July 5, 2011 · 5:59 pm

Five Things Motherhood Has Taught Me.

Thanks Forever Mother for tagging me in this and making me think.

What has motherhood taught me? Agh. So much. But, here’s the thing. When I respond to a question like this on my blog, there is, almost immediately, a conflict in my mind – between what I think motherhood has taught me and what it really has. You know, we have a perception about ourselves, which is not always accurate, but we like to believe facts about ourselves anyway! And a question like this makes me stop and think about perception and reality. Agh. The truth is not always good!

Anyway, here’s a sincere attempt:

1. Children are born selfish. The first instinct is of survival and self fulfillment. It is for the parents to teach them about sharing and giving. Ever tried to take a toy away from a two year old? What did that result in? You know what I mean..

2. Having kids has taught me something about my own parents – that people are not perfect and we expect our parents to be. It’s only when you become one you realize that your parents are human too.

3. Children do lie, though they do it without malice. So don’t always believe yours, listen to the other kid too..

4. Every child is different, so comparison is really not a positive thing.

5. And now for some emotion! Above all, motherhood has taught me to thank God for my happy life. No matter how much I rant and rave, I am fortunate. Very fortunate. And I don’t mean only economically. I mean it in every sense of the word…

Has motherhood changed me?

Like hell it has. Some for the better and some for the worse. Honestly.

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June 4, 2011 · 10:38 am

She’s beautiful. Truly.

What’s real beauty to me? Not a simple question.

Many clichés come to mind, but I reject them all. I think, till, I stop for a moment and think some more. Now thinking, most often, for me at any rate, has a positive result. What’s wrong with clichés? Are there any rules about them? Should one not use them only to sound intellectually superior? Nope, I think.

So, I tell myself, stop all this intellectual bravado, don’t worry, for a moment, about sounding trite, and think. More clichés. Sigh.

I know I want to say something about inner beauty, but what? I am not going to use a cliché!

Then, none other than Marilyn Monroe pops into my head. Gosh! Is that it? Am I so superficial? Fortunately, it’s not her skirt-flying-oh-look-at-me image that comes to mind, it’s what she said about beauty – “Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring”. Ironical that she should have said something like that, and I could not agree more.

Imperfection is beauty. I like that. And this is my cue.

Let’s rewind a bit: 1994 Miss India Competition, we sit glued to the TV – little girls and beauty competitions, there’s a direct connection there. (Not that I was little, but the connection starts, much to the consternation of the parents, when girls are little)

I remember it clearly. The competition, it is now quite evident, is between the two, then unknown, aspirants – Aishwarya Rai and Sushmita Sen. The former is blue-eyed, apple and peaches complexioned, straight from the never-written-yet-read-by-everyone beauty book. Yet, something seemed missing and I could not put my finger on it. Don’t get me wrong, I found her beautiful, not to deny that even in my most ah-beauty-is-about-inner-being moments. Yet, like I said, something was amiss, and it was not her puffy hairdo. The latter is beautiful too (they are all, just by the fact that they are at a beauty contest!) and yet, her beauty, for reasons I did not think about then, seemed almost tangible, like you could touch it. It seemed real.

Through the event Aishwarya wore a cat’s-got-the-crown look, something that, ironically, cost her the very crown she coveted. I remember thinking that she was beautiful, yet, I found it difficult to appreciate her beauty. Sushmita, on the other hand, may not have had the conventional looks (whoever defined those) but to me she was stunning. She had the spunk that, eventually, took her to the top.

Fast-forward to 2011: Now I think about those two women. Aishwarya has earned accolades, more than any Indian woman probably, for her physical beauty – her perfect face, her lovely eyes, her smile, et all. She’s probably forgotten that 1994 loss, or maybe learned from it. But that’s not the point.

Think, for a moment, about those two women today. Sushmita’s beauty has manifested itself in a way that Aishwarya’s simply cannot. How many women, and single women at that, do we know who have adopted girls and given them a loving home? Not many. Sushmita did not need to do that, she is rich and successful and could, like mostly everyone around her, live in her own little world, concentrating on herself and not much else. It’s easy to lose sight of reality when you are famous. But Sushmita seems to have her feet firmly on the ground.

