55 on Karma

Dear Amma,

I’m sorry I spoke incessantly with food in my mouth, spat out medicines, refused to sleep and gave you a tennis elbow. What goes around, comes around.

I’m glad that I smothered you with kisses, played hours of peekaboo and read storybooks into wee hours of the morning. What goes around, comes around.

Four things F

Today, I return to writing about parenting.

Fascination – Have I told you, I am in complete awe of evolution? What I saw as a 6 millimetre black and white picture in a scan report grew into something so beautiful and is now with us, right here! I cannot but marvel with a dropped jaw at the miracle that is life.

Forgo – You learn to let go. Let go of sleep, jobs, looks perhaps and in some cases, lifestyles all together. Priorities get a rejig. The beauty of it is that, although you let go, there’s so much you get in return – unconditionally. Love, joy, a sense of belonging, a feeling of being wanted, being able to provide, protect, teach and raise another human being!

Fear – As a new mother, I was always scared whether I was doing it right. I constantly tried to live up to the most perfect image of the role – my mother. Also, being completely accountable for another soul is the single most important responsibility that life entrusts us with.

Fury to Fatigue – Most of this emotion actually started out as Fury. With time, the fury sobered down to just fatigue. Not so much the physical fatigue of going through the pregnancy, labour, surgical procedures et al. It is more the fatigue of listening to endless unsolicited advice, opinions, comments and every other conceivable mode of interference there is. And all this about myriad issues – about the baby herself, my parenting style, the dos and the don’ts, the right and the wrong. The list is endless.

What are the things that parenting has changed in you? Do you have experiences to share?

Airport Adventures

I took a two hour flight earlier this week, all alone with baby A. I was quite apprehensive about how I would manage alone, but I met a whole bunch of people who helped ease my nerves a great deal 

• The C-Suite executive who offered baby A some very expensive magazines, which I politely refused, for she knows not the difference between a Wharton journal and Bombay Times.
• The classic neighbourhood aunty who gave me 5 minutes of unsolicited advice about raising children from whom I slipped away on the pretext of checking the flight status.
• A young mother of a slightly older child, who reassured me that that phase I am in now, is way better than hers.
• A group of college kids, obviously hungover, craving for some sleep. The look of horror on their faces was priceless to the point of being funny when I walked alongside them towards the boarding gates. They sneakily tried to check which flight I was taking by throwing furtive glances at my boarding pass / hand baggage tags.
• The genuinely nice teenager who patiently kept picking up her toy every time she dropped it, so much so, it became a game of sorts!
• A chic lady at the coffee shop with a Fendi bag, doused in the finest of Issey Miyake fragrances. She looked disdainfully at my dark circles, far from perfect hair, unkempt toe nails. I felt like an old hag. She then ruined her perfect image by asking for an “Expresso” and I had the last laugh ;-)

I had such a swell time observing people’s reaction to the presence of a woman travelling alone with a baby, but there has to be a rotten egg hidden somewhere right? A pervert who would crane his neck any length to catch a glimpse of a woman breast feeding. Hmph!

Cleaning out my e-closet

I got my first cell phone when I was in the third year of my engineering. My friends from then know how I never bothered myself with the hassles of buying a new phone as long as I was able to make and receive calls and text messages. I never saw much use for the phone above that. They still taunt me about how I used that small, little Nokia phone till it cried out loud to have a peaceful death.

I managed to change with time, never being able to keep at pace with it though. As a good friend of mine says, I would always have a phone that would be outdated by a couple of models. My dad was and still is more phone savvy than me. Anyway, I slowly graduated to an android touch phone after terrible withdrawal symptoms from my good old Nokia, which had a real keypad. (Which I inherited from my dad, btw!)

So, I grudgingly upgraded my connection to include a data plan. And that was when it began - the addiction. Like all other vices, this began slow. I would use it to check FB now and then, I had a twitter account, but hardly tweeted. I was never active on these forums, they were basically snoop tools. Just to check who is doing what, who got married, who had kids, who travelled where, who got stuck in traffic and when yadda yadda…

One day I installed the google search widget on my homescreen. And there has been no turning back.

When I was working, it felt nice to be on top of things and to stay connected. There was this obsession to “know” things. Better be informed than sorry was my policy. It felt powerful to know so much, so easily. More than anything else, it was a great way to keep myself occupied. I used to travel hell of a lot for work at one point in time. My husband and I tried to sync our travel plans so that we could get back home from the airport together. I accumulated enough miles to fund some short trips! Anyway, this was a great way to keep myself occupied while I stood in those long queues and endless waits to board flights.

