Tales of puppy love

Let it be recorded here for posterity that kuttan has had his first taste of puppy love. Meaning to say that he has just found an ardent, faithful and extremely beautiful admirer in the opposite sex from his own class - let's call her S.

The conversation between us went like this...

Me: So what did you do in school today baby?
K: I played with S...
(Pauses)
Amma, andha S enna chumma chumma kiss panra.. (S keeps kissing me)

The husband, deeply engrossed in the 'Classified' section of 'The Hindu' (we really, really believe in getting our money's worth) removes his nose out of the paper for the first time with a glimmer of interest in his eyes.

Me: Really? Why?
K: I don't know.

And the conversation is forgotten soon afterwards.

I went to pick him up from school in the afternoon and sure enough, as we get ready to leave, I see S hovering adoringly around him while my stupid, tasteless son is busy monkeying around with another boy. And then as we are just leaving, she helps him put on his shoes!! ( Whoa girl! Lesson one: Never, ever wear your heart on your sleeve.) Kuttan looks at me with the long suffering look of someone who's enduring something with great difficulty while I take in the sheer cuteness of the scene. And then she says bye with a nice, sweet kiss. My heart just melted and was in danger of puddling around my feet and what does my son do? Grimaces and wipes his face and nonchalantly walks off with me!!

The boy shows every sign of following in his father's footsteps...ah, well, another long story and one that I will probably never tell..:D

Why I was away...

Its ironic that I wrote about how unpredictable life can be only a few posts ago....It seems like a million light years ago since that time, a different era and it feels like I was a different person then.

I lost my father to a massive heart attack nearly 3 months back, 5th of September to be precise. Its been almost 3 months since life changes irrevocably, never to be the same again. I have stayed away from blogging because, somehow, even now it seems like putting it in words will make it too real, too permanent. The wound is still too raw and the pain is still too fresh for me to write anything coherent about daddy just now.

I will probably write about it sometime. But for now, I will continue to write posts about regular normal stuff...and go on pretending that all I need to do is press the beloved Coimbatore number to hear that beautiful voice pick up the phone and say, 'Enna kanne?'. I need to continue fooling myself. Just for a little while longer.

A few tips for men....

...on how to treat their wives after a visit to the parlour.

* After your wife comes back from half a day spent in the beauty parlor while you pulled your hair out in desperation at being left alone with the progeny, she is watching you for your reaction every step of the way from the minute she gets down from the auto.

* At all points in time, keep looking at her face adoringly and with wonder as though all your adult male fantasies have come true in her. Do NOT try to do something as unimportant as taking your son to the bathroom as he hops urgently from one foot to the other. This move of yours may be misconstrued as lack of interest on her part.

* In the interest of your peace and happiness ever after, please PAY ATTENTION as she discusses what she is going to be doing at the parlor BEFORE she leaves home. There will be questions when she gets back and I know that its not in your genes to be able to tell when she got a manicure with colorless nail varnish and if you had just paid attention to what she said, you may be able to suitably admire and ooh and aah over her nails.

* Do not even blink or miss a beat when she asks you how her hair color looks. Whether it is a garish baby pink or the exact same shade as she always had, always, always say with great enthusiasm, 'Awesome baby!! I love it..'

* If you do not like her haircut and both of you have an open and honest relationship where you discuss everything, well, this just aint one of them...You just have to zip up till the hair grows back...

* She has spent the best part of the day wincing as her body hair got pulled off her legs and arms and eyebrows and upper lip....believe me when I tell you, its bloody painful. Do NOT tell her how boring shaving is and how lucky women are to be able to wax body hair off...You just may find your legs getting waxed as you sleep one of these days.

* Do not ask blanch, or show any negative emotion at the amount of money she spent at the parlour, if, for some perverse reason, you need to ask at all.

* And last, but not the least, do not commit the cardinal sin. As she looks at you expectantly after getting her uber-cool haircut which her stylist assures her will make her look like a bomb, if you do not want grievious bodily injury and loss to preoperty, do not innocently ask her, 'What, no haircut????'

A chumma post

No, not the Hindi chumma. The Tamil one, meaning Just like that. And did you know that's not even an original Tamil word?

