When I nearly got run over by the school run

The alarm that didn't go off when it was supposed to. That delicious extra half an hour of sleep that seems even sweeter because it is unexpected. The slow realization coming with reluctant wakefulness that it is a school day and we are now running late! The nightmarish frenzy to get things together in time. The dropping of all the usual efforts for a relaxed morning routine as we run around like headless chickens (the husband and I naturally, not Nikki who seems quite removed from such mundane things as school runs) shoveling breakfast down our throats, gulping tea while furiously multitasking and setting new records for the seven second shower.

In the middle of all the madness sometimes I forget the little things.

"Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!" I screech at my child as she meditates over the exact way to butter her toast.

"Hurry, hurry, hurry!" I squawk as she goes about the business of washing her hands with a quiet industriousness.

"We're getting late!" I work myself up into a lather as she gently blows bubbles with her own.

Forgetting that I am screeching at her for my own tardiness. Forgetting that one of the most unpleasant things about going to school can be crazy, screechy early mornings with manic parents rushing to bundle you off to school and telling you to 'hurry up' and 'rush, rush rush' and 'not be slow' and 'we're getting late because of you!' Forgetting that I was only just setting myself up for a major guilt trip later on in the day, when I could have been relaxing over a cuppa instead.

Till she reminded me. Giving me that look she sometimes does. Of infinite wisdom. And infinite patience.

"There's only so much I can do Mama. Please be happy."

And so I did. I grinned. Sang a silly song. Sat down beside her and made up a story about putting on your shoes on your own. Drove to school with the windows down and the breeze in our hair and 'mein to tuk tuk tortoise hoon' playing in the background.

And we made it to school well in time.

Mommies need appraisals too!

This weekend I caught up with a few of my ex-colleagues from one of the companies I had worked for in my corporate avatar, back before I gave it all up to be chief slave to the little tyrant who now rules my home (and my life ) with an iron fist. This particular group of colleagues had also grown to be good friends over the years but it had been a while since all of us had got a chance to meet and I was looking forward to catching up with them. I was therefore a little surprised when my initial excitement at seeing them all together was returned with wan smiles and terse ‘hellos’.

“We had our year-end appraisals today” they explained morosely “And now we need a stiff drink each to forget them quickly!”

It turned out that three out of the four friends I was meeting had been given a rather rough time during the appraisal by their immediate bosses and the fourth friend’s appraisal had been, in his own words, ‘too confusing to make any sense of’ and he had left the meeting with more than his fair share of existential angst!
“You’re so lucky you don’t have to go through these corporate feedback sessions anymore!” one of my friends exclaimed as we reminisced about one joint appraisal we had gone through years ago, when we were still mere rookies in the corporate world. I laughed in response and the moment was drowned in a fresh round of minty Caprioskas brought to the table, but the words came back to me hours later when I was back at home, ensconced in my daughter’s room as we built large teetering towers with blocks and shaped little red butterflies with blue dots out of Playdoh.

True I didn’t have any formal feedback sessions anymore, ever since I had swapped my demanding corporate job for my even more demanding role of mommy, but sometimes I felt I sure as hell needed them as much if not more than before!

Motherhood brings with it a barrage of advice and feedback, and it starts even before the star of the show, the baby, makes its first appearance. Right from the moment you break the ‘good news’, or, if you’re the reserved kind, from the moment the bump begins to show, everyone from your vegetable vendor to complete strangers you run into in the parking lot, consider it their moral obligation to offer nuggets of advice and wisdom. When the baby does arrive, the stream of advice flowing in multiplies manifold and swells incessantly until you’re ready to throw in the oars and make a mad swim for it. Most of the advice is well meaning and can even be helpful of course, but the sheer overload of information coming in can often be overwhelming for an unprepared first time mother. Over time you get used to it and you even begin to discern the good advice from the unnecessary stuff, but one thing remains constant: your new found status as mom ensures that the advice keeps flowing in thick and fast at every stage of your child’s growth.

