Confessions of a Stay-At-Home-Mom (SAHM)!

I thrived in the corporate atmosphere, thoroughly enjoyed it for eight years and then came a time when I felt that there was another role that needed my attention. That there are two tiny people in the world who need me much more than the 3,00,000+ employee strong organization I worked for. I felt the need to seize the moment to fully enjoy myself with the two people I mattered the most to. It was difficult to let go of my career, of losing the person I became in office, of losing my financial independence.

People asked if I had a plan, if I was planning to join somewhere else or start something of my own, but for the first time in my life I had nothing planned, no agenda, no objectives to meet, no deadlines to run after. It felt surprisingly good, absolutely refreshing. I won’t say it was all fun and laughter, I do have my moments of doubt. I do have my ‘good days’ and ‘bad days’ as a Stay-At-Home-Mom (S-A-H-M). On rare occasions, I do miss dressing up for work and clacking in those glossy stilettoes. There are times I miss being among like-minded colleagues and I definitely miss my own money but never, even in those moments, have I regretted the decision I have taken. There are never any regrets when one truly follows ones heart!

Over the months, I have discovered various simple joys of life, connected with old friends, met a lot of new people, learnt new and varied things, picked up on new hobbies and in the process I made acquaintance with an all new ‘me’. I chanced upon a whole new world of possibilities I never knew existed. It is like opening a fresh new notebook and having the choice to do whatever you wanted to…write, paint, sketch or make paper planes out of. The options are endless. Additionally, I don’t have to worry about performance appraisals, project deadlines, meetings, e-mails and calls. No more Monday Blues (every day is a Monday or a Sunday depending on how you look at it.)

As a S-A-H-M, the hardest thing I learnt to do (and still trying) is to not have an agenda or a to-do list on my mind all the time. Throughout school, college and office we are trained to multi-task, project plan, keep everything organized, deliver as per timelines come what may and in the whole process we forget how to just simply relax. These days I am learning the art of doing nothing (dolce far niente) from my kids. It’s therapeutic!

A lot of times you may have read how hard it is to be a full-time mother and that it is the toughest job in the world! It sure is a difficult, complex, ever-evolving, challenging role, sometimes harder than a corporate job, if we must compare it that way. But, lately I have also come to believe that it is not really a ‘job’. Rather it is a ‘privilege’, a ‘luxury’. This is the only time when my kids are the most impressionable, the most delicate years of their life, when their mom means the world to them.

These are the precious years when we have all the time in the world for each other and I know fairly well that these years are going to fly past sooner than I know. Nothing seems to give me more joy than making my kids laugh, colouring with them, pasting stickers on the wall, pretend-playing and reading children’s stories with them. Sometimes I feel like I am re-living my childhood all over again.

Now, can I really call that a job? When I am having so much fun and not getting paid for it?

(To all the working moms...Kudos to you! I am really amazed by moms who are managing it all...Career, a Home,  Kids and slightly jealous of the ones who have grandparents staying together to provide full support.)

Would love to hear from you...please do leave in some comments.

(This post is also available on mycity4kids.com and has received over 1.7Lakh hits.)

The Game of Parenting!

Today morning, just as I open the fridge to take out some vegetables, my one and a half year old arrives and starts fiddling with the bottles on the fridge door. I see him pull out a bottle of chilli sauce. I ask him to put it back, he obliges and I turn my attention to the vegetables. Just as I take the beans in my hand, there is a loud crash! The big new bottle of tomato sauce has been smashed to bits. The poor bottle looks like a twisted, bludgeoned creature, lying on the floor. There is sauce splashed all over the kitchen floor, shards of glass everywhere and a shooting pain in my foot. I feel like venting my anger on my toddler but I stop and remove myself from the ‘crime scene’ to tend to my poor foot, while hubby steps in take our toddler away.

As I clean my wound, I observe myself firstly simmer and then slowly cool down as I make my way back to the kitchen to clean the huge mess. I would have reacted impulsively had I not recalled that I had lost my privilege of acting out as an instinctual human being the day I became a parent. Also, my acting out would probably not make my little one learn any lasting lesson about glass bottles being breakable.

I have learnt (the hard way) that for small children to process and internalize, even simple instructions need to be repeated (maybe a dozen to even more than a hundred times) before they finally follow. The hard part is not to repeat, but it is rather tough to stay calm, consistent and never lose patience in the process of repetition. I am not immune to it either and have heard myself start statements with “How many times do I have to tell you to….”

