When I reflect on my childhood and my school years, the most predominant feeling that resurfaces is how strongly I desired to be an adult. Growing older was exciting because I was leaving behind the lack of agency I associated with being a child. All my school years, I couldn’t wait to pass and begin junior college, and when I was finally at that phase, I was dreaming about graduation. I remember wanting to quit my first year of my post-grad at JNU because I felt I didn’t belong there. My professor urged me to complete the second year and ‘be done with it’. I am grateful that I followed that advice. But do you see the underlying pattern? The continuous seeking of futurity instead of fully inhabiting the now that was then. Wanting, always, to outgrow the experience as I was having it. These days when I read about the process of ‘reparenting’, which includes healing your inner child as you care for a child, I have been trying to reconnect with my version of this concept.

Yesterday my father sent me a photograph of me when I was a day old. I look like a brown potato. I am all slanted eyes and open mouth and a thousand shades darker than our child was when he was ushered out of my womb. In one image, I am nestled right below my mother’s arm. I can see both her wrists and the gold bangles she’s wearing stand out. Our skin colours seem to match perfectly. I look like I came from her. Flesh of her flesh. Bone of her bone. In the second photograph, I am in the transparent crib they use to keep babies in hospitals. I’ve my wristband on my left hand and I am fast asleep. I have no memory of either of these images and it is somewhat special to see them now, in the light of motherhood. Because I am suddenly navigating the experience of re-inhabiting the spaces that I had already familiarised myself with through the new perspective of a toddler. This means I gaze differently at the same streets I had grown accustomed to walking past briskly on evening walks soon after I moved here. As our child reaches out his fingers so they can rub against the surfaces of the walls or the grasses or vines, I notice their particularities. Everything takes a lot longer and I suppose this is how the feeling of time is itself altered.