Week 27

I didn't write the weekly update on the weekend as I was coping with physical and mental exhaustion. Stress playing havoc with my cycles or perhaps it was the other way round.

I had to speak to a doctor.

Do you have extreme mood swings, get irritated over small things? The doctor asked.

Was she mad?

I have been cooking 3 meals a day for 4 people, every day, for the last 6 months. That with an ever increasing workload at office, blurring office and home timings, no cook, no househelp and then there are grumbles about food!

Irritated?

Maybe it was diplomacy or just empathy. She didn't probe any more about my moods.

I checked with the family too.

Irritation? Did they too think I was heading towards early menopause?

A long silence and meaningful looks later, the younger one cleared her throat. Not at all, Mom. You were always like this.

Nothing to do with the lockdown!

Week 23

I remember the childhood experience of watching a flood in Kolkata. The street had become a river. A man with a boat would come with essential supplies. My grandmother would negotiate from the balcony, a bag tied to a rope would go down with the requisite cash and come up with the bread, eggs and other miscellaneous stuff. It was pretty exciting for us.

We were safe on the first floor but the grown-ups would still look down and frown. The water level was still rising! It must have entered the garage. Another hour of rain and it will flood the car’s engine. There would be lots of hypothesis and predictions about how much damage it would have been caused, when the water would start receding, what the government should be doing and when would life get back to normal?

I don’t remember but I’m sure my mother and aunts would have stretched to keep the house running ‘as usual’ even though supplies were limited and unpredictable, the maids had no way of coming and the waters were still rising.

I am the grown-up now.

The house is running as usual but outside the numbers are still rising ominously and we have no idea when it will end.

When the virus scare started, I was just thankful that everyone had reached home safely. I was excited about having the family together and not having to commute to office everyday. Not having help for cooking and cleaning would be tough, but between the four of us that was one inconvenience we could manage.

None of that has changed.
Just that excitement is changing into exhaustion with each passing day. The adventure has become blasé and the newness has become routine.

From trying new recipes and competing on social media, it is becoming a task to even think about what to cook for the next meal. Is it just because I am missing my house-help so much? Partly, yes. Office work has scaled considerably as everyone has adapted to the work-from-routine. Now we are expected to be online all the time since we are working from home and we are at home all the time. Trust the corporate world to twist the logic every single time.

The kids’ school and college have adapted to working online-and they are inundated with online classes, assignments and of course the miscellaneous things that take up your time when you have access to your own laptop and Wi-Fi.

So the time for housework and the interest level have dipped considerably. The amount of work remains stubbornly unchanged and each week I end up feeling more tired than the previous week. And hope that the next week will come with some good news.

 

Mother Grinch

“All the flats have maids coming in.” My husband keeps reminding me whenever I moan and groan about the extra housework. It’s for my sake as much as his own that he wants the cooking and cleaning tasks restored back to the paid house-help.

“Let’s decide by next month.” I put off the discussion. The one month became four and more, but the statistics underlying our decision only get worse and we all continue to pitch in with the washing and scrubbing. The girls have responded wonderfully. Sharing the load on all tasks while missing out on their time for ‘chilling’ and not complaining-much.

They miss meeting their friends. Actually meeting and playing with them. Especially since they all continue to play and call them. Their parents believe it is safe because there has been no case within the society-yet.

I pray they are right. And yet I refuse to take the chance.

My elder daughter has made her peace with the situation, more so because she doesn’t have that much inclination to go out and mingle anyway.

But she felt bad for her kid sister.

“All her friends are playing. She is not taking their call because she will have to tell them she can’t come and play. She knows you will not allow her.”

“But she hasn’t even asked me.”

“Yeah because she knows you will say no.”

I feel sad as my younger one insists she is fine. That she knows it is not safe to go out and mingle even when Badminton is the one of things she misses most in the current situation.

Maybe the other parents are right in letting their kids enjoy their childhood, and I am the one who is wrong, worrying too much about the worse-case scenarios. What if it is actually safe and my kids are missing all the fun because of my fears?