Anyway, I digress. I have not posted in sometime and have some(ok, ok) 1 anxious reader asking if things are ok. Thanks for asking, dear friend, and things are fine and dandy at the Bangalore household. It was a combination of sheer laziness and lethargy during weekdays and total head spinning craziness over the weekends that have kept me from posting. Some random updates:

It's been a month since Hubby's MBA classes started. To say that its changed our lives completely would be putting it too mildly.

When kuttan was born 3 and a half years ago, the whole family celebrated. The parents and in-laws were elated. Aunts and uncles rejoiced and friends called up to congratulate. Hubby and I, on the other hand, went about in a daze, not quite sure about what we were supposed to do with the little screaming, pooping bundle that I had, with ample help from the husband, brought into the world.

We looked at each other and did'nt say the words but might as well have shouted it out to each other. 'What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?' Kuttan was born on a MOnday and things continued on the same exhausting vein till I came home on Friday.

I came home on Friday morning. That night, on kuttan's first night home, we sent my parents packing upstairs. And then we switched off the lights in the living room and tuned to HBO to see 'Clear and Present Danger'. Ah, bliss!! I cannot tell you how liberating the feeling was. We can still have a life after all, we thought to ourselves, as we grinned at each other like idiots, as our infant son lay sleeping in the crib near us. See, our life has changed but our hallowed Friday ritual remains the same.

Things pretty much remained the same over the last few years as well. Come hell or high water, the Friday night was sacrosanct. A week ended. Two whole days to relax and look forward to. Satuday morning to lie in and wake up at, gasp!, a sinful 9 am! The schedule never varied. Dinner outside. Stop by at the DVD shop on the way back. Pore over the collection and argue over which movie to watch for HOURS. Finally, as a compromise, pick a movie that NEITHER of us like. Come home. Give kuttan his milk and make him sleep on the couch in the living room. Bring the beanbag over to the living room. Turn off the lights and switch on DVD...ah, bliss!! It was a rite of passage followed most faithfully. Until last month.

Well, all that has changed now. Hubby has classes on Friday morning and Saturday morning at the UnGodly hour of 8. To add insult to injury, he has tests and assignments that are, invariably due on Saturday. And thus, a much loved ritual came to a quiet end in the BM household in the past month.

But the hubby has a loooot of gyan to share on microeconomics and strategy to make up for the missed Friday nights...what a GREAT trade off, would'nt you call it?? Grrrr....It's taking sooo much out of me to play the part of the supportive wife I tell you!!

Where did my baby go?

Kuttan was one of th sunniest and most cheerful babies I ever knew. Not that I knew many but considering the mountains of baby literature I had read and the folklore I had heard from everyone from amma to my neighbour's maid about sleepless nights and crying babies, when the real thing happened, I found the going surprisingly easy.

One of my closest friends tell me I am the most optimistic persons she knows. She is 2 years younger than me and when she finally became pregnant, she came to yours truly for advice. How difficult is it, she asked me, a veteran who had a year old baby by then. Oh, no problem, I told her airily. Do anything you want to. Morning sickness? I had none. Tiredness? Drowsiness? The kind of lethargy that was usually a part of the first trimester? No, no and no again. The only time I puked was when I stuffed my face with a greasy chocolate cake from a bakery with questionable hygiene. Yes, yes, I was pregnant and still went around eating from places like these quite happily. You can do it too, I told her for good measure. Just as well that she wisely chose to ignore my advice.

The delivery? Was a c-sec. The easiest c-sec ever. I did not have a moment of labor. I went in and came out with a baby and that was the end of that. When the baby finally arrived, he was so quiet on the first day at the hospital that the nurses actually crowded around his crib to see this 'baby whi never cried'. I and amma as usual worried about it and begged and pleaded with his paed to check if everything was ok with him. The doctor told us in utter exasperation that we were two women who could'nt recognise a good thing when we saw it and he was surprised that such a happy baby had come out of me!! Anyway, all that changed on day 2 when kuttan decided to give us what we asked for and let out wails that were enough to wake the dead. All night long.

But apart from doing stuff that babies must ABSOLUTELY DO, like crying and peeing and pooping the MINUTE I sit down to eat, I have had it remarkably easy all this time. He started sleeping through the night by the time he was 6 months old and I have never had a chance to fret whether I will EVER get a full night of sleep. I have'nt had trouble weaning him or toilet training him. He has always been an extremely happy baby, at peace with himself and the world.