Given that parenting is one role that doesn’t come with an instruction manual, I’ve often felt that sometimes it might help to get objective feedback on probably what is the most important role I will ever play in my life; that of shaping and nurturing another individual. And so I decided that I would put my business education and my corporate training of many years to good use and give myself a ‘mom-praisal’. My husband decided to play the part of objective third party since my boss was too young to conduct the appraisal and could not be trusted to not throw a tantrum or make ludicrous demands if things didn’t go her way, and we got started. I decided to give my mom-praisal the importance and structure it deserved and created a list of performance parameters against which I rated myself, borrowing generously from the many performance appraisals I had gone through in the corporate world. Here’s a quick peek at what my mom-praisal score card looked like:

1.Displaying a Sense of Urgency:
This is one area where I score hands down, even though it would not be entirely untrue to say that my performance on this parameter is driven more out of fear of failure than anything else. For my boss does not tolerate tardiness at any cost! From a dirty diaper to a demand for food, right from the early days of her birth, my daughter made it very clear that not displaying a sense of urgency when it came to her needs being met would mean retribution of the most severe kind: ear splitting shrieks and mutinous howls. Displaying a sense of urgency soon became second nature.

2.The ability to innovate and think out of the box:
Much as I’d like to gloss over my (many) shortcomings as a mom, this is one area where I’d have to admit defeat. For when it comes to parenting I’ve always found a sense of security in following the text book approach. Parenting tomes of all shapes and sizes occupy pride of place on every conceivable surface in our home now and everything ranging from a tantrum to a refusal to eat the midday snack sees me rushing to consult my trusty mommy manual. Definitely not an example of innovative thinking, though I must say I have invented a pretty nifty technique of speed reading my ‘What to Expect in the toddler years’ while simultaneously entertaining my daughter with a snazzy rendition of ‘Dorothy the Dinosaur’. The husband however is one of those dads who can think out of the box and make it look as easy as shelling peas, so there is hope for me yet!

3.Monitoring and communicating progress frequently:
Another area where I can proudly pat myself on the back. Right from my bai, to my daughter’s playschool teacher, to the hapless husband, to anyone else who cares to listen, I make it a point to update everyone with any semblance of progress. Right from the first utterance of a new word or a particularly complex sentence construction, to a tantrum free day, to successful trysts with the potty, all progress is painstakingly monitored and communicated. The bulk of these communication updates happen with the husband who is given a blow by blow account as soon as he walks through the door. Yes, this is one area where I think I deserve a notable mention or perhaps even some mommy accolades for exceeding performance benchmarks. The husband doesn’t seem particularly pleased about it though!

4.The ability to manage stress with ease:
Now this is a tough one because I am one of those people who tend to get stressed easily. And while I make sure I don’t let my sky rocketing stress levels get to my daughter (mostly), I don’t exactly handle it with ease either. My way out of a stressful situation is usually to stuff myself silly with the most calorie laden food I can get my hands on. Like the time I binged on a pizza the first time my daughter fell ill. Or the walnut brownie with fudge overdose to help me cope with the first day of school and having to let my baby go into the care of strangers for two whole hours. Or the innumerable bars of chocolate to soothe my frayed nerves before her first solo stage performance. I’m getting stressed just recalling all of these instances! Think I’ll just take a quick nibble of some chocolate to help deal with the, er, hunger.

5.Do I strive for constant self development?
Now this is something I haven’t thought about for a while. I’m always thinking about ‘developing’ my daughter, of course. Developing gross and fine motor skills and physical balance and co-ordination are routine playground conversations with other mums. I make a sincere effort to foster a love for reading and am working at developing her socializing skills since she has been displaying marked signs of having inherited the anti social gene from her mother. I try and bring on the creativity by getting the husband to spend time with her while I re-read my book on ‘how to foster creativity in your child’. So yes, I get full marks for trying when it comes to developing my daughter. But me? I guess I never really thought about me. I suppose I’m in a happier place than I was before since my daughter took over my life. I’ve finally become patient and selfless, qualities I always admired in others and sorely lacked myself. I’ve learned to stop, slow down and relax. More importantly, I’ve finally got my priorities right and figured out the things that really matter to me, and that’s made me feel more settled. So yes I guess I have managed some self development without consciously striving for it.