But knowing all the risks involved, can I take a chance? What if one of them is a healthy carrier? What if that fun can make my child ill?

I steel my heart and say no. The kid nods in sad understanding.

I feel so sad at her brave acceptance. I wish I could have made her happy. But given the choice between keeping her happy or safe, I had to choose the later.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay  

The Early Winds

Early Vacations

Think of any time before 2020. How would these words sound?

It was early March.

The country had a handful of declared cases. There had been no covid related deaths. It was still a disease which had infected a few on their trips abroad. If they were quarantined and treated, the whole scare would go away in weeks. (oops, do I sound like Trump?). Well, that’s what most people thought at that time. We (and definitely the leaders) should have known better. But that’s another story.

I got an email with the subject “Early Vacation Announcement” and jumped in glee!

My younger one was coming home early! I walked out of the work area to make a few excited calls from the office corridor. The logistics were a bit complicated. I had a planned trip to Mumbai just before the pickup date but I wasn’t going to let that dampen my excitement.

Vacations were the only time I had with the girls. I planned menus like project plans. Shopping trips, eating out, movies, trips all had to be condensed within these fleeting time frames.

In the five days before I had to pick up the kid, the world kept changing faster every day.

I started reading every data, every research, every rumour. Fear started dampening my excitement and caution replaced optimism. The day before the trip, there was news of one person testing positive in the office complex 500m from home. I dashed out to buy masks and sterilizers even though all experts in YouTube videos insisted they weren’t necessary.

The virus was here, I would rather be called paranoid than risk my kid falling sick, I was in full hyper-mom mode.

Three and a half months later. I am getting hyper every day.

The Best Laid Plans

I plan. It helps me feel that I am in control (of whatever).

I need to make plans otherwise I get caught up in moments and land miles away from where I needed to,
And a lot of times, unexpected things happen, situations change and so do plans. So, I usually have a plan-B and even a plan C for worst case situations. This approach has worked beautifully for work-related projects, managing household inventory and investments and even holidays. With people, the plans need to be a lot more elastic, but the overall idea usually worked.

And then came March 2020.

Campus closures and travel bans. Kids at home with nothing to do and nowhere to go. The whole family at home, the maid at her home, and all the office work to do. Flights cancelled for vacations on which now we anyway don’t plan to go. And I don’t even know what to plan for.

Priorities changed.

I have started checking Bigbasket and Amazon Fresh to see when they are restarting deliveries more frequently than I check Facebook or email. Instead of cribbing about work, I am thankful for jobs that are allowing us to go about ‘life as usual’.

Instead of planning for the future, I am living in gratitude in the present. Thankful that the family got to move together before we got locked out and doing my best to help those who could not. And instead of waiting for holidays and vacations and big-ticket purchases, am just waiting for the days when a safe cure is around to combat this fear, and we can get back to the routine, humdrum, boring old life.

And getting my maid back? I certainly have renewed appreciation for her work, but I would not fear her leaves so much any more. Of all the things that have given me confidence, learning to manage with limited resources, without maids, while keeping kids occupied and doing justice to my job among all this mayhem are the topmost.

I am grateful we have been able to cope well so far and hope the same for all. Sharing my prayers for those still in peril and fear, and hopes for a world that heals soon.

Another stage of motherhood

There are some posts you read and forget.

Some which make you think.

There was one from a woman, a mother with a married son who urged other not love their children so much. Her story was sad. She had put her son above everything and everyone and done everything for his happiness. Now that he was employed and married, he didn’t have time for her. He did not look after his mother the way she had looked after him. She was not the most important person in his life anymore.

I am a mother too.

One who always puts her children first.

I also feel let down that though my children love me and would not want to hurt me deliberately, I am just one of the important people in their life. Even though they are born out of me, every day since their birth, they have been moving more and more away from me, creating a world of their own.

They did not ask me to put them first. I chose to.

Obviously, I would want them to put me high on their list of priorities. But they'll have other priorities of their own too. That is hard to accept.

But isn’t that I do too?

