Time started rolling back the year I turned forty-one, but it wasn't until two months later that I started noticing it.

What can I say? I am not the sharpest tool in the shed, but as it turned out, I was the one with the best memory. For instance, when things that had already happened once happened again, I was the only one who could recall them.

When my daughter demanded tickets to watch BTS (a Korean boy band) live-in-concert, I knew who they were before she could tell me that 'I knew nothing' and was 'soooooo uncool' I remembered what I had learned by googling them the first time around.

As the clock kept turning backward, I found my life getting easier as I had faced the situations already; be it unplanned power cuts, hurricanes, or surprise visits from my in-laws, I was always ready with plans A, B, and C.

It felt like finally, Lord Ganesha, the deity of obstacle removal, had decided to favor me as I turned the events that had previously bought on embarrassment, and sleepless nights, into opportunities to shine. By the time Happy Old Year had come knocking the third time around, the whole house was looking at me as if I was some kind of gift and not a pain.

But all was not well. As years rolled back further, memories started bleeding into each other, till there were no more useful ones left.

It was the fifth year moving backward when it hit me that if this didn't stop, everything: the good and the bad that I had gathered in my life, the people I had met, the bonds that I had formed would vanish. Soon, I would be no more a mother or a wife.

I did not know what my future held or how long I had, but a person is an aggregate of the life they have lived.

As I sit with my family now, waiting for the clock to strike twelve, I want nothing more than to move forward. Once I was scared of what the future might hold, but now I want to welcome it, knowing that that's the right way, the only way to live and grow.

The unexpected, the unplanned, and the unknown all come together to mean something, and that something is what life is.

I close my eyes and hear my daughter excitedly count backward.

60, 59, 58...

Only a minute left now.

Will this be the year time starts moving forward?

I sure hope so.

The sound of crackers at the distance signals that the time to celebrate was upon us again.

A moment later, my daughter's strong arms drape over my shoulders. They seem sturdier than the last time she held me like this. Offering me a fleeting kiss on my cheek, she whispers, "Happy New Year, Ma."