Kudos to her, I say. She, to me, is truly beautiful and defines what real beauty is about.

And, I am sure she makes a beautiful mother too. Maybe we should ask Renee and Alisah about what Real Beauty means to them? They’ll probably have the perfect answer.

Here I quote Zadie Smith, who says that beauty is found where you would not expect to find it : “Pulchritude–beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection”.

Who would’ve thought that a former beauty queen would have so much beauty inside her that it would overshadow the one on the outside?

(PS: This post is written for a Dove Real Beauty Contest and may appear more relevant to people from India. My apologies to my readers from overseas, this one time!)

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June 2, 2011 · 11:22 am

Perfect Honesty Is Not Always Good For Childen.

Childhood, I believe is about happiness. Children need not know the truth about everything. I think we as parent sometime get too caught up in doing the right thing. What’s the right thing anyway? How do we know that is not better to bend the truth than to tell something to a child that he or she can’t digest?

I’ll tell you why I say this.

A few days after the earthquake in Japan my five year old daughter came to me and asked me what an earthquake was. It was a mama-what-does-this-word-mean kind of question. Now, whenever my daughter asks me a question,  I try and give her a detailed answer. In fact, we play a little game around it,  with the aim that she remembers the answer. It mostly works. So,  when she asked me about the earthquake,  I drew a little diagram, got out the globe, cut an orange to tell her about the earth’s crust and layers etc etc. She loved it.  That was that.

About three days later when I was putting my daughter to bed at night, she sobbed and sobbed and refused to sleep in her bed. She said that an earthquake might come at night. I told her that it won’t. She asked me how I could be so sure. After all, if the tectonic plates could bang into each other under Japan, the same could happen under India! I winced. Great,  I thought,  in my enthusiasm to teach her I’d given her too much information!  I’d gone and scared her.

Damage control, I thought. So, I launched into logic. And zones. India is in a zone that is not really prone to earthquakes, I told her (true) and that there are some countries that are more prone to them and we are not one of them. She seemed a little mollified, though not entirely. Phew!  (Still refused to go back to her bed). I had dodged a tricky question.

Unfortunately, there was more to come.  A few days later she asked me (and this is some sort of a recurrent theme, we’ve talked about this before, in snatches) about death. Agh. Not again, I thought. I was not in the mood for this.  But she was, and her questions were not general, they were specific. “Can babies die?” she queried. I decided to lie. “What about dad?”. I told her that only very old people die (One day, sometime ago, when I’d told her, on one of these bedtime question and answer moments, that mamas can die, she’d wept uncontrollably and clung to me for days) . So I decided to let her believe happy things. Why cloud her little five year old mind with unpalatable truth? Dad will be with you till you are as old as mama, and even after that, I said. “And you?”. Ditto, I said with a straight face. She thought, then she smiled. Not sure if she believed me entirely, but she liked the reassurance.

Like I said, and many may not agree, childhood is about happy things. Truth is for grown ups.

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May 3, 2011 · 9:31 am

The Sibling Factor..

I feel like a tightrope walker. All I seem to be doing, for, well, for a large part of my day, is the balancing act – between the kids that is.

Three kids – one five year old and then twenty month old twins – you can imagine the i-want-this-one kind of fights. To a new entrant in our house, the noise levels can be, well, just a wee bit overwhelming, to put it mildly. I am used to it, though; screaming is part of the general acoustics here. There is always a bone of contention, and that object, for that time, assumes such great importance for all three that nothing else can match its excellence and try as you might the one who has it will not part with it and the other two cannot be persuaded to play with anything else;  distraction tactics are met with flailing of the arms and, of course, some more screaming. No matter how hard I try to be fair and equal, there is always one kid (sometimes two)  screaming, or worse, sulking (this, mostly the older one) feeling betrayed and cheated. The younger ones like to express their discontent, at what they take for unfair treatment,  by prostrating themselves on the floor with shrieks that could pierce the Rock of Gibraltar.

