Mommy’s prayers

My dear little baby,

Seeing you this last time has made me think a lot about you. Well, more often than usual at least. And as time flies by, I can’t help but weave dreams about this beautiful life you and I are going to share together. As I watched you putting your fist in your mouth and taking it out again and kicking up a storm inside my belly, it was like it suddenly struck me: it won’t be long before you will be a “person” with a personality! You will develop habits, which I hope for my sake won’t involve waking Mommy up ten times in the night.  You will develop tastes, like laughing along to a funny tune and dozing off to a soothing one and screaming out loud vehemently when Daddy plays those weird Hindi songs he likes (har di har har!) You will develop preferences, realizing that the bed isn’t as comfy as Mommy’s arms, and you will learn to manipulate Mommy into picking you up from the bed. It warms my heart in earnest when I think of all of this, baby. That’s when I say a silent Thank You to the One above, and send a silent prayer on its way.

May you learn to laugh a lot. May you be this happy person who realizes early in life that laughing is so much better than bawling your eyes out (less exhausting too!) May you realize soon the fact that there is no such thing as too much laughter. May you learn for yourself the joys of a hearty- belly aching-eyes watering-laugh.

May you learn to see the good in everything. May you be the kind of person who is willing to believe that everyone is good until they are proven bad. Daddy will disagree, and say that you will have to be realistic and in today’s world, you cannot trust anyone, but may you be this one person who is not ready to give up on the world and its people yet.

May you grow up to be this person who manages to achieve the delicate balance between emotions and practicality. With Daddy’s extreme practicality, and Mommy drowning in sentiments all the time, I hope you will bring a semblance of balance in our lives, baby. May you learn to be sensitive towards sentiments, and yet be level-headed enough to know when to draw the line between indulging and wallowing in all those emotions.

May you grow up learning to love yourself. If you are a girl, I want you to feel beautiful always and be intelligent enough to realize that being fat or skinny doesn’t in the least matter in the greater scheme of things. If you are a boy, I want you to know that as long as you flaunt a warm smile and a knack for good conversation, people don’t care if you sport a Mohawk or have three day stubble on your face.

May you learn to love books at a very early age just like Mommy did. May you find for yourself how magical it is to dive into a world of someone else’s imagination and forget about reality for a while. May you be the kind of person who spends hours looking for the perfect book in the library or the bookstore only to finish reading it as fast as you can humanly gobble the pages. And someday, may you learn how liberating it is to put your own thoughts into words for everyone else to read them. Mommy can hope, right baby?

May you love music, and discover just how blessed we are to have ears that can appreciate symphony and melody and harmony. May you learn to sing your heart out without worrying about being correct (though Mommy really hopes you are not tone-deaf and have inherited some of Mommy’s musical talents) May you grow up to find happiness and sometimes solace in finding just the right song that kinda makes everything happening around you make sense.

May you grow up to be fearless, and not fear anything but fear itself (Mommy’s a Harry Potter fan, baby). And if someday you find yourself being scared of something, may you be brave enough to accept it and learn to face your fears head on and say “Ha! You are just a paper tiger!” like your PapPap once asked your Mommy to do.

May you always enjoy good health; that goes without saying.

May you spread love and joy to everyone around you; that I know you will because you already are doing that.

May you always be successful, and may even failure teach you the right lessons to move on and be successful eventually.

I love you so much baby. And I hope you know that while Mommy hopes and prays for you to be the kind of person she thinks you ought to be, she will always love you no matter what.

Much love and fluttery kisses from here outside,

Mom on Tenterhooks.

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