Tag Archives: Mommy Blogs

April 30, 2010 · 12:08 pm

Mama, what colour is God? Is God a man or a woman?

Tough questions to answer, not because I cannot deal with them or explain but because I thought these would come much later, not when she is four. But it only tells you how conscious kids become these days and how early.

I was bathing my four year old and she said that she wondered what colour God was, just out of the blue. Ouch. I said to myself. I was not in the mood for an explanation at that point, had a lot to do, twins(have eight month old twin girls) needed attention, but I didn’t want to just let it go and ward her questions off, not this one. So, briefly, I told her all the right things, to the best of my ability, about colour of the skin not mattering etc etc, about God not being one and of a single colour.  She nodded then added “but lighter is better, isn’t it?” I squirmed, then said “no”,  and patiently told her some more about what mattered more, about good deeds and good human beings rather than superficial things like skin colour. She didn’t questions any more and I am not sure what she took away from our conversation, which I am going to revisit in a few days when I have a little more time to explain better and after, frankly, I’ve given it a thought myself, about what I am going to say!

I know I must be prepared as a parent to face all sorts of questions, and a lot would depend on what I say, so I must be careful. But what disturbed me was the fact that colour of the skin mattered to her, and she could not have picked this up from the house, since I am very particular about such matters and like to say the right stuff in front of the kids. And it’s not like she’s partial to fairer people either, which is why I was surprised and a little upset. This tells you about the limited control you have over what your kid learns and picks up, sooo many factors influence them, and you have to constantly counter or reinforce these, as may deem necessary. Scary.

Parenting is not easy. I just hope I have the answers as the questions come along..

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February 3, 2009 · 11:49 am

It’s happened, but fingers crossed..

Ok, so the ‘O’ phase is over. Phew! Yes, you understood right, I am pregnant. But, at 37, and I know this is not out of norm in today’s world, but my gynie wants me “not to celebrate yet”..till 12 weeks are over and I’ve gone through the gazillion tests for anything and everything.

So, while I am not screaming from the rooftops, much as I’d like to, I’ve told few people – family basically. In India there is this hoo ha about letting three months pass and I have to say I don’t see any harm in that.

And yes, one more thing, I’ve developed asthma, apparently the lethal combination of pregnancy and air pollution (which Delhi is full of) can cause asthma and bronchial spams, and I’ve already experienced both. So am now on nebulizers, inhalers, the works. Also, I have a throat infection – fungal they say – could have happened because of one of the inhalers, so am also on antibiotics. Feel sacred thinking of all the medication and the baby… Sigh, it’s only been eleven weeks, the road ahead looks long..

But, having said that, I am happy, very happy. I know the coming months are going to be tough, since the breathing is only going to get more difficult, but I’ll deal with it. I am happy. Now I have something to focus on. It’s weird how human beings love to justify something and once they can, then they feel better. Now that I am pregnant I am not thinking about not working because I have this to think about – it’s what I was waiting for so that I could push that work date far into the nebulous future and try and forget that it bothers me that I will have been out of the workforce for centuries by the time the second one is born..

Anyway, this is the update from me.

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September 4, 2008 · 5:05 am

Down The Leafy Path..

I have a friend, who I met in college, the brightest student in class by miles. And when I say bright, I mean someone who could discuss Marxism with Marx himself, or tell you intricacies of Freud’s work that most people would not be able to comprehend. But, she never rubbed her immense wealth of knowledge in anyone’s nose;  you could walk past and not even notice her- reserved and simple, yet gifted with a brain so sharp that one word out of her and you knew this was someone who had spent years curled up with them books, from Robert Frost to Dostoyevsky. Not that she’d tell you that. But you knew. Also, she was the one you went to when the exams loomed dangerously on your head!

I lost touch with her, as I did with a lot of my friends, after college. We all went our own ways into the big bad world, our bosoms full of idealism and dreams. But, in all the years that I was not in touch with her, I would think of her off and on, and when I did I always imagined her deeply lost and involved in the world of academia, which is the only thing she seemed to be meant for and enjoyed.

