Be Right Back!

Dear Kanav,

Till you are grown up to catch me stealing away. Or rather, till you are grown up to occasionally gift me sanity, I will continue to steal and celebrate, like this.
Movies. Caffeine. Reading. Writing.  - Bring it on!

[P.S - Done with my share already. Your super-nani just came from a break that I had forced on her! :-)]

Yours only
-Neha Mumma (@ Mother's Day.10.05.2015)

What not to expect when you are expecting

Gratitude to those who have stuck by me, through thick and thin.

My maid's sister delivered a cute little boy a week back. She is going through some post partum complications, the super-set of which I once had. She was hospitalized for reasons more than one. She felt clueless, hopeless, close to suicidal for reasons more than one. That's when I decided to pay her a visit. That's when I decided to pen this down. And that's when I decided to share it across. Hoping it paves hope for those going through it.

Ok. Will cut short the foreplay.

After a delivery that started with unnatural bleeding, spanned across 24 hours, turned into a back labor, leading to a forcepted labor, 3rd degree episiotomy, 15 days hence diagnosed - a severe life threatening infection because of the gauze pads being left inside during THE hour, sour lactation experience, a thing called endometritis, another thing called vistula, some 5 finger Diastasis Recti in the abdominal muscles, a bit of varicose veins, a financial breakdown, a marital breakdown, if me and my baby can make it. So can you, and your baby.

Just keep in mind -

1. No, even if it's a little more in your case than what I mentioned above, it wont kill you, or your baby.

2. Despite the conditions, the medical warnings and the evidence to not let me pursue my weight loss regimen, I exercised, and exercised (wont suggest you do this).  Till I lost that each bit of extra Kgs trapped inside my skin. Till I restored my abdominal muscles to where I wanted them to be, and not where they were announced to be, and were expected to accept. I am back in shape, even better one, just with a bit of loose skin around the tummy, which I am still working on, post 2 years of delivery. If it's in mind, body follows. Mostly. More tips here.

3.  Make sure you have at least ONE strong support system with you, preferably a woman.

4. Try not to rely too much on your partner though I do hope that you get all the support you need. For he has little approximation of what you are going through. Any expectation, unless met, is likely to bounce back with even more frustration. And is likely to further prolong the healing.

5. Stop thinking negative. Even if it means a bit of sleeping pills, anti-depressants, just go for it. Irrespective of what your sane care-takers tell you. Trust me, they help, at least more than what you can expect from anyone around. And if taken with the right zeal, are not that tough to wean off.

6. Father of all - Screw those who tell you to go for a normal delivery (and not a C-section) even if your instinct says, you cant. A screwed up vaginal delivery is n times (n being in inverse proportion to your luck quotient) more hellenous than a well operated C-section. In every possible aspect. The process itself, the healing, the precautions, the life.

7. Mother of all - Do not google negative stuff. Never when you are not in the right frame of mind. Even if you have to, search for the cures and not just the terms you are diagnosed with. I tell you, this concept of manifestation, or the law of attraction as some call it does work. Or I should say that it worked at least for me. As I feel I have a pretty strong imagination power. I've seen most (if not all) of my visualizations, readings, fears, aspirations come true. Negative googling can manifest the hell out of your life if you are a strong thinker.

72 to 52

For few, it comes naturally, for few it doesn't it has to be earned.

Once my baby popped out, I weighed barely 3.5 Kgs lesser than what I was just before my delivery. And that was precisely the birth weight of my baby. Quite contrary to what I had heard from the mothers and their success stories of being in control of their weight and shape post delivery, I relied on the scale's correctness and gave situation the benefit of time. Life continued. I incorporated all healthy life-style practices. Healthy diet, Exercising etc. Few months hence, I was done with breast feeding. Few months further hence, my menstrual cycle happened. My date came, and went by. But, rather Big Butt! My scale tip went down by just a few grams.

