Aama

Although living in a nuclear family, I grew up playing and having fun with many cousins because of my Mamaghar. There would not be a single holiday where I wouldn’t go to my Mamaghar. It was the best place in the world for me and still is. My grandmother is the head of the family. I never spent time with my grandmother. She always talked about being honest and being a good person, but as a child who likes to hear about that. Me and my cousins, we never sat next to her for more than 5 minutes trading our childhood shenanigans.

It was right before I came to United States, me, my mother, and my grandmother we went to a temple. We took lots of cloths and food to give to the people who sat around the temple waiting for donations. We were distributing cloths, there were more than twenty-five people sitting in a line on the either side of the long staircase. Most of them were women, some had cloths on some didn’t. Some women were feeding their milk to their kids. Despite their mother being poor and helpless, the mother was able to provide the infants what they needed, a pure breast milk. My grandmother cared more for the women with the infants.

As we came to the end of the distribution, I remember one woman who came running for a cloth. She had a huge grin on her face, she was running towards us in her ragged clothes, but as she came closer to us, she realized that we ran out of clothes. We had some foods left, but we had no clothes at all.  I was walking in front of my grandmother; I was enjoying the moment very much. I heartily believe that my religion is kindness. Despite growing up in a family with high religious values, I never considered myself as religious person. Religion is more of a culture for me. It was what the older people in the family did, never really explaining in details why we do those things. For me it is a way of life that can be changed any moment if we want to.  Why follow one religion when we can choose any culture to learn better morals?

My grandmother was smiling and giving last bit of food to the woman who ran to her. My mother was next to me, so I asked her, “What are we going to do about the cloth?” She didn’t open her mouth. I was staring at the woman for a long time. I saw my grandmother took out her sweater and her thick winter scarf. She gave it to the woman without any hesitation. The women had a huge smile in her face, she joined her hands thanking my grandmother and gave her blessings. My eyes filled with tears. My grandmother said, “let’s go.” directing her hand towards the end of the staircase.

I had fallen from the mountain of ignorance to the ocean of guilt. We took the taxi back home. I stared outside the window and recalled all the things she has done for our family, for me and my cousins, for the people around her, and done so much to make this world a better place in her own way. She is the strongest women I know. She lost her husband some months before I was born. I never saw my grandfather, however I never recall a time where she made us feel the lack of a grandfather or my mom and her siblings of their father. She is always a person who knows how to keep a family together. She is a perfect leader for our family who knows how to give unconditional love, set a good example for younger ones, and take in-charge when necessary.

Today I put my emotions into words with an unbearable urge to go to my mamaghar, put my head in her lap, listen to her, and spend time with her.

The moment we are in is priceless, there is no place we could be at this moment that would be better for us than what we are in right now. On the other hand, I constantly find myself drifting into things that will be different in the future or things I could change in the past.

Moments are deeper than we see and hear through our senses, being able to perceive and accept those strengths and flaws in things around us can lead us to pure joy in Life. Trying to master this art in a day or month or even a year will probably lead to an infinitely long path because it’s always a learning process of this beautiful phenomena called “Life”.

~ A