Those were the best days of my life

Those were the best days of my life.

Amma recalls her childhood. She was the first child born in the family. 

She was pampered, adored and indulged by her otherwise disciplinarian grandpa, grandma,  father, mother, uncles, aunts, servants and even a wet nurse when she was born. Ten years of wait filled with prayers and visits to various pilgrimage sites by her parents went into it. Precious child that she must have been, she got the best of toys, tHe best  of cookies and best of everything  that money could buy in a small indian village in the early 1950s. When electricity and photography were still rare in rural India,  she was the most photographed child of those days in Thanjavur or possibly in all of India.
( some photographs which have survived  will be uploaded soon )

Amma celebrated her sixtieth birthday sometime back. She was asked this question by her children that would come up as a blog prompt prodding her daughter to write a blog about it.!!!

Sixty years on she still feels her childhood we're the best days of her life.
Not many girl children got that privilege in her days and even today.

It is besides the point that when she is in one of her post menopausal  moods she laments that marriage, mother in law, husband, children , poor health ,heart attack and everything else took a toll on her and life has only been on a downward spiral from then on. 

In all fairness life has been a mixed bag for her. Like how it is for most people. 

 Her's was a typical life of women born in 1950s and 60s in India. 

Before you knew it, marriage and motherhood  just happened to you. 

Life went on depending on how well your marital  life shaped up. 

Self esteem was predominantly about how well you mother in law treated you. 

Money predominantly was about how well your husband's job or business shaped up.

Your own status in the society was about how well your children did at school, college and later in their jobs and marraiges.

You pretty much never had direct control over any of these matters and yet your existence , your self worth and happiness depended on how you shaped everyone else's life. 

No wonder the carefree days of childhood would, by default qualify as the best days of such lives.

it does not come as a surprise that  amma laments this so often about her childhood. 

That was probably the only time she had direct control over her own happiness and self worth. 

This weeks blogaddas wow prompt sent me reflecting. 

I started thinking about what to write. 

"What were the best days of my life?"

I ask myself sitting under the shade of a mango tree watching the sunset over the faraway hills on a sultry but calm and peaceful evening. 

I am on a vacation seeking solitude. 

Far away from the maddening crowd. But not too far away for me to submit my entry.
Thanks to My mObile service provider's  signal that reaches my cell phone even in this sparsely inhabited place. 

The reason I am here is precisely to reflect on them. 

The best days and the worst days of my life.

More about that on another blogg. ( I am much of a blogger on my smartphone. This is my first
attempt. Please fForgive the typos)

This blog post is a submission for wow (write over the weekend) on blogadda