I would put off calling my mom, if my daughter was sick or had an exam. That when my mom had also always put me first.

That I guess is the cycle of life.

Although it is one hard to accept.

My mom is at a stage where she definitely doesn’t want me to put her first. Where she wants me to take care of my family and my work first. Where she does not feel insecure if I don’t call her every day. Where she knows that I love her and will always be ready to take of her, but there are other things I need to do at the moment.

She has let me go and is happy being a part of my life from afar.

I too will have to do that one day.

It will be hard but then that is another stage which all mothers live through.

It is just a little different when the child is a married son. That’s another story.

Parenting a Teenager

I have some time to write today. But no clue about what to write about.

When this was primarily a mommy blog, there was always some incident like coming home to find the PC screen upside down or some conversations like these that I had to share. I am still the mommy but with two teenagers, there has been a slow and steady erosion of my job description.

The kids are not only on their own wings, they keep trying to take me under their wing too. Maybe they are looking for some payback.

You need to exercise. No mom, you don’t have fever and you can’t bunk office. How can you read this crap; I’ll find you a book to read. Show me the ticket, I need to confirm the time. Give me the ID cards. Did you pack your charger? Why didn’t you finish lunch? Phone-Wallet-Keys why can’t you not lose just these three things?

For some time, I would keep reminding them that I was still the mom, but then I stopped bothering. I listen to the instructions. I make worse excuses than they ever made. When they get really mad over some random (unfortunately quite common) incident like misplacing a wallet, I use the zooming-out trick I learnt from them.

When I almost delayed a flight, requesting that they let me ‘un-board’ and search for my phone, I thought my daughter would start a blog of her own! ‘Teenaging a parent’ or something like that. We found the phone in the seat pocket after sending the crew on a treasure hunt. She just gave that ‘Don’t say a word’ look, I refused to meet her eyes. I acted ‘normal’, read a book for ten minutes and then silently offered to share a bag of chips.

It is good fun being a parent of a teen. 

It’s also payback!

Experiments in ensuring the kids new their language(s)

A prompt on the Momspresso blogging platform nudged me to write this post. It took me back to the days of mad hands-on hit-and-miss parenting experiments. Most of my posts are now more reflective or borderline morbid. Maybe it's a 'phase of life' thing. Well this one is from another phase:

We live in city where if you step out to any public space-an event, airport, or a bus you get to hear a cacophony of languages: Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali to start with. In a situation where adopting any one Indian language over the other seems to tread on regional pride, most people have adopted English as the link language.

So much so that my children's generation now speaks and thinks in English as their first language and falter to even complete a sentence in other Indian languages. At one point, I thought it was ok, language is for communication. If the kids find English an easier medium to connect with people, and they anyway need it for school, let them use English exclusively.

But then a language is much more than a tool for communication. It connects you to an entire culture, your traditions and your heritage. Determined to preserve the connection to their roots for my not-so-interested children, I have tried multiple experiments over the years.

Assigning languages to people:
Using only Bengali while talking to grandparents. Speaking only in Hindi with parents.

Outcome: Slow, painful and yet at times hilarious conversations. (4-year-old telling Ramayana to her grandmother: taar pore ora Ram ke jungle-e bheje dilo. The literal translation: Then they fried-off Ram in the jungle). The convoluted conversations would end up with the grand-parents speaking in English. It was a bit confusing and even I would end up mixing the language and person.

Assigning days:

Saturdays were declared Hindi days; Sundays as Bengali days. These became the most peaceful days as the kids were still not fluent enough to fight without English. Given a choice between not squabbling or building up their vocabulary, they adapted soon and now we had cat-fights in three languages! I am not sure whether this was a good move or not.

Movies:
Yes. Bollywood was far more successful in teaching Hindi to my kids then any enforced language class. It still took some time to catch up though any there would be real confusion like the time my then 6-year-old watched Band-Baaja-Baraat to wonder in the end: But who was Baraat in the movie?

