How could you! The expression was clear on the face of my two years and three month old girl child, Shivani. Silently registering the incredulity of the fact that her mother was leaving her in a play school; a new and unfamiliar environ and also that her mother was in fact going away, trusting her with strangers.
As for me, I came home and wept from the memory of her enquiring eyes and asking expression, so vivid even today. The ordeals of the education system took over my life, the school centre-poised itself into our entity; as the extended family. Strangely the notion settled in with me after the first initial hiccups.
“This is a solution. This is a solvent...”, my three-year-old was now parroting. I was lost to wonderment at that science exhibition held by the primary school! I was thinking she ought to be explaining something like, “this is a plastic ball and I can play with it; this is glass it could break, I could injure myself, I must not play with it”. That I felt would have been more scientific explanation logically suited for children of that age.
The years flew by thus with misgivings and adjustment of the mind. Finally the frenzied college admissions stare at you. The mother of all challenges; in the art of parenting! Shivani got her admission. I was at first a little aghast that it happened, because it just posed itself so Herculean that the task seemed unattainable.
The graduation day arrived and I happened to be the only parent there to partake in the poignancy of the moment and it was then that I realised how much a part of my daughter’s life her educational system has been. It is not just courses one goes through; it is a myriad of experiences that hone you into the person you are.
“You okay?” she asks as I sit there thinking how the years have been stolen from me; the confident young lady that she is, a graduate, the first of life’s milestone and looking to go overseas to pursue biotechnology. I wonder why I was ever so paranoid with the system, it sure has its lacunas yet it comes through for the most of us.
