Sometimes I look at my hands and count the veins, a pale brown tiny mole had grown too, age spot! When I think that someday, the lifetime of a person will manifest on the skin, I want to wish that I be spared. Maybe everyone would want that, to stop time not just to restrain youth but more especially to preserve the most significant moment, the happiest time in life.
My overworked hands, if I refused to do household chores, perhaps they would still look like how they used to be. Manicure never attracted me but finds it soothing seeing the nails shortly trimmed and the pinkish color assuring me of good health. What use is a pair of hands if reserved for vanity, wrinkles are fine just so the clutter and my topsy-turvy abode can be tidied. I love being able to work out these hands, dish washing and pot scrubbing, planting flowers, crafting, sewing, baking, cooking, cleaning, cleaning, and cleaning something on the every day since I got married. Oh yes, just before marriage, it was so easy to eat whatever I like without the need to cook and clean or prepare for anyone else but myself. Reminiscing this past would always make me smile, how exciting it was to be able to work and spend money for some luxury, shopping, going out with friends, of getting fancy unimportant stuff. It was a very good time, but still not the best.
For some time, I thought my single life was the best time of my life. Guffaw I crackled with my girlfriends as if we could die laughing over something seems strange now. I do not hear myself like that anymore. Married life for me had been a constant struggle, it has been hard for a long time but I never lose hope and I will keep working, together with my hands. Maybe, we laugh lesser as we get older yet we do smile more. If I could live a part of my life again, I am sure of where I would bring myself to head back to. If I would die and be allowed to go back to a part of my life again, I am certain of this particular time, during the childhood of my little ones.
Life has been very busy, keeping up with growing kids, growing and growing. One day, I just realized that their voices were not the same anymore nor do they look like the ones I used to fetch in the room and carry to the breakfast table, whom I kiss and hug before I tuck to bed, whom I held hands so tightly when we walked, who gave me the smiles that went straight to my heart or the belly laugh that had jolted my whole being. Everything else seems the same, the books I have not finished reading to them are still sitting in the shelf, I still cannot part with some clothes and toys that connect to special events. I am the little one now in this house besides our black and white kitties. Seems like the wind just blew and took ten years away in a breeze. I miss those days. I know that there is no bliss greater than this to a mother; when her children whom she sees as her little ones look up at her as their biggest one!
(penned 2018)