Reboot

I shut down my blog for a while because someone I didn't want reading it was doing so. Which maybe a strange thing to do for a blog that pretty much lays out my entire life quasi-anonymously. But this time I felt a little too exposed, a little too vulnerable and figured I would take a small break for a while.

I am back now after a hectic couple of months which included a trip to Cambodia and Baby L turning one. I can scarcely believe its been a year since she came into the world. Sometimes it feels like a lifetime and most times it feels too good to be true. When I look at her, my heart swells with such unmanageable love that I feel I could blink and find she has vanished, that she was simply a beautiful dream, a figment of my imagination.

Even after a night like this one, where she spent 6 hours screaming and tossing in a crazed almost-sleep, some unnamed pain torturing her. Even when I knew I would be bleary eyed in the morning, that I would have to miss work and a few important meetings. Even when I felt like screaming myself because I couldn't get her to calm down. Even then, I love her with a love so huge, so enormous that it threatens to crush my heart to pieces.

Which it probably will one day. Because if one thing is clear, its that I cannot protect her from everything. Nay, most things. I cannot protect her from this virus that has had her coughing for the last 2 months. I wont be able to protect her from bullies at school. I wont be able to protect her from her own insecurities and anxieties. I can only try, but the world is so huge, so unpredictable and she is so little. To me she always will be.

When I watch her at the playground, grabbing other babies' hair in her friendly, but aggressive way, I worry that she will never have friends. When I see how she falls sick by just spending two hours a day at a play group, I worry that she wont be able to manage pre-school. When I read horror stories about child abuse, I worry that I cant trust anyone with her but myself because everyone else could be a predator.

Is this what being a mother is about? This worry and this untamable love? Is this why my own mother asks me if I have eaten every time she sees me (to this day) and always calls right on the dot when I am worried or upset about something? I have a feeling I am only beginning to find out. 

Press Pause

Suddenly I had nothing to do. Its Chinese New Year, a long weekend in Singapore. Its the equivalent of Thanksgiving weekend in the US - everything just stops. Shops are shuttered, the locals celebrate with their families, expats leave the island, even public transportation is hard to come by. K had to leave for the US on a business trip and I had just returned from one. The crazy train that has been work screeched to a sudden and jolting halt, our friends (most of them) had left for Phuket and here I was staring down four days with absolutely nothing planned.

Its been a while since life paused like this. The only other time was the last month of my maternity leave, but even then I was breastfeeding non-stop, so it felt a bit like work. Of course, I mean to spend all my time with Baby L, but lets be honest there is a limit to stacking and restacking plastic toys and crawling around the room with a giggling baby, however cute she is (and she is uber-cute!). So I placed her on the floor and reorganized my wardrobe. Then I reorganized hers. I cleaned the guest room. I reordered the books on the book shelf. I decided to bake, but discovered I had no baking sugar. I started the next book for my office book club ("The Fat Years") and discovered I hated it even if I shouldn't.

For the first time in a long time I was bored. Really, truly bored. I had forgotten what that felt like. All the things that I used to do that would keep me occupied I don't do anymore. I don't volunteer, I don't write (not really), I don't go out that much and honestly I don't even have that many friends here. I suddenly picturized an existence without K around to provide adult stimulation and realized that he was the only person on this island I could call my best friend. Hmm. I have become that cliche, a woman whose life is completely built around her husband and child (and job).

I suppose if I don't do anything about it (and soon), I will be looking down a whole host of lonely weekends in about 30 years or so. 

What Comes Next

I have been 34 for two weeks now. I can scarcely believe it because large parts of me still feel 16 and other parts feel 21 and then there’s the part of me that’s a mom that just doesn’t fit with all of that. 

2011 was a glorious, tumultuous, emotional year. Next to being born, becoming a parent is really the next big milestone in life. Not even getting married comes close. While I learnt (slowly, painfully) to be a mom, I found that my relationship with my own mother remained as fractious as ever. We have come a long way, the two of us, from the days of throwing things at each other, but we still have the capacity to hurt each other horribly.

I went home in December for my cousin’s wedding, the first family affair I had attended in years. It was wonderful, reconnecting with some of my relatives and showing off Baby L. There was one cousin in particular, who I used to be really close with, but drifted away from over time. As little girls we played together and shared secrets, but in later in life it became very clear that we were meant to go our separate ways. There were many reasons for this – divergence of opinions & values, distance, time. But if I am truly honest with myself, it was also my persistent envy of her (there I said it!) because I have always felt (true or not) that my mother saw her as the perfect daughter, the one she could never have.  On the last day I was there, my mother made some offhand remark comparing me to her, which cut so deep that I said things that I shouldn’t have. It is always so with my mother and me. Things are said that cannot be reversed and we have to start the slow process of rebuilding our fragile bond all over again.

