Living with your choices

As a stay at home mom, I’m caught in an eternal tussle between doing what’s right and what’s convenient. I’m still grappling with some of the difficult choices I’ve made as a parent. Breastfeeding, for instance, has been a major decision and I knew all through my pregnancy that I wanted to do this, simply because it’s the best food for a baby. But a number of other decisions hinged on my choice to breastfeed – and staying at home is an offshoot of that. I’d love to have a full time job and a steady salary every month, but that would mean forgoing time with my baby, missing her milestones and most importantly, pumping or giving her formula, both of which I’m not particularly inclined to do on an everyday basis.

The other decision was to exclusively breastfeed her for the first six months, in line with WHO guidelines. This, I’ve been able to do to some extent but finally buckled in and started solids at 5.5 months, while continuing to feed on demand. If my folks had their way, I’d have been forced to give D solids from her third or fourth month, and I’m glad I put my foot down. While I really appreciate any help from family, spending too much time with them also tends to rob me off any agency; I am expected to tow their line and follow their advice blindly. And while I respect their views and experience, I really do believe that some of what they say makes zero sense, and are not necessarily great for the baby either. We have more access to good healthcare and verified information today, so while my folks claimed we turned out OK under their care and advice, I want D to turn out better, more than just OK.

Cloth diapering is a decision I go back and forth on, because it’s super inconvenient for both me and D. The first few weeks, we never used disposables on her even during the night, and that meant I had to clean her up and change her sheets multiple times through the night besides nursing her and trying to put her to sleep. Since she was ( still is) such a bad sleeper already, it did not help that she was forced to wake up so many times. Better sense prevailed and we started putting her on disposable diapers at night and it made our lives easier. Slowly transitioned to diapers during daytime naps, bought expensive super absorbent cloth diapers that worked every now and then ( leakage is an issue ) and now we alternate between cloth and disposables during the day. I’d even do her laundry separately with a mild baby detergent earlier but now I’m not so obsessive about it; we run a common load on the washing machine with regular detergent, and it does not feel like we’re doing laundry all day!

Both M and I chose not to hire help when it comes to cooking and baby care. We have gotten by so far thanks to the kindness of family who’re so generous with their time, but now that we’re on our own and M has a full time job ( someone has to bring in the monies) the real test begins. Will be interesting to see how we ( especially I) handle all the additional stress.

So I’m torn between making life easy for me (read: getting more sleep plus me time) and doing what’s best for her. It’s a fine balance and it eludes me for the most part, because I want to be gentle on her ( which is why I’m hesitant to sleep train), but hopefully as we grow up in this journey, we might find that sweet spot lurking somewhere in the midst of all the chaos. Until then, I just need to be chill and keep my sense of humour intact, because really, if you can’t laugh at yourself, life’s bloody miserable.

Bookish

When I was a kid, I used to be what you might call a “voracious reader”. I was a shy kid, quiet and aloof, and would hardly speak to family but I found a friend in books. I’d almost always be found curled up in a corner of the home, book in hand. I’d read while having my meal as well, much to the chagrin of my folks. I had over a hundred volumes of Tinkle and perhaps every perceivable copy of Amar Chitra Katha books on Indian mythology, apart from several editions of Champak, Chandamama and Gokulam. This was my initiation into the world of books, and once I was big enough to read a proper novel, I started with the marvellous St Clare’s series by Enid Blyton, following it up with Famous Five and Nancy Drew books.

My school had a fairly good library and it’s from the depths of the musty shelves in that room that I fished out Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K Jerome. I laughed so hard till my stomach hurt. I re read the book a few years ago and it was just as hilarious. Swami and Friends by RK Narayan was the first Indian novel I read, and I was so emotionally invested in the story that I cried when it ended. From there on, I moved to popular books by authors like Jeffrey Archer ( Kane and Abel was one of the earliest books I’d read), but it wasn’t until I went to college that I was exposed to more interesting books.

