Playing With The Hand You're Dealt...

Isn't that what it all boils down to in life? 
It isn't always celebrating the things that go well or in accordance with our plans or even making our peace with the things that don't. It's finally just existing with what IS.
Sometimes we are able to do it gracefully and other times it takes a lot of plodding and prodding to get through each day.

There's a saying by Oscar Wilde that people often smugly quote- " There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."

I've found that while tragedy might be too strong a word for it, it does seem difficult to comprehend and accept ,what you sought out, opted for even isn't all that it's cut out to be or even worse...it's not what you want. Is inadequate.

So you shuffle the deck a few times and hope the next hand is better than the one that has you staring in bafflement.

Or you chuck the cards up in the air and don't care if they scatter all over; since it's mimicking life in doing so.

And some of us painstakingly make a house of cards. Trying to balance each card over the other and anxiously watching whether they stay up or come tumbling down.
In the end you either end up with a steady house you used up all your cards in making and are proud of or you decide to call it quits after you reach a plateau and are still left holding a few cards for later.

It's all about playing with the hand you were dealt.

Rewind the last 3 week

Well, maybe not rewind, a retrospect more likely but am not at my best at 5 in the morning.
Especially since I haven't been able to sleep courtesy a non-killer but persistent headache nonetheless!

Today marks 3 weeks that I got back to working. Woo hoo! 3 weeks!! Yay! bring on the pension plan already!! Now, now...3 weeks may be miniscule, taken in the backdrop of the whole work cosmos waiting to devour working parents but it's been a BIG 3 weeks for us as a family.

It's helterskelter in the mornings and I fully expect Charles Manson to come in and just add to the riot! The Biodiversity week (everyone clap now that Hyderabad is in the cynosure of all eyes...polite, bored (forced) clapping follows) has lead to heaps of problems for those of us not so bio-diverse.

The traffic jams, the mini-craters in the roads, the constant police vigilance and the mounting road rage just adds that "something" special to your mornings when you drive off to work and try to get reintegrated with the gerbil race. Eh?
We are not rats! Well...this time around am determined not to be a rodent so I will pick cute, fuzzy innocuous critters who can also race. But are gerbils rodents too? Never mind ..too early in the day to get my Darwin groove on!

The mornings are the worst honestly! Breakfast has come to signify getting some solids into the offspring who for some reason feels the time lag between getting up at 8 am rather than 7:30 is massive. And then he MUST have his bubbles! I mean how can we be sure that all the nooks and crannies are clean if they haven't been doused liberally in a bubble bath?
So by the time the school van arrives, at 8:30 no less, we need to get the child up, get him brushed (have you smelt morning breath on a kid! Yikes!!), bathed, fed, clothed, packed for school and out the door in time.

Now adding to the fun of all this newness of my new innings at work was Red's transition to a new org after having worked with his first (and only company till recently) for nearly 10 years. So there we were..all 3 of us with totally 3 things to do and places to go to- me to work, Red to a another place and MLM to daycare.

Here's a breakdown of how it goes:

I rush out the door by 8:15 so I can get to work by 8:45 at the very latest. If I get out at 8:20, I may get to work only by 9:15, yup! The office seems to move further way in those five minutes. I put in a cd (a medley of retro rock for the last 2 days) once I hit the first red light and bring out the eyeliner for the second light. The Gods that Change Traffic Lights are benevolent enough to wait for me to apply it comfortably so I don't end up looking like a raccoon while entering work.
My hair is still in it's bed-hair stage and will submit only once I get into work and not before. I try not to brush my hair in the car. I shed more than a lab these days and all I need is for the hair to mingle with the dark upholstery or for the offspring to get sneezing fits from it.
Note to self: Vacuum car over weekend anyhow.

So I get into work, with trusted coffee mug in tow and take life-altering sips before facing the rest of the world. Then come afternoon I start making calls to the daycare to see if MLM has eaten, how much and what he's currently up to. Then I head out to pick him up while he's semi-snoozing, conked out or chirping like he's high!
These days the new object of his affections is a blimp that's been put up recently and he keeps pointing it out from his car seat till I notice and say, "OOH! NICE!" Not acknowledging aforementioned blimp keeps him repeating it till I look at the damn thing and comment with some amount of life in my voice. It goes something like this- LOOK Mamma, LOOK, LOOK,LOOK,LOOK,LOOK,LOOK,LOOK! Stop it! I can't look I'm driving for Pete's sake! LOOOOOOOOOOOK!!!! BALLOOOOON! Ok, ok...pretty balloon! LOOOK MAMMA LOOK!!! OOOH...Nice balloon...look how it goes side to side (at which juncture he starts singing "Gymbo the clown goes side to side...all day long!"). And finally peace prevails.