Sensing the big trouble that my body had landed itself into, and the consequent restlessness in me, my GP gave me clear warnings, lest I be doing castaways with my body.

None-the-less. I took that as a self proclaimed wake up call. And what followed next was an austere project. Within about 4 months of that GP visit, my scale started showing 52ish Kgs. Consistently.

Coming to the point, here are the broad level tips (other than the regular exercising tips that can be easily googled) that by being aware of, you can make your journey more predictable and less prone to failures -

• Stay away from those who care for you. They wont be able to stand seeing you being so harsh on yourself, and would out of care try to distract you, reverse-talk your agenda and the likes.
• Stay away from those who are fond of eating. For obvious reasons.
• Prioritize and time cap the weight loss program - Understand the difference between staying healthy in general and losing intense weight. Former is a life style and can happen every day for the rest days of your life, but latter is a project that needs to be kicked off, implemented and be done with. Paving way for the former.
• Be aware that any such heavy weight loss can get extremely cruel on the skin and the area being targeted, leaving you with loose fat-less flab to keep you struggling for years. Get into the habit of doing a regular deep massage on the area or the entire body. 
• First few pounds are easier to lose. Let that be a motivation and not a distraction. 
• Talk to yourself, watch motivational videos, whatever. Keep the fire burning till you are there. 

And remember, if it's in mind, body follows. Mostly!

The Love that's yours

So it strikes
it had to
But in a way
that's way different
from how it was rather prophesied

Thirty plus
and a boy
an awesome one
may be in a way
awesomeness is seen
by every woman
in her every biological offspring
Or may be in a way
that's personalized by the way
you and me
build the connect
around us

the connect that wires
the threads of my heart
to the gaze in your eyes
when you look at me
with that sense
of longing
belonging

the connect that wires my headaches
to the pleasures
disobedience bestows upon you

the connect that wires my pleasures
to the soft touches
and
to every semi-sensible
and
to every semi-insensible
talk
that you do

the connect that soothes
the hours
yours and mine
slept cuddled together

the connect that
silently questions me
why

and the connect that
answers you saying
there had to be paid a little price
for the big awesomeness you carry

And that the love
with which you were born
the love
that hence is a part of you
and a part of me
and will always be
is the most abundant
the most surpassing
and the most unconditional
love
ever.

Forever.

Bun in my Oven

Ouch! This damn washbasin! Always hits me at the weirdo peeing hours. It’s about 3:30AM in Melbourne. And here I am fully awake. No folks, it's not any jet lag. It's a bun, a spiced up bun, in my oven, a really hot oven!

So while Mr. KUNE (KUnal + NEha) is in the process of making and baking, his mama sits awake at midnight tired of the peeing sessions; and his dad is busy fuming off his mama further by his non-stop snores and spinning-in-bed chores. Poor mama! I know!

With an absent-minded awareness, a dull face, patchy skin, drowsy eyes and a body which I find hard to recognize, I feel, this entire odyssey of pregnancy revolves pretty much around the letter 'P' - You get a 'Pea' in the 'Pod'  as a result of some 'Pleasurable' moments. Your 'Prenatal' phase starts and then you 'Puke' and 'Puke' until you have been ‘Pumped off’ of your last bits of energy left.  Your good night sleep goes for a toss while you 'Pee' and 'Pee' all throughout the night. Thanks to the 'Pressure' on the 'Pelvic' muscles which make it difficult for the body to even turn around while in bed in later months. This is followed by the most awaited phase of 'Pain' and 'Push', I mean the ‘Phobiatic’ phase. And voila, here appears the handsome 'Pie'! Of course with a ‘Pack’ of ‘Pride’ and ‘Postpartum’ chores.