It was more difficult to coax them to watch Bengali movies, so I started with a fun-movie Bhooter Bhavishyat. They enjoyed it, so I pushed my luck with another comedy, but this with a bit of partition history, Goynar Baksho. That went well! Excited, I tried playing more contemporary movies but then my luck ran out- “Can we see only Bengali Ghost movies?” I guess the other facets of culture will have to wait.

Travel:

There are large parts of the country where English doesn’t work that way. And kids learnt it on their own. While in Delhi they picked up the Punjabized Hindi, in Bangalore they learnt to intersect it with 'aiyos'. In Rajasthan, they interacted comfortably with the neighborhood children in colorful Hindi and my elder daughter told me with pride how she bargained in Bengali, in Banaras!

School:
I think this was the most effective channel. My children went to boarding school and broadened their horizons beyond the confines of family and region. They had friends from all parts of the country, were exposed to songs and movies in multiple languages and they learnt to appreciate unique facets of different cultures. If there was a weekend movie in Marathi, they would make a Marathi speaking friend sit with them and translate all the words, beyond subtitles.

Now they insist that while Bahubali was dubbed very well; to enjoy the songs, I must listen to the Telugu version! That’s the circle of life, I guess.

Papaya Leaves

I don’t even have Papaya as a fruit. I don’t like the smell and the memories it brings of recovering from illness.

But when you are told your child has dengue and papaya leaves are the best medicine for her-you are looking for them as soon as land is visible from the aeroplane. I was already calling my friend+neighbor who is familiar with the apartment garden, from the taxi on the way home from airport to check if we had a papaya tree. As soon as my daughter was fed and settled in bed, I went down to hunt with my best kitchen knife.

Finding a tree to climb

There was no papaya tree at that spot or anywhere else I could see! My friend’s phone was unreachable, and the building gardener was on leave. Another neighbor I called was sure there was a tree but could not recollect where.

I grilled the electrical maintenance guy: “Yes, there a tree here, we cut it last month.”

I had to restrain myself from using the knife on him.

I think he read my expression as he took a step back and apologized: “We planted two new ones, they’ll bear fruit soon….”

“Oh, you want the leaves?”

I don’t know which one of us was more relieved.

Then comes the JUICE

How do you juice the leaves? The citrus or the non-citrus juicer? The mixie? None of them seemed to be effective. I called friends and searched on YouTube but could only manage to extract a teaspoon of juice from one giant leaf.

I stuck the other leaves in my tall flower vase and moved on to the other juices as the other generic advice was to keep giving her fluids. (One doctor advised 3-4 liters per day, another said 1.5l most friends suggested ‘as much as you can’; I set the target at 3l).

When doctors tell you, there is no treatment but to observe and support; your kid is burning up with shooting temperatures and then falls listless with dramatically dropping platelet counts; you remember all the horrors dengue can cause and yet need to remain calm and reassuring-desperate faith is all you have to pull through.

I think it is that faith that brought unexpected help from different quarters: my maid took over the responsibility of getting fresh leaves every day and juicing them too (with far more efficiency); a friend advised me on diet and even offered to treat her through quantum healing; and another friend made me get in touch with her ayurvedic doctor and explained Baba Ramdev’s video on treating dengue with fruits and herbs.

Since regular allopathy wasn’t helping much. I tried everything else-kiwi, pomegranate and mosambi juices, coconut water, aloe-vera, wheat-grass and of course-papaya leaf extract. 

(New learning: You can’t get a glass-full or even a cup-full of it. The leaves need to be chopped and pounded or ground into a rough pulp and then squeezed to extract a tablespoon of juice. This much is enough, according to what I learnt-more than 30 ml in a day may cause stomach discomfort.
Another one: Too many forced fluids can case bloating and too many frequent trips to the toilet; 2 liters are good enough).

The beautiful part about desperate times is that it brings around wonderful people who care and share and give you strength to pull through. Thanks to all of you, my girl was soon well enough to argue and make her own plans and bully me into agreeing with her. Maybe some of the tips worked, your prayers and wishes definitely helped. The papaya leaves are out of my flower-vase now. Thank you!