Perhaps it will be the same with me and Baby L. I cannot imagine a time when I don’t feel as connected to her as I do now. But it must have been so with my mother and me and look where we are now. But in 2012, I will try more. Try to be a better mother to my daughter and a better daughter to my mother.

2011 was also the year that redefined my marriage in many ways. K and I have had our share of ups and downs. 2007 in particular was a year I thought our marriage wouldn’t survive. But we got through that and many other bumps. But then here we are, new parents in a two-career family. Proximity to our parents also brought it share of tensions. Somewhere this year we descended into a rhythm of arguing, blaming and nit-picking. Being parents was great, but being married didn’t feel so good anymore. We went to work, played with Baby L and rolled into tired heaps on our corners of the bed. On K’s birthday, we came to a head and realized that unless things changed – dramatically – there would be no “us” anymore.

At my cousin's wedding, I had several pangs of nostalgia. As I watched her with her new husband, all young and shiny eyed, I thought back to what K and I used to be. We’ve evolved from a couple that just WAS to a one that has to work on it. Such is life. On the bright side, we’ve entered 2012 resolved to make things better. 

As for friendships, 2011 was a hard year for that. Many times I was so absorbed in my own life that I didn’t make space for my friends. Even phone calls felt like chores. Two of my friends had major operations, two had sick parents and one lost a father, another grappled with depression. I knew I should be there for them, but I failed miserably. I was there in pieces or not at all. I hope to do better this year.

The world revolted in 2011, but I stayed in my safe cocoon. It was the year my apathy crystallized into inaction. I am becoming that cliche – the youth activist who turns into a corporate sellout. I found myself caring more about my job and an upcoming promotion than everything else that was wrong with the world. I don’t know how much that is going to change in 2012, however hard I try. The truth is maybe I don’t want to try.

In many ways I feel settled. I have found my own small piece of the world and all I can do is try and make that better.

Learning To Be A Mom

I stayed home the last couple of days under the pretext of being sick. Not that I was pretending exactly. I was unwell, but not so much that I couldn't go to work if I wanted to. I just didn't want to. For the last few months, work has been intense. My ambition and drive has revved up again and I find myself wanting again all the things that I had laid to rest during my pregnancy. This meant getting sucked back into the politicking, climbing-over-others and passive-aggressive competition that is the corporate world. My time with Baby L was limited to an hour in the morning before I headed to work, couple of hours in the evening before I put her to bed and every minute I could squeeze out of the weekends.

Finally, a couple of days ago, when I came back home from work, my daughter - who usually crawls towards me in a frenzy of happiness when I get back - looked up indifferently from her toy as I stepped through the door. And went back to what she was doing. I was hurt more than I could possibly admit. She is growing up, learning to sense things and know who is who. I am hardly around and she spends all day with her nanny. I had made peace with that, especially since the nanny is so good with her. I am not one of those mothers who is jealous that her baby loves her nanny so much. In fact I am happy she does - it sure beats the opposite.

But for the first time, I got a sense of what having a career that's important to me could do to my relationship with my child. At worst, she will resent me for it. And at best, she will stop missing me when I am not around. So when I got the sniffles, I decided to take two days off and spend it playing with my daughter. What I realized is that spending all day with a child - even your own, much loved one - isn't an easy task. While she is a bundle of cuteness, she also constantly craves attention, wants everything that you have in your hand at that particular minute and shifts moods from happiness to crankiness in under a second. It requires infinite patience to deal with a little person.

This much I know. Being a stay at home mom is out of the question for me. If I did, I would dissolve into sloth and ennui. I would sleep whenever the baby did, have no social life and become a hairball of irritation and anger. I am not one of those women who could mobilize around play dates, mommy's groups and children's activities nor find pleasure in it. Sadly, I had to force myself to play with Baby L all day and the only thing that kept me at it was the thought that this is the least I could do.

Does this make me a bad mom? I don't know. Plus I did enjoy most of the time I spent with her. We horsed around, I fed her all three meals, I held her hands as she took tentative baby steps, I cleaned up her poo, she grabbed at my face and planted open mouthed wet kisses on my cheek, she screamed and threw tantrums and I screamed back at her. And when we both got tired and cranky we lay on the bed all spent and stared into each others eyes till we fell asleep.

Not perfect parenting. But its good enough for me. And hopefully her. 

Pause

This blog is on hold till I feel like writing again.

Which maybe tomorrow, or never again.

Moving Sideways

If we were still in Chicago, the passage of time would be marked by the leaves changing color. Here each day looks exactly the same - give and take some rain - so I scarcely realized how time had passed. My daughter is almost 8 months old. She has gone from a supine, unresponsive, sleepy creature to a boisterous, hyperactive little person with her own personality and moods. She is a perfect blend of K and me, with her stubborn chin and lively, inquisitive eyes. She learnt to crawl and pull herself up way before it was time and now cant stay still even for a minute. She wants everything and she wants it now. All my old fears of not bonding with her are gone. She clings to me in a way that's simultaneously flattering and annoying. In many ways she reminds me of who I used to be, yet there are times I feel I scarcely know her at all. 