Oh my boy, my dude! Well, well there are still a few days to having you in my laps. At times the thought of seeing you and cuddling you wipes off my mind of all phobias. At other times, my phobic stimulus just seems to take over. May be its my preggo hormones playing wreck with my emotions, or it’s my worn and torn body at this stage doubting its capabilities once recovered, or it’s my dependency on maids in this maid free land, whatever it is. Trust me kid, it’s easier to be an obedient daughter or a daughter-in-law, a loving wife, or a supporting sister than to be a functional mother. However with a single kick of yours, my life seems to get a kick. With that magical wave on my tummy, you make me smile and jump with joy. With that beautiful shape of yours emerging in my belly, you make me feel restless about seeing you, about introducing you to this world. With an ultra-sound shot seeing you scratching your head, you make me feel you, you make me feel like a mother, you make me feel like the most energetic creature around who can do anything, just about anything for this cute Kiddiwink.

My Little Rug Rat! I mean Your Royal Highness! You demanded your mere diagnosis to be done not at home, but at a grandiose Hotel. It’s the night when our Hyderabad house was sprayed with pesticides and we had to shift to a hotel at 2AM midnight because of the pesticides putting unacceptable strain on my smelling hormones, marking a sharp decline in my environmental tolerance. Anyways the following morning, sensing your arrival, I decided to test your presence and voila – you had already popped in!  We are and will always remain honoured with your gracious landing.

Thanks to my motherly instinct which tells me that you are going to be a hard nut to crack. Your Highness! You either seem to be arriving with royal endeavours or you seem to be on a pursuit to bring your spoiled, kinky, irresponsible, and sloppy freaks i.e. your parents-to-be on track.

Your immediate next course of action was to ensure that your mommy was used to and comfortable with all the tricks of the trade cooking, and hence to ensure exclusive authentic mom-made savory bites for yourself in future. So you sparked off some fiery hormones in me which made me fire my cook, who had been serving us for 4 years. All at once it was time for self-cooking. I still don’t know if it was the actual fault of the cook, or it was these preggo hormones caused by of course you, My serene Highness.

Your Majesty! You deserve and command full time attention and care. So you made my days, especially mornings nauseatic enough to not being able to work from office. The day I woke up thinking I might just turn up in office soon, that day was sure to bring me a good number of pukes. With each puke, I heard your voice - “Enough of work mama! Stay at home with me, I Love You. You better love me too”. I was terrified even to take the name of ‘office’ in the morning. For it took me a few hard mornings to recognize that few words don’t seem to go well with you.

That was just the beginning. Very soon, I had to put down my papers because this ‘P’ factor brought with it another surprise, the most awaited ‘PR’ for Australia. As there’s an expiry date to activating PR visa, we realized there was no other time to visit there than then. So my Happy Little Vegemite wanted to be born an Aussie. May be that’s why this visa thing coincided with my conception. Your Highness made us leave our home, our families, our jobs and our country. So soon after, KUNES, expecting, jobless, homeless, clueless, just got up, packed up and arrived in Australia. What followed next was pure gamble.

Once a woman is in the club, she should not plan a shift. Though we shifted not once or twice but thrice before we could call some place home. Every time I wondered whether we were being railed or derailed, I felt the ever mine boy inside my tummy, boiling his own courage and pouring some to me as well. In the middle of an ocean of countless sensitive circumstances, a single sign of clean progress would make me weave new hopes about our years to come. And well! Seems the gamble played off well. Things started to fall in place. Yet.. Ninth month and here I sit, staring at our yet to open luggage which has just arrived from India a week back.  Well, a mother’s work is never done.

And my dear brave Littlie! All this while, your cooperation, butterflies you caused in my stomach, your ever growing martial arts (kicks, flutters, what not), your cute little face I see in my dreams and the excitement you bring with your anticipated arrival have kept the fire burning, and the aspirations elevated. Lucky are we to have you and the surprises galore you bring, which are already spicing up and energizing our lives. After having traversed through many a shades of the sky, and with a beautiful rainbow just around the corner, you are simply awaited and anticipated with lots and lots of love, wishes and prayers, and ouch! A little bit of labor-phobia!

