Reblogged from tangiblememory
Nothing in the world prepares you for loss. Not even loss itself. Not even repeated experiences of it.
Nothing in the world will prepare you for the delicate act of letting go. A dance of grace and clumsiness from which you must emerge with dignity and seem none the poorer, even though you are. Of course you are.
Nothing in the world prepares you for unconditional love. Also known as motherhood. This is Urmi Chanda Vaz’s tangible memory. An ordinary but extraordinary blue plastic clip that held love together, only to set it free.
“What is the most significant, memory-laden, gushingly sentimental object currently in your possession?” – Andrew Kaufman
1. Tell me a little about yourself. Something that gives me a sense of what you’re about:
I often feel I don’t belong here, in this time, among these people. A hippie I was meant to be, or a gypsy but here I am now learning to dance with the chains around my ankles. I am also learning to fly with wings called words. Trying to find skies within my four-walled life. I am a daughter and a mother and a wife and a dreamer. I will write a book one day - binding words between a hardback cover, squeezing them out one at a time from my heart. Perhaps I will die trying. But I know which way I am headed, what my refuge is.
2. What is the most significant, memory-laden gushingly sentimental object currently in your possession? (It could be ANYTHING. Try to think of the first thing that comes to your mind. That’s usually it.)
I am quite vocal about my dislike of parenthood, so I surprised myself when I found my answer to this question: My most significant, memory-laden gushingly sentimental object is a little blue plastic clip.
3. What’s the story behind it? (Don’t worry about being judged or about what anyone will think. This is YOUR memory and it’s precious.)
It’s no ordinary plastic clip. The little blue clip is an umbilical cord clip. The one they used at the hospital to stop blood from oozing out from my firstborn’s body once they cut him off from me, moments after his body became separate from mine, moments after he became his own person. The remnant umbilical cord dried out and fell off along with the clip a few days later, but I’ve kept the clip, as I will for the rest of my days.
The clip to me is a symbol of letting go. The first of the many heartbreaking times in my life when I will have to let go of my son. It is my first lesson in holding back. So many things and people and situations will claim his share - even pain. And I will have to bite my lip, root my feet, and fetter my heart using all my might to hold myself back; hold myself back from protecting him or showing my love. Love unlike anything I’ve experienced before. A love so powerful that sometimes it threatens to take over my existence. The most selfless love there can be. A love that can perhaps be born only of giving birth. And a love that is returned by him in all its earnestness - at least for now.
But I know there will come a time when the river of his love will have run its course, thinning down perhaps to a tiny trickle, divided into many streams for many people. There will be a time when I will no more be the woman of his life, the holder of his hand. There will perhaps be a time when he, full of dreams of a new life, goes away. But I will know, holding the little blue plastic clip in my hand, that he can never be too far.
An umbilical cord is never really cut.