Butterfly

To the eighteen-year old, poised to take on her flight

Do I wish for time to turn back;

and live those moments once more?

Or, that it just stood still a little longer;

letting me hold you close and tight?

Or, just feel it slip through my fingers,

as your wings flutter out of their cocoon,

and the glorious hues burst out,

sparkling in the dazzling light...

Making Sense of an Ending

A seventeen year-old in my neighborhood jumped to his death.

His parents are devastated. I, like most of the people who have known them for years, shocked to the core. I had thought I’d tell me daughters about the incident only when they came home for the holidays, when we could have a longer conversation. But bad news travel fast and it was my daughter who asked me for ‘details’.

Then I had to write to them. I write to them often but this time I did not know what to write. Why am I putting parts of it in the public domain? As a prayer from a mother who hopes that no parent has to live through this.

What happened?

He jumped from the 7^th Floor.

Why?

Only he knew what was going on in his mind at that moment. Anything else we say would be an un-called for assumption.

What other details can I give you?

His parents will be in pain for a very long time. It is like he stabbed them and went off, leaving the knives in.

We are all shocked. We, who knew him as a much loved child a friend of our children, are now not sure how to talk to our children.

Say yes to everything, because we don’t know how you will react to a ‘no’? But then how will you face the number of times the world says ‘no’ to you? Be around, keep a check on all your activities, your internet time, your interactions? But what if that sends you off in a more remote corner, interpreting out protection as intrusion? Trust you, leave you to your own space-but what if that leaves you feeling alone or isolated or vulnerable?

There are a hundred ways in which we can go wrong. But is this the solution?

We have just one life. And that too is limited. Some beliefs say we are born over and over again but then that will be as a different identity, a different life altogether. Death is final. And every death is so sad. The death of a child, that too when it is deliberate and avoidable is the saddest.

Maybe he thought it was his life and he had that right to give it up because he didn’t want to live it anymore. What makes a person decide to take his own life? Depression, desperation, frustration, loneliness, losing all hope, not being able to ‘face’ the world, running away, or the desire to punish someone-making them regret forever? Or is it just that overwhelming moment? For everything there is a better solution.

Maybe he thought there was no other way for him. Everyone is looking for the reason now. If anyone knew the reason, before he took this step, they could have helped. Maybe if he had talked..

There will be phases in life where there is no hope, where your struggles may seem too tough to carry one, where you may not see the point of going on (I wish I could save you from such sadness forever, but it’s a reality which happens to everyone). But there is always a way out.

J.K. Rowling suffered from severe depression. She channeled it into imagining the ‘Dementors’ and the 'Dementor’s Kiss'-a fate worse than dying because all happiness and hope is sucked out of life. Everyone can’t write a 'Harry Potter' but everyone can survive, find a new hope, a new reason to live. It takes a lot to break out of these phases, more than conjuring up a Patronus from happy thoughts, though that is a good begining. Talking helps-massively.

There will always be a way out. Talk to us, your friends, strangers, anyone. Keep talking. Keep the human connections alive and you’ll find a way. Be a friend. There would be people around you going through such a phase but you’ll be unaware if you don’t talk enough. You could be a tiny light for someone. Make someone’s life happier. Make your own happiness. Make something from your own life. It can be as beautiful as you let it be. (No, don’t take it as more gyan from me-this is just what I wish for -a beautiful life for you).

It’s been a long time.

It’s been like losing touch with an old friend. You think of her, but then you realize you don’t know her new numbers. You think of asking for it, someday. Life keeps happening, tasks keep getting added onto the to-do list faster than you can tick them off and someday gets postponed, again.

You still think of her, you know it is not too difficult to call, but don’t know what to talk.

Maybe, it’s better leaving some moments only for the memory.

Maybe, it’ll be more disappointing to talk and find we have nothing much to say to each other anymore.

But maybe, I’ll regret having not made the call even more.