But, when I did finally reconnect, I found that she had abandoned all that seemed so dear to her and gotten married soon after college. Nothing wrong with that, but she seemed the last person in the world to be doing that.

Anyway, it was what she did and I never asked her why. She married someone in the army, had a son, nine now and immersed herself in her domestic world. She seemed happy when we talked, but I always detected a twinge of regret in her voice, something I didn’t explore further.

But it made me think. Why did she make that decision? It was not for love, that much I know, since I vaguely know the man she married and I know it was not an impulsive must-marry-him decision.  But, it was not for me to question a friend’s decision, even if I wondered about it often, and she largely seemed happy, so, I let it be.

A few days ago she wrote to me and herself addressed the matter, if only indirectly. Her words are here, and I am sharing this without her knowledge, but they are so beautiful that I feel I should share them. Also, they encapsulate wonderfully what I feel about my own decisions in life:

“Introspection is a dangerous activity. It makes you look back and take stock, not a pleasant thing to do. In life, you walk down a road… then, a path opens up on the side and for some reason you leave the road and start down that path. It’s a beautiful path, tree lined, shady, and edged with dainty blossoms. The fellow travelers that you encounter are polite, friendly and nice. The path does get bumpy occasionally, but, there are no steep gradients, neither up nor down. The path is more of a dirt track and you walk in a slow unhurried pace. The scenery is pleasant though, it seldom changes. Slowly and imperceptibly, you stop taking in the scenery or feel the cool shade or even notice the fellow travelers. Even as your feet carry you along the path, your mind wanders back to that road that you got off. What all did that road have to offer after you quit it? Once in a while, through the gap in the trees, you catch a glimpse of that road. You dimly make out people walking in confident purposeful and fast paced strides. This sets you wondering. How is the journey on that road? What happened to the friends you parted from when you wandered off down this shady green path? You try and imagine their glitzy, high – octane life, full of accomplishments targets, achievements and hefty pay cheques. You feel a twinge of envy as you envision their confidence and their self-assertiveness, their ability to say no when they wish to. You gradually endow them with all those qualities that you seem to lack. The exciting journey of the busy roadsters creates a tiny black hole inside you. Soon you spend all your time peering down this hole even as your brain is slowly sucked into its lightless oblivion. How close you are now to becoming Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, even if by nature you are neither hedonistic nor adulterous. The wooded path palls on you, the cool shade suffocates you and the pleasantries of the sweet folk, you find tiresome. The timid flowers by the wayside seem so tiny, so pathetic…

Sooner or later in life we reach this stage. Bewildered, you ask yourself,” where am I? How did I get here? Would I have been better off on that other road?”

I still don’t know why she look the leafy path and I don’t want to. But my point to her was this; that no matter what path you take, you’ll always peer through the trees to look at the other one and wonder if that had been better. Someone who took the fast paced one would wonder if being with the kids on the shady path had been a better one to opt for…it’s the ultimate quandary and I can safely say it is one that most women face.

Women, not men. Men believe that there is only one path for them, and they take it. They don’t feel the angst of wondering “what if?”, of agonizong over life changing decisions, of watching their friends stride along a path that they would have liked to be a part of. It should not be this way, but it is. And it’s a shame.

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August 24, 2008 · 8:08 pm

I’ve lost my sleep.

I was one of those people who could sleep anywhere, have even slept on an x-ray machine once. But the past ten days have been terrible, and I just can’t sleep.

And there’s a reason. My daughter, on the day she turned two and a half, got burnt with hot tea. It happened in a flash, and it was horrible. Horrible, horrible.  I didn’t know how badly tea can burn, but now I do.

But, the good thing is that now she’s healed well, after many visits to the pediatrician and other doctors. She got it mostly on her chest, but could have been her face, eyes…anything.

The first few days I kept wondering why this happened, and the image replayed itself in my mind endlessley, like a bad film on repeat, and the more I’d try and get it out of my mind, the more it would persist.  Then, I looked at my daughter and realized that she was far braver than me, for she, even with her would, all wrapped up in bandage, was running around the house as before.