Another important aspect of parenting is Unconditional Love, irrespective of the behaviours our child shows. Our love for them is not so fragile that it can change and shift based on their accomplishments, acts of mischief or academic achievements. We may or may not like certain behaviours but we love them all the same. It does not matter how many times or how many ‘walls’ they make me climb, they are always the most loved.

However, our love for them does not mean a lack of Discipline. In fact the greatest gift we can give to our children is Discipline, but that too does not need the extensive use of our vocal cords or limbs. That would indeed be the worst for our children.

Even in my limited experience as a parent I have realized the importance of patience, practice and passion in mastering the science and art of parenting. The same applies to anything else we would want to master and it is true of parenting, only more so.

Just like in a video game the levels keep changing and getting tougher, the same thing happens to us as parents at every progressive stage of our child’s development. A game is always interesting and enjoyable and so is parenting, but this is one game you never want to lose!

 

Once you become a Mother…

Till you become a mother, your life is busy with so many things, your job, your friends, your relationships, your hobbies, your interests. Your mind is completely occupied by so many things revolving around you. Everything is more or less about YOU. But, when you become a mother everything is no longer about you, it is about someone who is more important than you, even more than your own self.

Even for a mother it is extremely hard to tell how much she loves her child. It’s impossible to quantify, yet safe to say that a mother loves her children enough to consider everything else secondary in comparison to the primary love of her life, including her partner and herself. Everything that she loved earlier becomes a little less important than her precious baby. I see many mothers around me and I know that they have put their child ahead of everything else, some have even sacrificed their aspirations to be the best mother that they can be. For many, becoming a mom is an achievement in itself, a realization of a dream.

Mothers may sometimes complain about their changed body, the sleepless nights, the endless toy picking, the constant running around, dealing with tantrums, the flu and fever days and the list goes on. But, if you ask her if she would have it any other way and go back to her old life, I am sure the answer is going to be a definite ‘NO’. Because she knows that one smile, one hug or a few sweet words from her child are the best things in the world. Once you become a mother, you are always a mother and you don’t want to imagine a life without your kids. With experience you become a better mother, sometimes you struggle, sometimes you falter but mostly you learn. As the child grows, so does the mother.

Once you give birth, you are more of a mother and a little less of everything else you were earlier. Sometimes, you are a little less of the daughter, wife, friend and employee you used to be to make space for the mother in you. Also, you learn to be a little less impatient, less selfish, less angry, less anxious, and at times less social (at least initially). Yet, you are so much more than what you used to be earlier. Your understanding of relationships, love, feelings and emotions deepen. Your life feels so much richer to have gained an all new meaning, as you learn what it really means to have your heart beat outside your body, to love someone more than words can describe and more than the mind can imagine, to care for someone so much that you want to bear their share of pain to see them smile. When you feel all this and more…you know you are madly in love…you know you are a MOTHER!

“Being a mother is learning about strengths you didn’t know you had, and dealing with fears you didn’t know existed”                                                               

                                                                                                                                          – Linda Wooten

Family Trademark!

It’s the Friday, the thirteenth, but the day began well for me with my post on parenting getting posted on the webpage for ParentEdge magazine. I proudly show the e-mail to my husband and he happily congratulates me. Soon after he leaves, it is time for me to give our one year old a bath. Like every day, he is playing a game with me while I try to massage him with oil. Every time I take my hands off him to get some oil, he crawls away from the mat and laughs when I struggle to reach out and catch him. The only difference today was that he seemed to a little more enthusiastic than usual. He giggled at me while rolling on the bed as I tried to grab his tiny little foot.

With tiny pink lips and curly locks of hair that hang on his face, he looks like a doll to me. He looks so cute that people often mistake him for a girl! It is such a joy watching him that sometimes I don’t want him to grow up. Once more, as I sit on one side of the bed and let go off him to pour some oil on my palm, he crawls away, smiling. He turns to see me and sneaks a mischievous look at me, waiting for me to reach out. I notice that he has reached the other extreme of the bed, I call out his name but before I can grab him, he rolls over, bumps his head on the side table before hitting the floor with a thud. He begins to cry in pain as I rush over and pick him up.

As I try to console him I feel like a failure as a mother. A mother who failed to protect her little one from getting hurt. I hold him close and as he calms down I find an ugly blue bump emerging on his forehead and a small cut at the outer corner of his right eye. Once he stops crying I take him to his bathtub and to my surprise he happily begins to play in the warm water, while a droplet of blood on the side of his eyelid mocks at me, leaving me feeling terrible. It is indeed amazing how soon kids get back to normal and forget their pain. I wish we adults could do the same. I begin to wonder if it is indeed something to do with Friday the 13^th.