All of which is pure conjuncture of course because her personality, like her features, are very much a work in progress.  Even if 8 months have passed, even if I can put a diaper on a squirming baby in under 25 seconds, even if the plaintive cries at night & lack of sleep feel like de rigueur, even if I can walk two miles uphill & downhill with a 15 pound baby perched on my hip – even then I feel an unreasonable sense of equal parts anxiety and disbelief when I stop to consider that I am a mom. I would think that one would get used to it at some point and learn how to do it gracefully and fall comfortably into the role of super protector and perennial caregiver to an actual human being. But this too seems to be a work in progress. What I do know is this – I would very much like to do this again, however flawed my execution maybe. Its addictive, falling in love with a child and in just 8 short months, I feel that I have to experience that again even as I acknowledge to myself that it’s a selfish need and I should probably get my act together first. Plus, how did our moms seem so very... mom-like? I'd like to crack that code.

While I haven’t written in a while, this blog has been on my mind. Will I ever reveal its existence to Baby L? Would she ever find it (probably)? What will she think once she does? I read this very wise piece of writing recently and was struck by this particular paragraph:

“……once children get to a certain age, the age at which they start keeping their own secrets, becoming opaque to those who love them most, the age at which they start doing things they cannot dream of their parents ever having done, they (the children, that is) become voraciously curious about what exactly their parents did do, what were their secrets, who were they, anyway?”

How true that is! Its so much easier now with the advent of the Internet with all of us leaving digital footprints all over the place. As soon as Baby L discovers Google, she will probably know more about her mother (and father) than she ever imagined (or I’ve ever known about mine!). I wonder if this will shut down all conversation we could potentially have or if it will foster more? However combative my relationship with my mother has been, we still talk at least for an hour every two weeks or so. The excess of information may actually impede communication.

Ironically my last blog post referred to dark times and while the last couple of months were largely good, we had a couple of forays into the path of darkness. A colleague of mine, a very young fellow, died in a freak accident in early September. It was something so totally unexpected and terrible that it left me feeling hollow for a very long time. Its not that I knew him well, quite the opposite in fact, but I did go to his funeral (my first since my uncle’s when I was 13) and witnessed the horror that is a mother’s grief firsthand.  

I find that lately I cannot relate as much to distant uprisings and revolutions. In fact I have become hugely cynical when it comes to changing institutions and established morays. I feel nothing when I see the India Against Corruption movement or the Wall Street Uprising or any of the other dozen anti-establishment protests that are going on in the world. I know we live in a hugely unstable time and that some day this card of tricks will come falling down, but somehow I do not want to be a piece of it anymore. I stand outside the change and watch it happen. Put it down to disappointment. I campaigned for Obama and look what he has become now. But motherhood has also made me so much more selfish, but not about myself. About my family. My empathy now manifests itself at a much more personal level. I empathize with my colleague’s mother and with the poor mom I saw begging when I was in Chicago recently. But I cannot – nay, do not want to - wrap my head around the big problems of the world. 

I revisited a little bit of the old me, when I was in the US recently, a whirlwind trip through Chicago, DC & New Jersey. Although just over a year has passed since we moved away from the States, it felt like a trip down memory lane. Chicago, where we lost one almost-baby and created our first “real” home. DC, where we built our careers. And New Jersey, where "I" went from "me" to "we". Of the three, my heart definitely lies with Chicago. I met M & D and spent an emotional, confusing 24 hours with them. While I’ve been obsessing over Baby L, my friends have been through some tough times and I realized how little I’ve been there for them. Very little can be solved in 24 hours, so we spent our time sitting around M’s kitchen table, them drinking wine and me juice. We went for sushi to that restaurant round the corner from my condo. We visited my condo and found that my renter had converted it into something that looks like a feature in Better Homes and Gardens. We went shopping on Michigan avenue and ate seafood in Old Town. We talked about our lives, so distant and removed from the tangled web it used to be. Our friendship was the same, yet it really wasn’t.

DC was different, mostly work. I met old friends, who I saw with new eyes, since we are all mothers now. M came down again for a day to help me shop. We went to Bistro du Coin (that scene of so many lovely evenings) and then we fought badly the next day over things that seem inconsequential now. On the way to Jersey, I stopped in Philadelphia for a few hours to see Baby L’s namesake, who is also expecting a little one of her own (everywhere I look now, there are expectant or new mothers!). And then on to Jersey, which I found I hated as much as ever. Jersey to me is associated with tough times – shitty jobs, very little money and that goddawful pollution that made each day more miserable than the last. But it was also where K and I loved each other intensely and so I grasped on to those memories as I tried to look past the miles of strip malls and highways dotted with factories. 