Had it been a mythical friend I was talking about-I could have even added ‘waiting for her to make the first move’ to my list of excuses. I was thinking of my old mommy blog-which feels like a friend I have ignored for a long time, but have never been able to forget completely.

It feels strange to log in again. I am actually nervous. What if I make a start again and fumble after a few days.

Well I started maintaining this journal, just to record some precious memories. I’ll regret more if I don’t write whatever I can.

So here I go again-Mamma Mia!

I hope some my old friends are still here-I miss you.

A Bird gets me to blog

Saw a mother bird teach her brood to fly

Not much teaching actually.

She flew and they saw

She chirped and they fluttered their downy wings

Hopped and fluttered them a little more

Perched on the ledge and skipped a few steps

In a few days they were all soaring towards the sky

And then they left home.

Did the mother bird know that they would go away so soon?

Is she happy that they can now fly on their own paths?

Scared, that they may not find the way home?

Lonely, because they may not want to come back?

Guilty, because she could have cared for them a little longer?

Angry, because they no longer need her?

Content, that she has done her work well?

Proud, that they have flown so high that even she cannot reach them?

Confident, that they will reach the stars?

Thankful, for the moments she got to spend with them?

Mother birds is happily chirping away,

My eyes are still on the chicks trying to ride the wind;

My chicks complete another year of school, 

the fluttering gets louder...

Looking for a Silver lining

I have not retired from blogging.

I have the same excuse as everytime.

I was just waiting for things to come back to turn right.

But things just kept turning left.

Just the little mom things

Like house-hunting with the stop-watch ticking away in countdown mode.

Like the kids’ exams to get over-they did. But then we had to make up for all the missed-out Guitar and Art classes.

And the maid just had to leave for her native village for a three-day trip which got stretched to a week.

And it was just the time that we found that both cooking Gas cylinders were now empty, and a delivery which normally took three days, this time took 11!

I did have the microwave to pull me through, but there just happened to be a day-long power-cut too.

And then the kitchen taps didn’t leave me the option of ignoring them till we moved away, the school van didn’t come one day, my partner in fire-fighting had to go away for two weeks, and the school declared a day off when it was my working day.

Is insomnia preferable to nightmares haunted by houses and exam papers and cooking breakfast on powerless microwaves?

Maybe not-I realized as I heard the screeching dent on my car.

The quotes on positive thinking just did not work.

It was only on reaching office and drinking hot-coffee from a machine that worked that I could think of the silver lining.

The dent is on the left fender!

The old one! For which I can now claim a replacement.

Let me celebrate by logging in.

Mom Alone

Growing up is such a pain.

Especially when you have to do it when you think you are old enough not to do it anymore.

Leaving children at home and travelling for work is what Moms and Dads need to do all the time. And I had managed not to do all this time-it was a record.

Was-past tense

This one time-I am doing it. Not that I had run out of valid reasons, but this once I felt I could leave, knowing that they would be able to manage.

I am the one not able to ‘manage’.  Offering bubble-gum to a stranger as the flight takes off, not able to launch into my spiel about the history and geography of the place I am travelling to,  talking to my family only through the screen-not able to touch, feel, poke or tickle …………..it is a whole lot of growing up.

Being the one staying back with the kids, managing the home-work-kids-and everything else issues, this once I feel that the one going away has it worse.

Do I have so much more to learn? 

Letting them be

....what they want to be.

That’s what we should be doing. Teaching them to fly and then letting them free to go explore, build their own nests, and fight their own battles.

But as my chicks are trying out their new wings I am not sure how well I’ll be able to do that.

My 10-year-old says that she shouldn’t be spending too much time on her studies because anyway she is going to be a fashion designer, or an actress, or a dancer. (The logic-they are fun, you get famous and you don’t need to study).

I cannot find the words to cheer her on-so I resort to my Loverna-like manipulations. Introduce her to more interesting ways to study, tweak her selection of books at the library, and try to get her to explore more options by enrolling her in a Robotics class.

This, she enjoyed. It was not like regular school. They got to watch videos, work hands on with building and programming robots, and as a final workshop, even design and build a robot of their own choice.