We get home and I've barely parked when all sorts of potty-peepee emergencies come to this child's head! So we rush and often leave the school bag, daycare bag, my handbag and sometimes groceries for later. I barely get the door open and he rushes to his toys instead of making a beeline for the loo like I'd have hoped. Any efforts at trying to elicit information about previously stated emergencies only brings out demands (not requests, DEMANDS) for snacks, juice, paints and everything that doesn't belong in a loo.

So, emergency balloon deflated, I lock him at home for 2 minutes, pop back down to the car and haul up everything like a beast of burden and look around for a jumbo mug of coffee. Can you guess what happens when  I finally plonk myself down and take the first sip? Yup! He has to go to the bathroom. This time for good. It's the big stuff now. So on we rush, him telling me to get the toilet seat as if I'm some kind of a newbie mom. Once the deed is done, hands are elaborately washed, not so very subtle signs are given indicating a bubble bath is preferred, yet again, and I finally sit down to my neglected coffee.
And I swear this child waits for me to sip at the drink before unleashing something else on me! And this time it's, " Siddharth eat. AAH!" followed by an open mouth and a finger pointing inside in case I haven't cottoned on to the idea that's being conveyed.
And snack time follows.

All this while my coffee seethes, simmers and fizzles out but I drink it anyway because I need caffeine more than oxygen!

But hectic as some parts of life have become- it's been pretty damn good to clean the cobwebs from my head. Thinking again, thinking on things pertaining to more than child care and child rearing, what to make for the lunch and dinner. I still do all that but earlier I'd got hemmed in by these things and wasn't able to stretch my mental muscles. That process has now started. And boy! are those muscles tired.

And it's largely due to the fact that the daycare demon has been conquered. Not that daycare is preferred by MLM but he's not fighting it the way he used to earlier. He's marked his territory there I guess :) and the morning rush leaves me a bit winded but I get enough time to unwind in the afternoon and all through dinner leading up to bedtime. That I'm a total, complete zombie if I don't conk off by 10:30 and once I sleep I need a hydrogen bomb exploding to get me to ask, "huh..whahappan, is everything okkk...zzzzz".

Red usually laughs about these things the next morning, that is until I try to shoo him into leaving the paper behind and going for his bath, not to leave the house without eating anything and not leaving the wet towel on the bed!

Such is our life. But it's a nice little life and we're all surviving. So far.
AMEN.

3 going on 30

That's right! Monkeyboy's about to turn 3. That I've grown 3 strands of grey hairs in my own odd mommy- tally system is just another freakish coincident. Or so I try to tell myself again and again.

The little man in question has blossomed from the time he made his grand entry into this mixed up world of ours. Red and I took baby steps ( pun most definitely intended!) into parenting and I for one found that there were aspects of it I wasn't prepared for. It's not  merely the kissing-your-sleep-goodbye...actually being a zombie isn't so bad after a while. You find yourself staying up at nights looking at your husband and exchanging looks of utter relief that the monster...darling offspring is finally snoozing in the land of diapers and baby powder and that's a whole different kind of bonding altogether.

It's about knowing the way ahead most of the times, if not all the while. Routines are easy to fall into and easy to follow. The hitches come when the routines go awry (by no fault of yours most of the times) but it's knowing the right time to expose the children to new things, concepts, helping them form habits and also trying to teach them boundaries.

The last bit's got me so all over the place that half the times I just want to lie back and say, "do what you want, you will anyhow...I'll just catch up on my pimply sleep while you wreck the house for the 5th time since morning."

But kids are usually creatures of habits and it takes a lot for them to break one and take up another. And  while you try various aspects of conditioning on them the idea of a Skinner's Box takes root in your head where the image of your kid safely ensconced somewhere while you go about your own thing for a change, gives you moments of amused pleasure and you think, "what if" before realizing that you'd be inviting the wrath of the spouse, parents, in-laws and pretty much the neighborhood onto your rapidly-greying head by doing such a thing. However empirical and scientific and helpful in your cognitions.

But what I'm still learning 3 years down the line is that your kids teach you (BY FORCE GODAMMIT!!) about being a better person, a bigger person and also about keeping up appearances among other things. They teach you perseverance, patience; up your endurance, snatch your sleep, relegate you to track pants, bushy eyebrows, oily skin, turn your diet upside down, make the gym a distant dream, make you long for Mary Poppins, the days when you were single or newly married...oops...I think I meandered into another list I had in my head.