It was then that I told myself to snap out of it, and it was then that I stopped asking why this happened, and thanked God for what did not, because it could have been much much worse.

She’s a trooper I told her and she smiled. When I took her for her bandage changes, she cried, obviously, but not much, and kept telling me, all the while, what a good girl she was. “Mama, I am a good girl”, she’d say through her tears, trying hard to put up a brave front while the doc cut her bandage and cleaned her wound. I wanted to hold her and cry but I had to be brave for her, for she was looking to me for support. I clenched my teeth and didn’t let a tear fall out of my eye, not in front of her at least. She kept repeating how good she was some fifty times while the dressing was being done. It was heart wrenching to watch her do this, she was doing it for she was scared, and hoped that if she was good, she’d not get hurt. This from a two year old.

One underestimates one’s children. I didn’t know my daughter, my little delicate doll, who would cry if she spotted a life size Winnie the Poo at a birthday party, had such fortitude in her. She went with me to the doctors without as much as a peep out of her, and when there she complied better than any adult I know. She’d turn, sit, stand, lie, as the doc said. When I gave her medication she’d open her mouth and gulp it down without any resistance. She was unreal, and I salute her for it. I would have not been this good had it happened to me.

The worst is now over and she’s on the mend.

Now I need to find my sleep.

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July 25, 2008 · 12:13 pm

Of Wolves, Witches and Stepmothers..

My daughter loves books, wants me to read to her every night before she goes to bed. It’s something I started doing when she was very young because I wanted her to love reading, which, to my utter joy, she’s showing signs of.

She wants me to begin every story with “one day” or “once upon a time” and they all must end with “happily ever after”. Only then am I allowed to switch off the light, after which she flops on her tummy and closes her eyes, almost as if she’s trying to picture it all again in her mind’s eye.

But, the trouble is that most fairy tales I tell her are fraught with all sorts of evil and dark elements. And this is something I have wondered about often, why, for one, must stories for little children be full of stepmothers? How terrible it is to tell a two year old that when a little child’s mommy dies, the evil step mom tries to kill her or makes her work in the house. But, one might argue, that there’s always a happy ending. Really? What is that? Oh! the handsome prince. So, all these terrible things happen to Cinderella, but in the end a prince charming, who’s floored by her beauty, marries her and that’s a happy ending. Now, there’s nothing wrong with stories and I do not want to over react for the sake of it, but it amuses me how so many of them end this way!

Or , then there are those where even if the parents are alive, but poor, like Hansel and Gretel’s parents, they lead them into the dark woods and leave them there. Imagine what a little kids thinks when you tell him or her that.

A few days ago, my daughter asked me to tell her the story of Snow white, but when I started reading it to her, I was not sure I wanted to tell her that Snow white’s mommy dies, so I sugar coated it somehow. She asked me what a step mom was and I tried telling her in the best way I thought possible for a two year old to understand (I don’t lie to her, mostly, when she asks me something, I may give her an abridged version but I try not to lie). She didn’t quite understand, but didn’t inquire further, so I let it pass.

But then yesterday she found Hansel and Gretel and told me to read it to her – the cover had little children and a house made of candies on it, so it appealed to her. When I started reading it, (I told her that the kids got lost in the woods, not that the parents left them there) and got to the part about the witch, she looked at me in fright and told me to shut the book. Then she cried and cried and said that she never wanted to see that book in the house, that I should give it to some “other baby” as I tell her when I want her to look after her things!  And I know that there is a moral there in the story about not going into strangers’ houses and so on, but I think I can teach her that anyway, without such tales!

I’ve decided to put these fairy tales away, and since I have other books for her too – I’d also bought the Panchtantra stories some time ago – I now read those to her, and she loves them. But every now and then she’ll ask me things like why the wolf wanted to eat Red Riding Hood, or where Cinderella’s mommy was…

Each child is different and I think before reading these stories to them one must think whether they’ll be affected by them or not. And frankly, a lot of kids would be, I mean who likes to be told about witches, wolves and evil mothers? Not kids for sure. I wonder what they were thinking when they wrote such stories for kids.