From a flat belly to a belly full of paws and claws, from fifty three kaygees to sixty nine kaygees, from Me-as-Boss and Maid-as-Maid to MyBaby-as-Boss and Me-as-Maid, from mental tiredness to physical tiredness, from girly whirly shopping of all types to Toys & Nappies & Wipes,  from time-to-kill to a full-time-drill, from immaturity to a little bit of maturity, from a woman to a mother, the way I see it, it's been a journey from glamor to glory.

True Grit

“Oh! It’s a girl! Yet again!”

A small town, a financially challenged house, the elder daughter recently turned 9, the middle one is celebrating 7 years of her ‘existence’, and wola! Here’s born yet another girl! Quite as expected, barring the smiles of the father and the grandmother, this third-newbie-girl is welcomed with frowns. The still-in-pain mother is looked at with helplessly sympathetic, and sadistically pleasurable eyes, especially when her counter candidates had been ejecting out boys in series.

Thanks to the ‘sexually and racially paradoxed’ yet ‘cultured’ society, it’s female stigmatization, it’s effortless efforts towards eradicating some of the social evils converting loud dowries into so-called sophisticated gifts - someone just got an unexpected twist in her motherhood.

Underneath some unsaid silences, and her clogged breath, she lies.. Bewildered

So what next! Advice and opinions galore: “Beautify the daughters, engage in socializing and the associated show-offs, sing in to the tunes of the vanity of socialites, needless to educate the daughters, instead save money and hook them up with the so-called perfect grooms of the town..” For some reason, in India, human species surrounding a person, especially close relatives, consider this their birth right to dictate how a person, having committed blunders like arriving at multiple-female-offsprings, should now succumb to their life-saver wisdom. And if you are a woman, and choose not to do so, you will be simply labeled unsocial and will be out-casted. But I do not blame the social creatures in this case, as they had absolutely no idea of what and whom they were dealing with. For the lady/mother in question had a plan, a sense, a grit of her own, ready to be put to test.

Battling with the storms of the heart, here begins the waterfall..

Post delivery, the mother resumes working as a full time housewife, as a full time mother, and as a full time school teacher, all in parallel. Father continues struggling his ways out at a number of places –Singapore, US, Middle-east. And the concatenated effort is just about sufficient to keep their daughters studying in a decent school, while worrying about what lies next, while thinking if at all there is any way to hit a reverse gear in life and start afresh. Unfortunately or fortunately there is not.

In the middle of all this chaos, the family gets some ‘special’ visits by their ‘so called’ –near and dear one(s), the ‘economically and socially well settled’, and hence ‘wiser’ people, proud about their earned or inherited riches, in the name of brotherhood, shower their lessons of wisdom upon the mother on how to keep herself and her daughters grounded, and not to get over-ambitious. ‘Unrich’ daughters, per them are the shaky, slippery grounds and should never be invested/relied upon.

But strange is this mother, who even after being warned so much, after being suffocated deep into the noise of the city, still manages to remain untouched by it. Needless to mention, the other ‘domestic problems’ which are a part of every marital life, are a part of her life too. 

Stupefied yet stubborn, she continues and challenges messiness head-on..

Days pass by, crises continues. At this stage, an already working mother, mother to 3 kids, the youngest one just delivered, in addition to her full time working job, opens up a boutique at home. Several months pass by, never ending crises still continue. And while catering to all of the above roles, now she decides to add some advanced academic degrees to her belt. This belt already comprises of a Diploma in Arts (one of her art works even got auctioned in an exhibition in Germany), a Bachelors Degree in Science, a Masters in English. She takes up Economics this time, as this promises good money. Money! aah! The need of the hour.  

Somehow she knows what her way is, and the way to her way..