I call up my husband to share my anguish. I narrate the whole incident and tell him how miserable I am feeling about the cut. Knowing that the skin near our eyelids is delicate, I fear that the mark would probably stay for a lifetime. He responds by telling me that it is our ‘family trademark’ since the three of us (My husband, elder son and I) already have it and our younger son just got his. I had not even thought about it like that and I realize it only when he says it. I feel a small hint of a smile emerging on my lips and fall in love with him a little more for diffusing my tension in the most unusual way possible. Interestingly, my mother too says the same thing when I tell her about it.

Later in the day I watch my brave little soldier play, smile and walk around the house as usual and I feel relieved. While he seems to have moved on and forgotten about the injury, I seemed to be hurting for much longer than him. I wish we adults too could put our hurt and pain (physical and emotional) behind us with the same ease as little children and move ahead in life with a carefree smile. We have so much to learn from them, to love wholeheartedly, forgive easily, make friends effortlessly, laugh freely, be surprised by small things, find joy in everything (except eating), jump without the fear of falling, forget pain quickly and focus all our energy in having fun all the time!


(Printed in the March Issue of the White Print Magazine)

Valentine’s Day and All That Jazz!

It’s the 14^th of February this Saturday! Isn’t it just wonderful that it falls on a Saturday this time?  For those wonderful couples who believe in celebrating the ‘Day of Love’, it’s simply perfect! You go to any market place or mall or even an online store and you shall see cute little hearts splashed all over. The shades of red and pink are peeking from everywhere. It’s all so sugary sweet, it makes me feel nauseous. No offense meant to those who have special plans for celebrating the day, cooing sweet nothings into your beloved’s ear, while holding hands through the day.

Sometimes, I feel as if celebrating Valentine’s Day is more of a thing for teenagers who believe that love is just like the way it is shown in romantic movies, expressed through cards, gifts and flowers. I see this as an excellent opportunity for many companies to make money by setting up a perfect honey trap for you. They all seem so eager to sell you something that’s perfect for your partner. Doesn’t it look like they are much too interested in improving your love life? Sorry if I am making you feel bad… maybe it’s just that I have been married too long to believe in these mushy things.

If we needed a brand ambassador for Valentine’s Day, then I can only picture one man, standing there, with his arms spread out, telling his senorita how much he loves her. No one other than Shahrukh Khan comes to my mind. Having grown up in the 90’s, my impressionable mind at that age made me believe that maybe love was like that. That the man who loves you understands your feelings and emotions just by looking into your eyes and conveys his love eloquently through words. His intense eyes and facial expression convey true eternal love etc. Somewhere in my mind I blame him for making us girls believe in these fairy stories and also increasing the burden on the guys to be like him. Have you really come across a real guy like that who is capable of mindreading their partner’s feelings when she clearly say she is ‘fine’?

While I don’t believe in celebrating Valentine’s Day, I am still a die-hard romantic. To me, the best gifts are those that can never be mass produced in a factory or bought at the Archie’s store nearby. Love need not be conveyed through that super expensive bouquet of red roses bought on Valentine’s Day. Love cannot be celebrated on fourteenth of February every year and forgotten the next day. The most romantic words are never the cliché ‘I Love You’. While I absolutely do believe in expressing love, it doesn't need to be in any prescribed format or on a particular date.

To me, it’s a part of our lives, it is transient and continuous. It needs nurturing and grows through the investment of time from both. Also, if things are not as you would desire them to be, then you yourself need to be the knight in shining armour and put in effort to get things back on track. Love doesn’t need to wait for Valentine’s Day to be celebrated and neither is it limited to one day. It something that you live, breathe and feel every day and it’s not just about loving your husband or boyfriend either. It may not even be expressed in words, but can be hidden in a million things we do for our loved ones everyday.


You may also enjoy reading A Quaint Love Story!

I am working from home!

When I became a mother four years ago, I was working with a multinational organisation. I had a job that I loved and never could imagine that my becoming a mother could interfere with my career. I had no idea that my heart would begin to pull me in different directions. I had believed that I would be able to jump into my job as soon as my maternity leave got over, but I was wrong, so wrong. I discovered with experience that motherhood is something that changed my priorities for life.