It was hard leaving Baby L behind at first, but then (guiltily) I realized that a full night’s sleep was something I greatly missed. We had spent a lazy few days in Phuket before I left on my trip, our first vacation with baby. It rained a lot, which was both annoying and a God-send because it meant that we didn’t have to force ourselves to do anything too intense. In another life I would have gone hiking in the mountains or got on a boat to the “James Bond Rock” or gone partying in Pattaya beach. Now, we stayed on the resort and watched the waves crash against the distant beach as we sat in our rain soaked balcony. We did eat a lot and dragged Baby L with us to dinners including one at a literal shack by the beach, where the wet wind lashed at our ankles, while we tried to cover L with a swaddle cloth. We also went to the Blue Elephant, a restaurant and cooking school, set in a beautifully restored British colonial mansion and wandered lazily around making pointless plans to go back to Cochin one day, buy up an old house and start a restaurant and B&B.

Now that I am back home, we are moving again. Its a move I am so conflicted about. We live now in a tiny apartment bang in the city center. We are minutes from Orchard Road, the din of construction and traffic is a part of the fabric of our lives, the river is just around the corner and the city is at our literal doorstep. I love this neighborhood. I love that I can walk to Killeney Road and find 20 different types of restaurants. I love that I can wake up at 7:30 and get to work in an hour with minimal trouble. But all good things must come to an end. We are moving to the "suburbs" of Singapore, the East Coast, because its the right thing to do for Baby L. There are more families with kids there, larger living spaces and better schools. This is yet another thing I said I would never do after I have a child that I am now doing. Not that other people don't bring up children in the city. Its just that they have more money (and thus can live in a larger apartment) or are much braver than I am. I want things to be easy for Baby L and so I swallow my disappointment and tell myself its not such a big deal if I cant walk everywhere and live in the middle of everything. 

Its not all that bad because its a lovely condo with superb facilities and its minutes away from East Coast Park and the beach. I think what horrifies me the most is becoming like everyone else. I maybe a mom, but I still want to be original and subversive. I had a glimpse into my new life when we went to a Diwali party this weekend at a condo next to the one we will soon be moving to. All the ladies (yes, I am a lady now!) were moms and the conversation was all about what their children ate, how much they slept and a mini-competition on who went to the best school (the kids, not them). I felt the weird need to participate in the conversation, while staying out of it at the very same time. I didn't want to be one of them, yet there I was. I felt a perverse need to annoy them, the same impulse that makes me invite ardent Hindutva proponents to Eid parties. But I didn't. I smiled and asked polite questions about the best children's playgrounds and fun activities for kids on the East Coast. I am a mom now, so I did.  

But if I ever end up buying a mini-van, shoot me please, if you are a friend. 

Unbidden Joy

At 5 am, two days ago I woke up to my daughter slapping at my face with her chubby little hands. As she cooed into my ears, I had a sudden clarifying thought - nay, sensation - that this moment, this second would be the very happiest of my life, possibly ever. My beautiful daughter was with me, my husband lay sleeping next to me, my parents were in the next room and my brother just a mile away. The people I loved the most were all in almost-touching distance. I knew that there would be dark times in my life, times when things seemed hopeless and hard and at those times, I could look back at this one shining moment and know that I had known complete and total happiness.

I've been thinking a lot about life lately and how short it really is. So much has changed in so little time.  Five years ago, my friend R died. He was the first of my coterie to go and that too by his own hand. This month, another friend (albeit not that close) was diagnosed with late stage, terminal cancer. He has perhaps a few months more to live. His mother, a close friend of my mother's, visited us the other day and she looked like a hollow shell of her previous lively (slightly irritating) self. I felt a shiver of empathy for her, imagining my L in the place of her son. Life is so unexpected in its tragedies and so sparing in its small parcels of joy.

For now, L is perfect and healthy. Every day with her is a revelation. I see much less of her these days and every evening when I come home I feel like something has changed. One day she was half crawling and the next she was half sitting up. She has become so much more alert now, her little eyes darting here, there, everywhere taking in this new and fascinating world. My mother likens her to a little bird, a sparrow with her perky little head and quick movements. But in her eyes, lie an endless depth. When I look into them I see an old, old soul who has lived many exciting lives. Sometimes when she drifts into deep thought or looks at me with knowing eyes, I just want to get into her head and see her thoughts.

But mostly we play and she laughs out loud, the most joyous sound in the world.

Part of me cant wait for her to grow up and part of me wants her to stay a baby forever. Right now I am the very centre of her world. There are days when she cries and refuses to be soothed by anyone else. I cant help but be flattered by that - when else do you get to be the single point of focus in any one's life? Not even in the beginning of love, the romantic kind. I know this will wear away and she will find her own independence and strength. But until then we have this and each other.