I may not remember the story or most of the characters in a book that I read, but I most definitely remember how the book made me feel. For instance, Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead made a huge mark on me and I went on to read Atlas Shrugged, which made me all sad, angsty and upset. Catcher in the Rye helped address some of my teenage angst and rebellion. Albert Camus was my hero and for a while, I was so into existentialism especially after reading Happy Death, which was not as morbid as I thought it’d be; it is in fact my favourite Camus book more so because of his strikingly handsome face on the cover. The Outsider made me depressed and conflicted.

But there were two books that stood out for me: the weird and wonderful Catch 22, and the unbelievably funny Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I’d lent the latter to a friend and instead of returning it to me, a bunch of my friends (including him) gifted me the entire hitch hiker omni bus with all five books in the series ( the author had called it a trilogy of five). And it was around then that I realised that I love funny books; even now I look for books with a sense of humour and I love the Alexander McCall smith series, Sue Townsend and Gary Shteyngart ( ‘Absurdistan’ is a riot!). I read a fair amount of non fiction too and I’ve taken a special liking to the Indian writer Samanth Subramanian’s works. Chimamanda Adichie’s works gave me deeper, fresher insights into feminism and race, while Pico Iyer kindled my wanderlust. I just finished a book of short stories, Loyal Stalkers, by Chhimi Tendufla, a Sri Lanka based writer, and I’m hoping to read The Diary Of A Provincial Lady, next up.

Sadly though, I’m not the kind of reader I once was; definitely not “voracious”. My appetite for books has shrunk and I take forever to complete a book, sometimes months. I’ve abandoned several books too ( mostly because of their intimidating size) such as Born To Run, Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, and A Suitable Boy, the classic.

Hopefully I’ll stop scrolling my phone or flipping through Netflix and Amazon Prime, and get some reading done soon. Do hit me up with book recommendations and tell me what you’ve been reading.

Wishful thinking

I realise that I don’t have a ‘best friend’, so to speak, and it bothers me sometimes. I’m usually pretty good at staying in touch with people I love, but somehow I seem to have lost contact with my school friends and most of my college friends. It wasn’t a deliberate attempt at cutting people off but I’d have loved to preserve these friendships and nurture them, if you will.

I’ve shifted several cities, about 3 at least in the last 5-6 years, and while I’ve always had people to hang out with, finding new friends who are keepers, has been tough. I don’t know if this has to do with age ( inching towards mid thirties) or my choice of friends but things tend to fizzle out after a point. Sometimes I feel that I’m not putting in enough effort into these relationships, and sometimes these new friendships fade out despite my best efforts. It’s a two way street, at the end of the day.

I have a little daughter now and I’d love for her to have cool aunts and uncles to spend time with. My family ( parents, grandparents, mom in law and M of course) has been my rock, really, despite all the turbulence that lasted several years leading up to my wedding, sure, we disagree on a lot of things and have heated arguments but the kind of unconditional love and support from them has been beyond anything I could hope for. Yet, my friends and cousins are largely missing from the picture. I sometimes wish I had a more close knit support system – you know like friends who are family, and cousins who are like your own siblings. As a family, we’re quite distant – most of my extended family can be volatile and condescending and I’m not particularly close to anyone in the fam, for above mentioned reasons. Besides, I moved to a new city just a month or two prior to my pregnancy and couldn’t take up a full time job, so no work friends either. And work friends have been the only kind of friends I’ve had over the last few years. I can’t afford to sink into loneliness and feel like I’m friendless in a strange city. I understand that everyone’s busy with their lives, but I’ve come to value human connection to a great extent, and miss it sorely, at times.

I say all this because I want a far better community for D. I want her to be surrounded by people who love her and care for her ( apart from her parents that is) unconditionally. I want us to go on holidays with families and friends, celebrate festivals with loved ones, have friends and family visit us often and have this wonderful bond with them. I want her to know and believe that she is loved, cared for and has an army of people she can trust and lean on. It’s something I never had ( given that everyone at home and the extended family was conspiring against me for a while) but I don’t think it’s a big ask.

This is one big rambly, rant-y post and I want to delete it completely but letting it stay just for the heck for it. So excuse me while I go hunt for a local BFF and douse this fleeting sense of worthlessness in some coffee and cake.