Ahem, ahem...back to the scheduled post- my child has taught me forgiveness. No matter how mad you get with them, no matter how many times you put them in the naughty corner, spank their bottoms, take away privileges, let them roll around on the cold floor crying their eyes out- they still love the heck out of you.
They still kiss you goodnight, they let you kiss them bye before they go off to school, they jump off the school van just by seeing a glimpse of your face and the moment there was boo-boos to be kissed they come and search you out in a room full of people because only you can get the job done.

My son, may he not turn out like me in temperament- is a doll. I don't like him all the time but I love him from the top of his head down to his toes (which are usually covered with his doodles). He invokes my creativity (even if it's to get him to get him out of my hair), he makes me laugh when we twirl around the room to jhinkchak songs and he makes me smile at the end of the day no matter how tough it's been throughout just because he sleeps with his mouth open and his lashes almost touching his cheeks.

All in all- toughest job I've ever held down (and I've been exposed to the criminally insane and the plain-vanilla variety of loonies) and I can't think of anything that I'd rather be doing.

Psst!! actually I have a whole big list of other things I could be doing but that's another blog. This is meant to be a feel-good-I-love-my-kid blog post. For a change.

Amen.

Posts from the Past- Part I

I turned a year old yesterday. I've long stopped expecting to turn wiser. Never happens when I need it to kick in anyhow :-(
Red made plans to stay in a resort about 2 hours drive from home. With traffic, a squirmy kid in the back seat 
 ( who was pleading to be let out 'peeease) during long waits at signals and my grumbling about us never stopping long enough at places for me to take 'interesting' snapshots- it was a relief to finally pull up at the reception of a place that had actually begun to feel like it was in a different state altogether!

Red opted for a bit more comfort this time as compared to our Goa trip and one which has more activities for MLM. But the moment the grand entry was made into the room, the monkey spotted the outdoor splash pool

 and forgot everything else.
I could practially hear the Halleluahs going off all around his head as the angels sang and the heralds harked.
Gross exaggeration? I think not. Kids love water. Check. Kids love places where they feel comfortable and in control of their immediate surroundings. Check! So when MLM found an MLM-sized water body just 2 steps from the room, he waited no longer and stripped off and got his float out and got into the water! Although he didn't care much for the waterfall that could also be turned on and off in the pool.

Red and I ran about taking care of more prosaic things like getting towels, making sure there were clothes for him to wear when he got out and the AC was turned off so his goosebumps didn't get goosebumps of their own.

The room is just right.  
Red termed in beautifully in calling it 'measured perfection'. Now perfection differs from perception to perception and is fairly hard to find because our notions of it changes like the weather.

We'd vacationed in Maldives on Red's 29th. It was unfettered perfection. We didn't know what to do and what not to do. Should we sit on the beach all day long and just watch the waves? Did that.
Should we step out of our cottage and into the shallow pools below where tropical fish gathered at all times of day and night? Did that too.
Should we walk along white sands and just get into a gooey romantic moment with wispy white tents pitched for our comfort and white wine served to get us buzzed into 'la la land'? Check!!
Maldives was an assault on the senses and I for one, went for overkill because I knew it was most likely to be a one-off thing. I lived a bacchanalian life those 5 days and it's become a dream vacation.


But the place we're staying now is very normal indeed. But it caters to almost everything we need now as parents. An eating joint for kids (which we'll try for lunch today) that serves only kiddy food or they make it the way we want them to. A babysitting service (AMEN! AMEN! AMENN!!) and a kiddy play area 




segregated by age as well as the run of the mill slides and swing sets all located conveniently nearby or motor able courtesy those puttering golf carts. Again, that's something we'll try in a bit.


We had a great breakfast, let MLM whoop his way down the slide  
 
and laugh like a loon and then...we hit the big pool. There was another family with kids slightly older than MLM and they'd been in the water longer than him. Naturally he felt compelled to cannonball into the water along with them as well.
So there we were, Red playing lifeguard, MLM with his Nemo hand floats and me, a 30-something woman floating around lazily with my kid's Mickey Mouse tube ring. Truly perfection. 






After the optimum time had been spent splashing about in the pool viz fingers had begun to prune and MLM had drunk enough of water to sputter it up, we decided to head back to the room.

Now, I'm drafting out the blog post. Red's reading the paper and MLM's watching his Oswald cds on the Home Theater system in our room.