The older one, on the other hand, has mastered the art of touching the raw nerves , of saying what she thinks will get her a reaction, and it does. “You don’t laugh with me the way you do with the twins”, or, “they are small, so you are always giving them my toys”.  She knows she’s being unfair when she says that, because I have been only too careful not to make her feel this way.  In fact, I have neglected the twins if needed, but not her, because I knew that it would be difficult for her to suddenly have to share everything, from her mother to her toys, with two more siblings. But, even then, at some level, she feels that I am not fair, that I treat her and the twins differently.

So, here’s what I think.  It’s a tough balancing act when you are a parent of two or more kids. In your mind you try and be fair, but that does not  necessarily mean that the kids see it that way too. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that they won’t.

I don’t know how my parents did it. I now realize what it means to raise three kids (we are three siblings too) and have them feel equally loved.  It’s a hard thing to do and my hope is that once they are grown up they won’t feel this way. Sibling rivalry can manifest itself in unpleasant ways, and that’s scary for a parent.

My kids are young right now and these are passing, insignificant fights, I know that. But, it makes me think, how will it be in the teenage years? When one of my girls is, say, 16, and the other two 13? Gosh. Imagine that.

These days will, in retrospect, look rosy and wonderful.

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March 23, 2011 · 6:16 pm

When parents Grow Old..

My folks live in a city that is about six hours by road (on a good day) and I visit them, say, three times a year. I try to get them to visit me but they are tangled up with their house, dog, garden, a little business they run (that is now getting a bit much for them but none of the kids want to take it over so it’s in a state of slow death) etc.

My father has Rheumatoid Arthritis and is in pain every single moment, every single day. It wasn’t so bad earlier, but for the past few months it’s become acute, mostly, because he’s developed a blood condition that requires some of his pain medication to stop. He’s now never without pain, in multiple parts of his body.

I call him, I feel terrible when I talk to him, but then my mom tells me that they are managing fine, which I know they are not. I go there sometimes when I feel he’s really low. But that can’t happen that often (kids school etc etc) so I mostly call, sometimes in my crazy day, I not even that . I  get sucked into domestic chaos and forget about his pain, till I get the time to think about it again (like right now). I want to change their life. I want them to wrap it all up and live in the same city as my sister, my brother and I, so we can look after them ( so it’s easier, I guess, for us to look after them) . They fight that and are not prepared to leave their life ( which I understand but I think it’s a matter of time that they’ll have to, once they grow too old to be alone). It’s hard I know, and we’ll face it someday too, but what is the other option, if none of us can move there?

It’s so hard to watch your parents grow old. I feel helpless. Part of me says – he needs you now,  drop everything and go, and sometimes I do. But I know I should be going/calling much more often; am so tied up with home and the kids that I can’t drop it all and go as often as I’d like. It makes me think – how does he feel about it? He’s in pain, he calls me and sometimes I can’t even talk because the kids are wailing and fighting over the phone. I tell him I’ll call later. I wonder if he understands. I know he calls my sister when he really needs to talk, she’s got more patience and has one grown up daughter, so it’s not crazy at home, though she works. We are three siblings, but all of us are so tied up with our daily lives that making a trip to see them becomes difficult, unless the kids have vacations.

I feel that time is running out. They are old, and though very independent, they, ideally, need someone to be there with them. They have help, of course, but that’s not all they need right now. They need one of us and not one of us can be there for too long.  It’s sad. I feel guilty, more because they never ask for help, but when I call my mom (now 75) and hear that the driver didn’t show up and she drove my dad to the doc, I feel miserable.

I don’t know what the solution is. His condition is not critical but he’s unwell and has a condition where he will be for a while, so, as my mom says ” how long can you leave your homes and be here?”. Not long I know, so we call, sometimes visit, then leave them waving at the door.

Life.

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March 15, 2011 · 6:51 pm

The clingy stage, all over again, and this time, it’s double trouble!!

My five year old is just about getting out of the really clingy stage (still demanding, don’t get me wrong, that’s not going to change – mommy must do everything!) But, she’s past that I-am-going-to-stick-to-your-leg-do-what-you-can state. So that’s something of a relief. (She’s developed other somewhat distressing habits, like the sulking and moodiness of a teenager, but, more on that later – another post). For now I am happy that she’s not hanging around me like a rope, on most days.

