“I Never Want to Feel That Way Again”
Written on 21 July 2023
It was January 2017. We were on our way back to the U.S. from India with a flight change at Heathrow. At the time, I was a postdoctoral fellow in Pennsylvania, while my family lived in Texas. In December of 2016, on our way to India to attend two weddings, I took a flight from Harrisburg to Philadelphia, while my family flew to Philly from Texas. We then traveled together to London and on to Mumbai. I belabor the sequence of this travel because it is central to what I’m about to write tonight, sitting in my old bedroom in India.
I distinctly remember the feeling of joy upon seeing my baby, who was 5 at the time, and who I hadn’t seen or held in my arms since August. I held him and we laughed and joked like we usually do.
After spending a wonderful, albeit busy, month in India, when we landed in London, the gravity of my separation from my little boy came upon me like a boulder crushing my heart. Standing there by the gate for the Dallas flight, I wept with my boy in my arms. I hadn’t shed a tear when my partner and kid left after helping me settle in at Carlisle in July. That’s because, since his birth, I hadn’t been away from my child for a prolonged period of time and didn’t realize how much I would miss him. This scene, then, of me wailing unabashedly before a crowd of bemused folk trying to speculate the reason for such unceasing tears, became a moment of reckoning for me.
In that instance, standing amid a confused and sympathetic crowd, I made a decision: I never wanted to feel this way again.
In July 2017, at the end of my fellowship, when I failed to find a job that would put me closer to my family, I gave up my teaching career in a heartbeat. My partner’s high-paying tech job was our anchor and our financial security as an immigrant family, so his quitting his job to relocate wasn’t ever a sound decision for us.
From the outside, I looked a picture of failed feminism, an educated, aspirational woman, who was now “sitting at home” after a Ph.D. in…wait for it…Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. But neither my educational training nor my self-confidence had ever been so tenuous as to be shattered by such aspersions. Because at the core of it lay my own selfish need to never feel the pain of being away from my child. I did not give up my teaching career for my family, I gave it up for me.
There was a reason for that. Having a baby was a choice I made. It wasn’t social pressure or the constraint of being married that led us to create our baby. It was a conscious, intentional choice. We waited until we were financially secure, and until we could finally start living together. Until then, both me and my partner lived in different time zones in the U.S. working hard to complete our Ph.Ds. Quitting the rat race in a rather bleak job market after I graduated was a decision I took with my eyes and heart both open wide.
I had, however, never spelled all this out so clearly until I was sharing my thoughts and feelings with my closest cousin during this visit to India. When I described to her the image of me standing at London Heathrow, with red, swollen eyes and a crying child in my arms, my heart broke all over again. I am glad I did not choose to stay away from my child ever again. I am grateful for all the support and encouragement I got from friends as I recast myself from a teacher to a professional writer. I am fortunate to have the privilege and the opportunities to pursue my dreams, despite multiple sharp changes in the course of my professional career. I am happy that I have the tools and the training to reinvent myself as necessitated by the changes in my life situation. And I am glad I made that decision to never feel that way again.
Tomorrow morning, my kid goes away with his father to my in-laws’ while I care for my aging parents. Today we cried again, wrapped up in each other's arms and I was reminded of that day again. He’s grown now, more independent, and immensely strong. But a child, nonetheless. I consoled him by suggesting that he think of it as a summer camp. He’ll see me again in a few days. I wiped his tears, helped him clean the snot from all the crying, and put Vicks on his nose and Amrutanjan balm on the forehead for his headache, before lulling him to sleep. As he sleeps peacefully next to me in the home I grew up in, I pull out my laptop to write this blog post. And I still know I never want to feel that way again.