They called the parents to see the final presentations and it was really impressive. There was robot for picking up debris. One racing car robot which had sensors to stop it from crashing. There was one which had a pencil attached to follow simple writing instructions (has the potential to be developed into a homework tool).

And here is Elena’s robot.

She is a ballerina, designed to take perfect pirouettes.

Well, technology is also fun, but she can get distracted only to this extent.  

Running out of Mommy skills

This is a question to all moms or rather all parents:

Do you get mad at your kids? Really angry, annoyed, pissed off enough to say Ok-Do it your way!

Or am I one of the few who cannot keep the ‘Mom hat’  on at all times and say no matter what you do or say child (or how obnoxiously you say it), I forgive you because I cannot remain angry with you?

As my daughters live up to their pre-teen (is that supposed to start at 7!!!)  identities with gusto,  we are having more frequent and serious showdowns each day. I get seriously upset when I have to juggle schedules, work crazy hours to meet my deadlines, miss out on things I wanted to do, just to ensure that they do not miss out on anything, be it be extra classes, doctors appointments, trips to the library or even a birthday party, and all they do at the end of the day is crib!

Sometimes I really question my maternal instincts. I do not have that unlimited patience and wisdom motherhood was supposed to come with.

We had another of these showdowns today as the younger went on arguing it was ok to go swimming with her cold. After the usual round of reasoning, explaining, cajoling, and debating, we fell back to our same old conclusions: THAT’S NOT FAIR and NO MORE DISCUSSIONS! (Why on earth did we have to waste an hour for reaching it when she had an exam the next day and I, as usual, had a deadline to meet??? )

Next time I’ll let her do it her way and bear the consequences…maybe she’ll learn that way. But not this time.

It’s been hours since then.

My baby could not sleep as she was racked by terrible coughing fits. I tried everything to help her, but she was just clinging to me and coughing away. After a trip to the doctor, a change in medicine, and vomiting out her dinner, she’s finally sleeping peacefully (touchwood!)

I am still awake. Watching over

Tomorrow she’ll be better. Fighting with me again, and yes, calling me the “worst mother” amongst all the friends’ mothers. And I’ll be fighting back instead of allowing her in the pool. Because no matter how angry I get, I am a mother.,,

Words that live on

Remember the days we prepared for exams and dreamt of the holidays to follow? I always had a long list of things to do in the vacations-that I would keep updating as I would make notes for the exam next day. And then the vacations would be over before I got to point no. 2 or 3 on the list.The same things happened to my blog. The last few months I kept pushing off things because I would be free in a few weeks. And then,   things just got busier and crazier till I forgot what I wanted to write about. Some of the things didn’t matter anymore…

Just one incident that still finds me shaken was reading about IHM’s daughter. Something no mother should have to go through, something that is so brutal, so final…

I remember holding my grandfather’s hand for hours as he turned to a cold block of wood. And I felt furious at the hordes of relatives who descended and suddenly started calling him “the body”. He was still my grandfather. I was praying so hard. He would of course draw in a breath again…

But he did not. 

There was no hope.

How does a mother deal with such a moment?

I salute you IHM. Your courage is amazing.

And so are your daughter’s words, which are a beacon to all mothers like me..

Why such a late tribute? Because I cannot go on to my blog without thinking of you. Isn’t it strange, when we don’t even know each other, except just through our words?

My Mom and me

The galaxy changes when you become a mom, doesn’t it? It starts revolving around a new center.

The realization hit me a long time ago when I was going to the hospital for a c-section. Every time I had been seriously sick before that, I had needed my mother. Yes. Even as a rebellious teenager, and independent adult, whatever…

This was the first instance when I was insistent that Mom should stay at home with Elena. Just so that my daughter can see Nani when she wakes up and know that all is well with the world.

Over the years, as life became more about taking care of others, I needed my mother even less. To the extent that this time when I had to get admitted for an emergency op, she was one person I didn’t inform at all. She would not have been able to do anything from so many miles away, and have got more stressed because of it.

But I still missed her…