I could really, really, REALLY get used to this :-)

Sybaritically Yours,

Ms.Self-Indugent

I don't understand..

quite a few things but reading the paper gives rise to more things that fall under that particular ambit of non-comprehension.

For example- 

• Why is it so bad to let the Tibetans living in Nepal to celebrate the Dalai Lama's birthday? Is Nepal so utterly under the yoke of the Chinese that it feels that such an occasion merits a ban?
• How a life long coach thinks he can get away with saying that he didn't have an inkling of the "contaminated" food supplements he gave to his athletes? Dude, if they started winning more after the supplements alone, maybe it should've occured to you to check if they were merely vitamins alone? Which nutritional supplement is so kickass that it'll enhance so many athletes' prowess? Are you that green?
• The Telengana Issue- this merits more rambling so no more bullets for now. Just prose.

I've been a gypsy all my life. Indian and all that sure, but linguistically am not entirely of my native state. I have links to Calcutta or West Bengal overall because of the people there who have a connection to me either by friendship or family. But no such sense of belonging occurs to me merely because I was born and half the people there speak a language that I do.

I happen to speak two other Indian languages with far more proficiency than Bangla and can also think in them. That by itself should speak volumes right? Being able to contemplate in a language? 

But neither do I align myself with those geographical areas of India where those languages are spoken, simply because I don't feel like I belong there.

I've finally put down roots in Hyderabad courtesy a myriad of reasons, but had things worked out differently I'd be writing this blog sitting in either Bangalore or Bombay today. 

Whether it's salacious reporting about youngsters killing themselves for the sake of a "Telangana" state of not, I'd really want to know for once, what a damn state is supposed to mean to someone. Does one's identity begin and end with the geographical and linguistic boundaries. There are people in villages who probably haven't seen the inside of a major city in a while, indulging in self-immolation for the sake of the T-state. Either they value themselves very high or they place a massive premium on their action; thinking it'll spur the powers that be to conform to the demands.

And is it really the demands of the masses? Any picture in the paper, any morcha taken out seems to be a collection of ne'er do wells who have been hired or influenced to join in to swell the numbers of the agitators. If anyone were to ask them about why they're agitating and how life will be different for them if a state is carved out of A.P they'll go into goldfish mode and just open and shut their traps aimlessly.

I do believe that while people want the better things in life, they also want to live in peace. Parents don't want their kids not going to school day after day, daily wage earners don't want public transport disrupted so they can't go and earn their livelihood and even politicos don't want to go on fake fasts on and off because guess what? Someone just might have a camera focused on them for good and then they might just have to pull of a proper stoppage of food and water and not merely do a bowel-cleansing 24 hour "fasting" skit.

In states which are geographically spread over different kinds of topography, it may very well make sense of have regional headquarters or separate centers to take care of specific needs of the people, but if every time a demand for a state has to be conceded then the map's going to end up looking like scrambled eggs. And if the formation of a separate state led to ease in governing, promise of a better way of life or at least cessation of the demands of the locals then it might make sense. But when it all boils down to a power play then effectively no one wins, we all sit on the bleachers and watch the drama and impressionable young people go on sacrificing themselves for naught.

If it makes financial sense at the end of the day, the state'll be formed. As long as life can continue being in flux despite increasing agitations, it won't. So I guess there'll be more cookouts on busy junctions, more resignation drama and more students resorting to various means to hurt themselves, and the rabble rousers will just keep screaming themselves hoarse. There's just no place for sentiments in the whole equation at the end of day.

Jai (pick a word, they're all up for grabs aren't they?)!!

T.I.M.E

Time is indeed fleet-footed, to use an archaism.

A little scrawny bundle grows from being immobile and with loose skin to a roundish little being who fairly rolls around like a ball.

A would be apartment grows from bamboo sticks jutting out to a room where memories are made and unmade.

A house grows into a home and back into a house again.

What was spacy yesterday is now cramped and what seemed like a few toys now are a mini store in one's home.

What seemed eons ago is now the present and the past is going further away. Though hovering close by if need be for recollection.

Those who seemed distant and surly have been revealed as shy and unable to break self-imposed barriers and many who were friendly have been found to have layer after layer of veneers and facades.

Time has revealed vulnerabilities, arrogance. Has pronounced people as falliable and also reliable beyond belief.
Time has shown the way, has misled as well.
It has taught and enlightenend and also cast into some darkness.

But there's never been a dull moment.
Time wins I guess..

"Time is gone
The song is over
Thought I'd have something more to say..."