preparing our young generation by educating them on this very eminent stage. Most children don't get 't the opportunity to be with their grandparents and older relatives. They don't understand what growing old means. For example, I didn't know how to look after elderlies when my visited about 10 years ago. The old saying "you've to be old to understand an elderly" is so correct!


I had heard an interesting story about an elderly when I was very young that I want to share to demonstrate how we cheat ourselves:


Once there lived a young couple who had a very young son and very old man--their father and father-in-law-– living with them. From the account of this tale, it is understood that the old man had reached at his “unfruitful” age, and the couple decided to get rid of him. They said, "this old man is useless and draining our resources". So, they devised a plan.


Next day the husband brought a basket, large enough to fit his old man, and loaded his father in it. After watching his father, the very young son of his asked, “What are you doing, father?” The father replied, “I’m loading your grandpa to dump him down from a tall mountain, so that he can’t return home”.


When the man finished loading his father and was on his way to the mountain, his very young son came running after him. He shouted, “Wait, wait, father, I’ve to tell you something…” The father was in a hurry, but his love for his son compelled him to stop. Impatiently the father asked, “What is it son?” “What is so important that you must distract me from carrying on my urgent work?” His very young son breathlessly replied, “I just want to remind you to bring the basket home after you dump grandpa down the mountain”. His father paused a while and asked, “Why my son; why do you care about this useless basket?” His very young son replied, “Because I would need it to dump you down the mountain, too, when you reach to grandpa’s age”.

Taking things for granted

It was a perfect evening for a walk in Fredericton, NB. As I stroll up the hill with my husband, a cool comfortable breeze blew at our faces, then I suddenly noticed the breath I took – a deep, long, strong inhalation that I felt it was the first time I had done so. Instantly, I thought about my brother who is fighting for his life in a hospital in Nepal. “If he could draw the kind of air I just did into his lungs a couple of times without the help of ventilation, he would be up and running” I imagined.

For the first time in my entire life I became so thankful for each breath going in and out of my lungs!

Me and the Pickle jar: Radha's story

I found a jar of artichoke pickle molded and rot in my refrigerator:

"A strange thought struck in me," said Radha. Then I started chatting with my pickle jar, sitting on my countertop and looking as impatient as I'm: 

Me: waiting for my children to pick the career they want, so that I’ll know what kind of future they’ll have.

Pickle jar: waiting for one my children to come home and eat me up.

Me: waiting for my children to marry with their boyfriend/girlfriend, so that I can finish some of my motherly responsibilities.

Pickle jar: waiting for my children to come home and find me still waiting.

Me: waiting for my children to settle down, so that they could take their belonging to their own place.

Pickle jar: rotten but still waiting…

Me: waiting for my children to sort out what they want to keep, so that I could give away the things they don’t want.

Pickle jar: can’t wait any longer; I’m out of here and in the garbage now!

Me: still waiting for my children to come home and give me some good news…
 
Radha tosses the pickle jar into the garbage and goes for a long walk.

The end.

Being honest and being known to be

“While honesty and integrity are financially detrimental in today's society, the needs of the future will almost certainly reverse that. Honest people will be so, no matter what the prevailing political climate is, and have been disadvantaged for many years for being so. In the near future that will change, being honest and being known to be, will become the benefit it always should have been.”

 By

 Perry McCarney.