Can I Still Be Your Child?

Visiting Ma between 10 and 12

10.00 AM to 12.00 PM.

Those are the timings for when I can visit my mother in the dementia care. Evenings too. But I like to visit her in the morning to start our day.

My first birthday with my elegant Ma

Every three days, I pack my bag to meet Ma. Ice-cream. Check. One ORS Carton. Check. Album. Check. I sling my bag across my shoulders and enter the centre to reacquaint my mother with her daughter.

Or maybe, myself with being a child.

When they bring her to me – freshly bathed, oiled hair braided, nails cut – looking just like a thinner version of my Ma, for a moment, a brief blissful moment, I forget she forgets.

And then it starts. The ritual of erasing the forgetting, the love of remembrance. We look through the photographs, and I get to ask a question, not the ones I had planned, but: Who is this person? For each picture, we play the guessing game of hits and misses. The journey of connecting memories to faces.

Birthdays, decades apart.

Today, for a while, I put my head against my mother’s chest, and her arthritic, twisted fingers ran down my forearm. Up and down. Down and up. I had shown her an album of us – of a younger me and her – and for a few hazy moments she forgot who I was now, older and greyer, but the moment my head landed on her bosom, her maternal instinct took over.

In that pocket of love, I could fool myself into thinking I was a child again. Who just wanted to lie in Ma’s lap as she ran her fingers through my hair. Not this version of an adult who has to make decisions about Ma, but an innocent, responsibility-free child, whose only job was to be held.

Each visit, I prepare a list of questions I’ll ask Ma to jog her memory and to emphasise mine. Each time I land there, all my questions dissolve. Like dandelion seeds. There one moment, gone the next, scattered somewhere I cannot follow.

I thought I would grieve the garam masala recipe I never asked. The story behind the photograph where she’s laughing at something outside the frame. What she felt when she earned her Master’s in History. I thought grief would arrive as a list: specific, retrievable, answerable. With a bit of regret, if only I had thought to ask in time.

Glorious past.

But when I embrace my mother, I realise I was wrong about what I would grieve.

It wasn’t her answers. Or my questions.

It’s her hands. The ones that knew, without being asked, that I needed to be touched. The ones that heal.

The moment the clock face shows up as 11.50 AM, a tiny part of me wants to throw a tantrum. How can the centre prevent me from being with my mother? Why must I abide by their times? Their rules? How can I extract myself from her hug and go back to being responsible?

Can we just stay here?

But I know. I know. Ma needs the structure, regulating trained medical care, which was impossible to give at home. I know the centre’s decisions are correct; I know. But I don’t want to know.

The aide comes in promptly at 12.00 PM, and quietly, my mother follows her back without a backward glance. I watch her until she is out of sight, hoping for a minute she would turn back, hoping the way only children hope, but she doesn’t. Maybe it’s the medicine that makes her docile. Maybe she has forgotten. Or maybe, she knows. And knows how it would affect me.

I stand there a moment longer than I need to.

The bag on my shoulder feels heavier on the way out. The ice cream is finished, the ORS will last her a few more hours, the album is tucked back in. I still have my questions. The ones that dissolved and somehow reconstituted themselves on the walk to the car. The garam masala recipe. The photograph. Her Master’s in History. All the things I meant to ask.

I will bring them again next time. And they will dissolve again.

Because I think I finally understand what I actually came here to ask, the question underneath all the questions.

Ma, can I still be your child, even now? Even like this?

And today, without words, without memory, with only her hands —

She answered.

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If this is your story too, even in a different form, you can write to me here or email me at natasha.harish.sharma@gmail.com.