Like all other addictions, when this took over my personal time and space, I could not do anything about it.  

For instance, if I visited a doctor who prescribed a tablet that I hadn't had before, I would google it. And by google, I don’t mean superficial stuff. I am talking about proper, in depth research. Chemical composition, dosage, side effects, different views from different medical bodies etc. I did not have to make an effort to do all this, it came to me naturally.  

I enjoyed my pregnancy thoroughly, barring one scan and one blood test report, where terms like placenta previa, pelviecatsis, fetal macrosomia, low AFI etc. were thrown at me. After being told such stuff, I felt really claustrophobic without knowing what these meant. So google! I clicked one link after another and went into this spiral of research and worry, albeit only for a day. Thankfully, I had angels in my mother, husband and friends who would speak to me and allay all my fears.

Then I graduated to motherhood. Like all other new mommies, I had no clue what happened in the first few weeks after my delivery. Then it hit me, all over again. This time around, it was a craving to know whether I am doing it right. As a mother, you get paranoid about the tiniest little things.  So when my daughter started tugging uncontrollably at her ears, I googled it. After going through multiple forums, I refined my search string to “3 month old infant tugging at ear + chewing hand”. A little more research, and a little more refinement. Till I read everything that the internet had to say about it. I scoured the internet dry for articles on motherhood and parenting till the point of obnoxiouness. (Some of them have also been shared on FB, guilty as charged J )

And then, one day, I got so sick of it. Just plain sick of all the information overload and I shut down. All this after just about a week or so of indulgence! I reached a point where I did not want to know anything more and I cared two hoots about whether I was doing it right.

So I cleaned out my e-closet. I detoxed – I unliked, unsubscribed, turned off notifications and unfollowed unnecessary management mailers, job updates, baby and parenting websites. My e-life looks a lot cleaner now. That little search bar is worse than a black hole at times. And social media only sucks you in faster. The thing that this form of addiction kills apart from peace of mind is TRUST. It kills the trust you have in human beings. Be it a doctor, a family member or for that matter yourself.

Have you watched Kung-Fu Panda? The time when Po gets that moment of clarity and sense of balance? I think it is safe to say that I am somewhere near that zone now. I have learned the hard way when to use the internet and when to rely on my instincts. It took a great level of self restraint, but I have got the hang of it now. It just needed some amount of conviction to step out of all the frenzy. Now, the view from the slow lane is beautiful. And I suddenly have so much more time for everyday things and my life doesn’t seem like one mad rush anymore. You know how the grandmothers say that motherhood will come naturally? I never believed it earlier, but now I must say - it does. I don’t know how to explain it. Maybe it is the magic of the slow lane.

More often than not, the internet and all the other wonderful things associated with it have made me feel good, positive and reassured. Yes, it has improved my world view of things, I read a lot more, I have a new found love in Pinterest, I watsapp other friend mommies and it really is comforting to know that there are other people who experience things as me. I order books and stay connected with friends and family who live far away. You are reading this blog because technology has made it possible.

I feel like a hypocrite for saying this, but on the flipside, there have been a couple of times this internet spree has made me feel tired and rather miserable. And I will forever remember this lesson learnt. My mother, however, thinks I still spend too much time in front of the computer. I am working on it Amma J

Of the cruel, bad and ugly

My daughter has just started babbling.  She loves looking at pictures in story books and speaking with them. Although she doesn’t really understand what I read out to her, it scares me to think of the day that she will actually learn and comprehend this stuff.

Look at all the popular stories for children – Snow White, Rapunzel, The Ugly Duckling, Three Little Pigs et al. All of them are centered around a wicked stepmother, a jealous queen or worse still, concepts of ugly and bad!

Why would I want to drill into her that looking beautiful is even a virtue? I will someday have to explain to her what it means to look ugly. She will probably think that people feeling jealous or being cruel is acceptable, because her childhood stories revolved around these emotions. Of course, in all these stories, the good guy wins at the end of the day, but my point is – why even tell children the negative things to begin with?

I know, the sad fact is that she will anyway grow up to understand and probably use these terms in some context or the other, but I hate to be the one teaching her this. It feels like I am killing her innocence, it just feels so… wrong.

I would rather have her confuse a wolf with a wolverine, or even better, think that the wolf is a smoking hot picture of Hugh Jackman than a big bad guy who goes around blowing down pigs houses.  So instead of looking at a story book today, we read the latest issue of Lonely Planet.  :) 

But hope is not lost, because I found this wonderful publishing house based in Chennai – Tulika. Check out their stuff, it really is heartwarming and oh-so-Indian!  http://www.tulikabooks.com/. Can’t wait to go an ransack their store!