Even in the chilliest of winters, she wakes up at 4AM, unapologetically, and mercilessly. She lights a lamp outside in the balcony so as not to waken up her family. In the silent fog of the uncertainty, she sits, unwary of whether she is going to make it or not, she studies unknown and unheard of concepts. Her grit accompanying her, her love for her daughters fueling her, and her shadow comforting her. Few uninterrupted minutes follow, and she gears up for the rest of the day. She hand-washes clothes, dries them. Cooks and packs food for all. Leaves for her job. Comes back to see some customers waiting at her boutique. Attends to them, attends to the just returned kids. Takes tuition in next few hours, followed by tuition to her own kids. And chores just don’t seem to end.

All this continues for days, months, until the exam-day arrives. And she comes out good. She is an ‘Economics Lecturer’ now! Her brilliance and determination wins over rest all oppressions.

She is her honor, she is her veil.. She is her lamp, she is her wick..

Meanwhile, the daughters are too busy growing up. Yet again, against the opinion of others, they are sent to the best school in a new city altogether. The Mother further aggravates her tuitions and boutique strategies. By now, she is used to seamlessly waking up at 4 in the morning, and to her never ending struggle motivation for ‘larger than life’ experiences in the rest 20 hours of her being awake. As kids have to now catch a public transport to land into their school situated in another city, she first drives the eldest one to the bus-stand, some 6 Km from the house, comes back, drives the middle one to the same place, for she drives a luna and cannot manage a tripling. She comes back, drops herself in her school, yet another 7 Km away in the opposite direction. Years pass by like this.

Her body, her mirror needs some time from her, but she has none to spare..  

The eldest daughter decides to pursue MBA from a reputed college. The mother, without a hitch, stands by her decision, and extends herself into the risk of taking education loan worth lakhs. Decision well made, this daughter is successfully running her own consultancy firm today. The youngest one, being good in vocal and extra-curricular activities, plans to pursue Bachelors in Mass Communication from one of the most expensive universities. The mother, after facing a lot of criticism, stands by her, and yet again manages the fees. This daughter after having graduated effortlessly is now pursuing an MBA.

The middle one decides to go for extra coaching classes to help her with her admissions into good engineering colleges. Mother borrows money from cousins, cousins do help, but with a lot of noise around that ‘girl-child and her education’ crap. None-the-less the daughter gets to sit in the extra classes. The first wave of comfort comes when she gets into a decent engineering college, and also gets scholarship thoroughout. And finally gets the real break of her life, when she gets through her first campus placement and eventually lands into one of the world’s finest organizations. Phew! That journey still continues while I pen this down. Thank you Mom! :)

Who says happiness cannot be earned?! Happiness for me is satisfaction and it was clearly earned, rather snatched from the odds! Whatever I am, whatever I possess –

My body – for I came from her, and her hands nourished it further and turned me into a young lady even before I knew I had entered into adulthood;

 My education, my professional well being – for she taught me, facilitated my education, took the right decisions even before I could sense that blindly following her was doing so much good to me;

 My values – for she never preached but she practiced and demonstrated, and left the rest to me;

My belief system – for she gave me the freedom at the right time to develop one;  
My personal bliss – for she always trusted my decisions, and supported me into marrying the LOVE of my life;

My each compliment I have ever received - I owe it to her, to those wrinkles, to those gray hair.

And that’s why I call her a Bond! My James Bond Mother! It still does not quite sink within me from where she derived her perseverance, her belief in life, no matter how many times, and in which all ugly stunts life hit her.  

But since she excelled, and so we are where we are, and hence is the bliss.

Latest I heard, she is planning to pursue yet another Masters degree, even at this retiring age.

Proud to be born of you mom. In times to come, if I prove myself to be even half as good a mother or a person that you are, I will be a HIT in life, a BIG-time success.

Moral of the story -WYBIWYG (What You Believe Is What You Get) 

P.S – I am equally thankful to my father, but being born a girl, and now turned into a woman (though not yet a mother), I relate more to her...

Thanks to my grandparents (maternal and paternal) for their constant support.