Cutting the cord

Right in the middle

To an outsider, I’m sure we’d have seemed like Godzillas on a rampage.

The alarm on the night stand buzzes loudly nearly making me fall out of the bed. Bleary-eyed I reach out to turn it off and knock off the books placed near it. It's 6 am on a Monday morning and my klutzy avatar is out in full force. For a moment I'm disoriented and then it dawns on me. My kids are no longer in school and the morning mayhem in our household is a thing of the past.

The last year had been fraught with wake-up calls at dawn, all-nighters before exams, countless trips to a pantheon of Gods for a successful completion of the academic year. Funnily enough our family only got closer even as our nerves were sorely tested. However to an outsider, I’m sure we’d have  seemed like Godzillas on a rampage. My typical day revolved around test schedules, research for projects and being woken up at all hours of the night for making snacks or to give a morale-boosting hug. Finally with the kids  off to college, I've a lot of time on my hands and wonder how best to put it to good use. ‘You have got to get a life of your own,’ my husband never stopped giving me advice – unsolicited I must add.  ‘Don’t hover around the kids. Stop playing a helicopter mom!’
Just to get him to quieten down, I ferreted out the list that I had made a while back when the kids were still in school. I'd boldly titled ‘101 things to do when the kids are in college.’ It offered a variety of interesting options from going backpacking in the Himalayas (struck off since the recent disaster in Uttarakhand) to sighting tigers at Ranthambore (becoming a dim possibility with the species on their way to extinction) to the more doable plan of visiting the family deity in a hamlet near Thanjavur. Even as I was browsing the list, my cell phone sang out in a special ring tone. My mother in Chennai seemed to have gotten a whiff of my precious list and its hare-brained ideas.

‘Have you started with the music classes? What happened to the book?’ She was determined to keep me on solid ground and despite my own college-going teens, never stopped being a parent to me.  My 16-year old who happened to overhear my conversation with my mom, was convinced that her biggest fears were coming true. 
‘You're morphing into grandma at this age – you'll still be haranguing us to drink milk when we're in our forties!’  I realised then that cutting that umbilical cord was never going to be so easy.