However, the twins, now one and a half, are right there! Clingy does not quite define their behavior right now. They are gluey to the point that I cannot even escape to the bathroom without them pounding on the door beseeching me to come out.  And that makes me wonder if this is so extreme because I’ve done/am doing something wrong!

The only thing I can think of is that, at night, I don’t put them to bed. I  leave the room because they drink milk (still on the bottle!) before sleeping and I can’t put two of them in my lap and feed them, so I leave them to their maids, something they were OK with till recently, but now they scream and shout and want me in the room. The problem, however, is that if I do try and put them to bed, they fight over who has to be in my lap, pushing the other out. It leads to much shouting and crying, with both of them saying “both babies!!” or “Mama, I want your lap!”.

It’s now kind of become a vicious circle – I flee because they fight each other for me, and no matter which one I pick up, I feel bad for the other. I leave because then, at least, they know that I’ve not picked one over the other. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do. I do know that, because I leave, they get clingier. I did try once to lie down next to them and pat them both, didn’t work. They both wanted to climb all over me and fought sleep.

Maybe I need to do this a few times to make them believe that I am not going to leave them at sleep time. But then, I get tired by the end of the day and look forward to a little bit of downtime before I go to bed. And that’s what I am going to have to give up if I have to put them to bed too.  I have no time in the evenings to myself, none at all.  My older one has to be fed and put to bed by 8:00 – 8:20, on school nights, so once we come back from the park, I am on a fast track to get her all set for the night. Then we eat dinner (mostly, I eat with the twins taking turns to sit on my lap while I try and eat!). Then I play with them for about forty minutes, till the maids eat and wrap up. So, by the time it’s time for them to sleep, I am out of steam (and patience).  That’s when I want a bit of time to unwind, talk to my husband (seems like that never happens nowadays – a gap’s developing that I don’t like). The kids sleep with us at night, and the twins still wake up a lot, so I don’t get even one uninterrupted night’s sleep – they sometimes wake up at the same time and in their sleep they cry for mommy. That’s the hardest part, because they are sleepy and not in a mood for sharing their mother and I am not my best at that time either.

What am I doing wrong? Do all mothers of twins go through this?

I have so much to write, but, I need to sleep now. It’s late and something keeps telling me to stop blogging and sleep while the kids are sleeping too. Wonder what tonight will be like..

To bed now.

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March 10, 2011 · 4:39 pm

Schools. Gosh.

My five year old goes to a good school. OK, a great school. It’s one of the most sought after ones around here (elitist? you bet), with parents bending backwards to get their kids into it. I, actually, didn’t realize, when my daughter got admission, that it was so hot, but it is and getting hotter still.

Hotter and now, unfortunately, a bit arrogant too, with a don’t-like-it-leave-it attitude, which is not good, not good at all.

Tell me, am I overreacting when I say I don’t want to, as a parent, be assigned bus duty? What’s that? Well, it means that parents will be “encouraged”  to offer their services and be open to getting rostered duty on the school buses! Yes, you heard me. Not kidding! When I heard this, I was a bit, well, shocked, so I didn’t quite hold back my reaction and went ! “What the..”  Another parent, however, was open to it. (She said that she really wanted her second kid to get into the school, so she’d do what she could to get into the good books of the staff! ) Oh! come on! This is crazy, I said. She shrugged and informed me that she was part of the parent teacher association and intended to actually push the matter.(Not  a coincidence, I later thought, that her daughter is splattered all over the school magazine looking quite the star kid..hmm..)

Great. So now I pay through my nose (and other orifices!)  to send my kid to a good school only to be “requested” to spare a few hours every now and then to generally ride the school bus with a bunch of tired kiddos. Yup, my idea of a great afternoon. Not only that, what am I supposed to do with my kid on those days, the kid I pick up at the bus stop? I take her (hungry and tired) with me on this joyous ride too?

There is such a dearth of good schools and so many parents desperate for them, that schools get away with any shit these days. No one says a word.  The fee is hiked more regularly than fuel prices, but no one raises an alarm.I don’t exactly storm into the Principal’s room either! I am told they don’t take to well to revolt, and I am afraid my kid will suffer. So, I mutter to feel better and blog to vent  it out!

 

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