Thankfully for me, the organization that I worked for allowed me to work from home (WFH) for a few months after my maternity leave was over. Although it was difficult, but it still was a big blessing for me. It allowed me to be around my baby for longer, feed him and watch him as he achieved some of his growth milestones. I could cuddle him and kiss him whenever I wanted. However, working from home came with its own challenges, such as working in an environment that was not as peaceful as my office cubicle, lacked the fancy telecommunication systems and the suave meeting rooms. The other thing that I missed out on was the ability to catch up with my colleagues and discuss things face-to-face with them.

However, what pinched me most was the perception of colleagues that when you work from home, you are not working as seriously. Interestingly, some family and friends also felt that since you are at home, your work is not as serious, which was far from reality. On the contrary, I ended up working all the time, late into the night or early in the morning and making the most of my time when my baby slept. While in office I had the chance to chat with people over a ‘chai break’, at home I began to feel guilty about getting up even to eat breakfast. On certain busy days I did not even get a chance to comb my hair. In spite of all these difficulties, I preferred to work from home since the control freak mother in me, found it hard to let her baby out of sight during the initial months.

Around the same time, I saw some of my friends in other organizations who did not have the privilege of working from home, either drop out of their jobs to become stay at home mothers or worse, suffered from guilt for not being with their kids for a significant part of the day. Often, unable to match up to the energy levels of their toddlers once they returned home from a heavy day at work. The kind of guilt mothers feel for spending time away from the kids is unique to our species. I barely see fathers feeling bad for spending long hours at work, travelling or spending time away from their children, having delegating their parenting responsibilities to their wife and other family members. Overall, I definitely felt blessed to be able to manage the two important spheres of my life.

Through these years, I really wished that more organizations offered a work from home option for their employees, be it women or men and more importantly offer it without carrying any bias, which would allow many more women to stay in the workforce through the tough years of child rearing. Secondly, I would love to see people who do not work from home treating those who do with respect. Respect for their work and for them as a person for juggling two worlds at the same time, while they themselves have to take care of just one at a time. Lastly, to all the mothers who are working from home, I would like to say…please do take care of yourself too. In our pursuit to be superwomen and supermoms we often forget our own selves. So, do make time for yourself, relax, it is okay even if everything is not as perfect as you would like it to be. While reaching the destination is important, enjoying the journey to get there makes it even better!

However, do not let the perception of you on others spoil the spirit within. Rise up and tweak the perception so that it is just right for you.

Originally published at Work from Home Divas India website (http://www.workfromhomedivasindia.in/wfh-peril-perception-dont-juggle-them-tweak-them-to-be-just-right/)

The Best Gift Ever!

With my birthday coming up, I am reminiscent of my previous birthday and the year that has gone by for me. Just a day before my previous birthday, I went to my office to hand over my laptop and bid farewell to my colleagues. It was the first time in my life I was going to be unemployed and unoccupied by a desk job or studies. For the first time in my life, I had nothing planned. I had not thought about what I was going to do or if I would ever join back into the corporate world. To be honest, I welcomed this unusual break. All through my life I had either been studying or working and for the first time I nothing on my hands that would use my intellectual capacity, force me think critically or strategically.

I had continued to work after the birth of my first child four years ago. I was struggling, yet juggling my job and my baby, getting crushed in between. But, now with the birth of my second child, I wanted to give myself a chance to enjoy motherhood, to stop being the superwoman I wasn’t. However, for some strange reason I felt I needed a laptop. My husband suggested an I-pad or tab since that would make it easy for me to browse through and read things online but for some reason I insisted on a laptop, maybe because I had always had one for the past decade of my life.

My parents had been keen to gift me a pair of earrings on the birth of my second child but I asked them not to buy one. I could see no use for another pair of earrings that would sit pretty, locked in the cupboard. Instead, I asked them to gift me a laptop. I just wanted something basic and comfortable, but my father, who loves gadgets choose to buy me one of the best ones in the market and gifted it to me on my birthday and I must say it’s the best gift ever, way better than the best diamonds. After all, it’s not just a laptop, it’s my window to escape into an all new world, whenever I wish to. It is my key to freedom. It allows me to dive into the all new world of writing and I swim through words to explore this new world.

A thought may occur to me, but its only when I sit down in front of the laptop, does the thought leap to take form. It’s only when I type, my thoughts take shape, just like water coming out of a fountain, soaring high and then touching the earth, with droplets scattering all over, like little pearls. It is only through this that I have been able to touch so many lives, bring tears and smiles to people around me, people I may or may not even know. Most importantly, it has allowed me to find a new passion, to learn new things, to play with words, to lose myself and discover a new me.

Thank you Papa and Ma for this beautiful gift! Last year, this was just a laptop, now it is a lot more!