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July 22, 2008 · 11:22 am

Now She Ok, Now She’s Not..

Before I say anything else, I must admit that I am not a strong person, not strong when it comes to people I love. I have a lot of angst about, well, about many things in life, but also about mommy issues, as is apparant in this blog, but, the big but, let’s just say, I ain’t got nerves of steel, to put it mildly.

So, last week when my daughter sat inside her classroom with total strangers, I was happy. She has a lot of stranger anxiety and one of the reasons I wanted to put her into playschool was to try and cure her of some of it, so that she does not recoil each time someone waves a hello. She never liked school (its only been a week and a half) but, once there, she would go in and after a while I’d leave the room and she’d be fine.

Day before yeaterday she just didn’t want me to leave, but the teacher made me, so I had to. I felt terrible as they took her screaming from my arms. I skulked around corners for a while till I was scolded and then I left the hall and sat outside with the rest of the mothers and soon I was swapping salad recipes, though my mind was inside the classroom.

I told myself that she’d be ok, that this is something she had to learn to do and I had to be strong. But I could not get that image of her out of my mind, her sweet face and large teary eyes looking at me. I gulped a few times to stifle the lump that was, once again, beginning to form in my throat. Then I started wondering if I was doing the right thing, because though in my mind I was doing this for her betterment, just like everyone around me, I was very upset about the fact that she cried the way she did.

The thing about her is that, though it may appear to be the opposite, she actually loves kids her age and once she is familiar with a place, she tends to love it. So I had hoped that she’d start liking the place soon. And while I know that such moods are cyclical, I am dreading going to school tomorrow and leaving her in the classroom. The last time she told the teacher to bring all the mommies inside, she had pleaded for me and when I was finally called in, I found her eyes red with crying. She ran to me and clung and cried, then laughed, then asked me not to leave. I could not say anything but I held her hard and after a while told her that I was right outside and had not gone home.

I know all kids go through this and they settle down after a while, but, like I said, I am not strong enough. I hate it when I have to leave and she is crying, I hate it but I still do it because I think it’s good for her, because the whole world does it, my parents did it too, and all the rest of it, I know all that, but it’s still not good enough for me because I simply hate seeing her sitting at a table crying for her mommy.

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July 3, 2008 · 4:56 am

Two, No Wait, Few Birds With One Stone.

I decided to solve the clingy problem with all the will I had left in me.

Last month I had told myself that after my vacation, I would seriously tackle the what-am-I-doing-with-my-life issue.  But that cannot be done with a toddler holding your leg and wailing . You need peace to think, and I haven’t had any in the past two weeks, because my daughter decided she needed her mommy 24-7 and no one else. Flattering as that was, I began to lose it after a while; something needed to be done, fast.

So, this is what I tried. I got up in the morning and asked a friend if she wanted to watch a film, which she did, and I trotted off and told my horrified looking maid, who had been witnessing the scenes around the bathing and eating, to do what needed to be done – the bath, food etc – and put her to bed in the afternoon. I planned to return only after she had taken her nap.

And guess what? She didn’t shed one tear or throw one tantrum. I was told happy stories about how she laughed and played in the water and also during lunch. All that drama was, of course, only for mommy dearest. So overjoyed was I with this outcome that the next day I decided to take off in the morning again, and went shoe shopping, something I had been wanting to do for a while. And sure enough this time too she was happy as a calm and was sound asleep in her cot when I returned home, to peace and quiet.

So I am not sure I’ve successfully solved the problem – mommy hood has taught me not to celebrate achievements too early, and sometimes not all all, they have a way of resurfacing just when you think you’ve crossed that bridge – but I am feeling chuffed. After all not only did I manage to wean her off me for a while, I also got to watch a movie, catch up with a friend and buy some shoes in the bargain- not bad, not bad at all!!!

So now I am wondering if my good luck will last and somehow, miraculously, she’ll love school when she goes, for the first time, on Monday.

Too much to ask? I thought so. But, it’s worth a shot, in case someone up there is listening.

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