I’ve decided to make my mom-praisal a regular feature to ensure that I don’t stagnate as a mother. Maybe, when my daughter is older she can take over the appraising bit and give me some feedback to make me a better parent. Until then, I will have to make honest and brutal self assessment work for me, I suppose. I have to admit though, that unlike the often dreary appraisals from my corporate past, doing my mom-praisal was kind of fun. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this time round I am hopelessly in love with my new boss!


Originally written for "The Punekar"

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Manasi Vaidya, Author of "No Deadline For Love"

Lessons from mommyhood

Okay, so I am bursting at the seams (metaphor, metaphor!)with all the stuff that's been going on and that I want to tell you, but first I have to do the 'lessons from mommyhood' tag that the delightful Noor had tagged me with a while ago. Strangely enough before this tag started doing the rounds I'd been thinking of doing a post along similar lines, a post about all the stuff that I've learned since I became a mom. Being my usual efficient, brisk, get-down-to-the-job self, the post in my mind grew and brewed and would have probably got pickled, if it hadn't been for this tag which has served like a timely kick in the posterior. So here goes; here's some of the stuff I've learned since I became Nikki's mommy:

1.I've learned that it pays to start the day sunny side up. That bit about getting off on the right side of the bed? It works! Before I had Nikki I don't really remember waking up in the morning all raring to smell the roses and soak in the sunshine. Maybe the fact that all I could really look forward to smelling was my evil co-workers' coffee breath while soaking in the artificial glare from my laptop had something to do with it, but the point is I was invariably grouchy first thing in the morning on most days. Except Mondays, when I was positively depressed. Then Nikki came along and every morning I'd be greeted by a little bundle of cooing and squealing delight. Nikki wakes up every morning super thrilled to just be awake, raring to take on a new day, chattering non stop about all the million things she simply has to do right away and her cheerful enthusiasm is infectious! My blue funk vanishes and I grin right back at her and it makes all the difference to the rest of my day as well. The bai who fails to turn up doesn't throw me into a tizzy, the gloomy weather outside doesn't make me want to curl up under my duvet and die and the million little daily irritants that earlier made me want to howl like a banshee just make me want to say tut-tut. Sounds simple really, but it took Nikki to make me realize how important it is to start the day with a smile and what a difference it can make.

2.I've learned to stop, slow down, relax. When you have a child who takes approximately one hour and thirty seven minutes to eat one aloo paratha, you can use the time to figure out what WH Davies really meant when he wrote all that stuff about leisure.You also learn that it can actually be fun to just slow down while you make funny shapes with that aloo paratha and observe the swirls it makes when you trail it in a bowl of yoghurt. And that there's nothing more relaxing than a summer afternoon spent in the park with a two year old, watching the clotted cream clouds drift past above, or make up stories about apples that dance and grasshoppers that sing.

3.Motherhood has made me an infinitely patient person. Patience was not something I listed among my virtues earlier but now I can deal with the worst of the temper tantrums and the nuclear meltdowns and the mealtime battles and then some with an abundance of calm. I just hope it lasts.

4.I've learned that I can be Superwoman when I have to. Ten years ago, if someone had told me that I would survive one long road trip with an infant, during the course of which keeping said infant well fed, clean, safe and in good humour would be my sole responsibility no matter how many times the infant pooped (and boy, did she poop!)and that I would come back home at the end of it, bone tired, to cook up a batch of khichdi and sterilize a few bottles, I would have laughed hysterically. Then I would have keeled over and died. But I did do all of these things. And then I woke up three times at one, three and five am to rock and sing the same infant to sleep. And I did not howl like a banshee. At least not out loud.

5. Most importantly, I think becoming a mother has helped me learn a whole lot of things about myself. About what makes me happy, about the things that really matter to me and the things that don't. And, cliched as it sounds, it has helped me become a better person, because the thought of that little person whose life I am responsible for shaping, at least in some ways, makes me want to be someone she can always look up to.

The whole world and its sister has probably done this tag by the time I've got down to it, but I'm going to go ahead and tag some mommies I'd like to hear from anyway. Go for it Priyanka, Divs, Sonia, MRC (hope this gets you to blog again!) and Beks! You're IT!