The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that it is impossible to determine both the position and the velocity of a particle at a given instant; one must always be uncertain. To be the daughter of a sad and beautiful woman is to orbit your life with uncertainty. You walk on eggshells—afraid to say the wrong thing, afraid to say too little, afraid to fall. It’s not that she is purely cold and unfeeling. In fact, most would describe her as loving and kind. It’s that you never know what you’re going to get; she’s always in flux.

You are at the age where you follow your mother everywhere, never leaving her orbit. Her deep brown eyes seem to sparkle when she looks at you. She drops you to the bus stop every morning and picks you up in the afternoons. She tells you and your brother bedtime stories on most nights, some made-up, some from Hindu scripture. Your favorite is one from the Bhagavata Purana about young Lord Krishna:

One day Krishna was reported to his foster mother, Yasoda, for eating dirt. She questioned him and he denied it, urging her to check his mouth and see. When Krishna opened his mouth, in it she saw the whole universe in all its variety, with all the forms of life and time and nature and action and hopes, and her own village, and herself. Stunned, Yasoda made a fervent prayer to the gods, only for her memory to vanish in an instant. 

You think that maybe part of the universe exists in you, too. You believe in the boundless magic and wonder of the beyond as your mother beholds everything good in herself within you. You wonder how she never gets tired of telling stories, but you hope she never does as you fall asleep in her arms.

Now your father has moved to Hong Kong for work. You go visit him. Hong Kong has buildings far taller and far closer together than you are used to. The apartments are too small, you think, and you wonder why your father wants to live here. Then you realize Hong Kong also has a Disneyland. You and your brother don Mickey Mouse ears as you parade through the gates. Your mother dons a scowl because your father has to work. She does not tell you a bedtime story that night, or the next.

She sends you and your brother to the playground; “your father and I need to talk,” she says. Your brother chases you down the big yellow slide and through the cypress hedges. It starts to drizzle and you watch the rain beads race each other down the slide. The cohesive and adhesive forces of water allow it to stick to itself and other surfaces. You wonder if your family will stick together.

When your mother is a beautiful woman whose marriage is decaying, she shuts you out. Radioactive decay is a stochastic process; it’s not possible to predict when an atom will decay, regardless of how long it has existed. You spend days building a 5,000 piece lego set only for your brother to knock it over “by accident.” You scream. You cry. And, naturally, you retaliate. You hide his action figures. Then, he rips up your posters. Next, you steal his piggy bank. Chaos ensues. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy—level of disorder—of the universe is always increasing. The madness continues until your mother comes home. Her eyes harden as she takes in the wreckage. She goes into your room and frantically starts grabbing clothes out of your closet. “I’m sending you two to the orphanage. I’ve had enough.” You believe her. Your heart sinks to the floor as your brother erupts into screams. She clutches a suitcase under one arm and grabs both your hands, marching you to the door. Your tiny chest heaving, you cry harder than you ever have, so hard you throw up. She sends you and your brother outside, throws the suitcase on the ground, and slams the door shut. Days pass and she apologizes. You forgive her. She is your mother, of course. She takes care of you.

Your father comes to visit. Your mother says she’s sick of parenting alone. Tears stream down her face as she packs her things and says she’s never coming back. You wonder if she really means it. A few days go by, and she comes back. She says nothing, so you act like it never happened. She’s warm, loving, and kind. You forgive her. She is your mother, of course.

Now your father has moved back. Your family seems whole again, solid. Solids are composed of tightly packed atoms vibrating in place; they are rigid and able to resist forces applied to their surface. But you wonder if it will last. You wonder what happens when force is applied from the inside. Of course, there are good days, a lot of them, actually; you all go bike riding at East Coast Park, you celebrate birthdays, you go on vacations. On the good days, the universe’s magic still exists. You swim with Varuna, the god of the oceans, on your snorkeling trips in Phuket; you play piano recitals with Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and art, while your mother watches intently from the audience; you bask in the sunlight of Surya, the sun goddess, on long nature walks with your mother and brother.

But, blissful ignorance can’t last forever. Unresolved tensions have been festering under the surface, and, inevitably, things reach their critical point. A critical mass is the minimum amount of atomic material needed to set off a nuclear chain reaction. You and your brother fight. Your mother yells at you, and she cries. She says she’s failed as a mother. She yells at your father, she says he’s too passive. You apologize and apologize, and you wonder what happened to her stories of Vishnu and his search for peace. You find yourself feeling alone more often. Your father has to work and your mother has to take your brother to his therapy sessions and classes, and, even when she’s around, her mind is elsewhere. You just can’t pin her down. She stops coming to your piano recitals and sports games; you’re not a child anymore, she doesn’t need to indulge you. You learn to keep to yourself, not wanting to burden her. She tells you to learn from her mistakes: to focus on your academics, that you won’t succeed in life if you waste it on mediocrity. You do okay for yourself. Never poorly, but never enough to make her proud.

One night, your mother knocks on your door. She says that she and your father are going for a walk. A few hours later, your father calls you from the hospital. She lied. She was having a cardiac episode. The doctors are doing some tests, but she should be fine, your father tells you. Of course, you’re relieved. But, a thought occurs to you: your mother thought she was dying, and she didn’t want to see you—her own daughter. She was probably too proud for you to see the state she was in, your father insists. However, a worse thought occurs: what if she hadn’t survived? She would have left this world barely on speaking terms with you—her own daughter. The shock passes, but the guilt remains.  

When your mother looks at you now, you’re not sure what she sees, yet you know it’s not herself, or her universe. She’s long forgotten the nights of lulling you to sleep with tales of the beyond. You both live your lives with a distance between you, an invisible barrier neither of you seems to know how to cross. Your mother isn’t the saving grace you so desperately want her to be. She’s a disillusioned shell of her former self. But, when you look at yourself, you still see fragments of her; your brown eyes, the dark circles beneath them, your need to hold it together when you’re so close to falling apart. You wonder if maybe one day you’ll find your way back to each other. More often, though, you wonder if you'll become just like her. For now, it remains uncertain. After all, the uncertainty principle is an inherent property of matter within the universe; it’s irrevocable.