Obviously when things are so perfect that I am beginning to think I am all set for the next one, God thinks to Himself, oh no, not that fast. And sure enough, hubby and I have been seeing some remarkable changes in his personality over the last few weeks. And they are not changes I am happy with.

I have been observing an increasing amount of aggression in kuttan. Something which was also observed by his teacher and the neighbour's maid. Every play session ends up in a fight with the other kids with amma and appa having to act as referees. Whereas earlier he would cheerfully go along with the other kids and share his toys, these days he creates a ruckus. Where earlier he would charm the trees off the birds with his smile and sunny disposition, I see him talking back to people and not very politely either.

I see a streak of unruliness in him that was not ther before. And I am worried. I know that this could just be a phase where he is trying to assert his personality and eventually he will be ok again but I miss my baby. As usual, the spectre of working mom guilt rears its ugly head again and I talk it out with the husband till he claims his ears are ready to fall off. 'Maybe I should quit my job', I tell him. As my friend says, that's my solution to everything from the Iraq war to my domestic help's failed marriage. But I do not even know how much that will help. I do get back home by 5.30 and in the software industry that is a miracle by itself. And after that, I spend every minute with kuttan, taking him to the park, playing with him and the other kids, helping him with his homework. How much more will I be able to do as a Stay-at-home mom?

We have never enforced a very strict routine on Kuttan because he just kind of fell into our routine quite easily, without much effort. But I think it's time we instilled some discipline on him in terms of listening to what we say instead of asking us a thousand questions as to why he needs to do something and arguing with us.

A part of me knows what is happening. My baby is growing into a little boy. A spirited, intelligent boy who needs to do something because he BELIEVES in it rather than because amma asked him to. A discerning boy who will fight with his friend if he does not get his turn with the bat instead of allowing his friend to take all the turns himself. A boy who rebels against his mother as she asks him to do one more page of homework before going out to play. I guess I should be happy. But wait a minute....did I tell you he is only three and a half years old? Did the teens come a wee bit early for my son?

This one's for you, my love

I guess Yash Raj would never pay us a penny to make our love life into a movie. There is'nt any melodrama, any mush. There are no cute lines or fancy locales. There is no possibility of introducing lengthy, profound dialogues. As far as love stories go, ours was the simplest.

We met in college. We were both part of the college orchestra. He was 2 years my senior. I had a crush, he hid his very well. Both of us refused to talk about it till he had been placed through campus interviews and we did talk then only to awkwardly say, 'let's see, maybe...if everything works out in a couple of years' time' and left the rest unsaid. We were both too devoted to our families to be able to make a greater commitment than that at the said point of time.

To give our parents credit, they appreciated our restraint and gave us the go ahead. No questions asked. There were none to be asked, since we both belonged to the same religion, caste and sub-caste and were even related to each other in a very distant way. And we got married, 6 years ago, almost to the day.

And that's when the real love story began, and continues to this day. This is the man who knows all my deepest fears, my greatest sorrows. The man who opens the door to our apartment simply by recognising my footsteps on the corridor. The eternal giver. My rock who holds me patiently while I rant and rage at the world, my boss, my mother and mother-in-law and waits for the storm to pass. Who senses my tears falling quietly on the pillow and takes me in his arms even when he is sleeping. The man who knows when I am rambling on looking for advice and when I am grumbling only because I need somebody to listen and let me sort it out myself. The man who treats my family with respect and love even while they are driving me nuts.

The man I discuss EVERYTHING with, who always believes in me more than I believe in myself. I have seen him grow from a boy to a man. And what a man he has grown to be. My heart swells with pride at the way he has built our life, brick by brick, with love, understanding and empathy. And at the astounding amount of success he has met with at so young an age. And how he aspires for even more, just so that we can have the best.

And more than anything else, I love the father he is to my son. When kuttan looks at his father with total adoration in his eyes and I see it reflected in his father's eyes, I send out a little prayer of thanks to God Almighty. He, indeed, has made all my dreams come true and I could not possibly want for anything more.

I think my conversation with kuttan a couple of days ago sums it up aptly. So we were lying in bed and cuddling each other as Hubby was doing an assignment in the living room. 'Amma, Avya is my friend', he spoke up suddenly. 'Very good, Kanna.' 'But appa is your deepest friend and best friend, no?'. Yes, my love. My deepest and best friend. And the love of my life. A love that burns so bright that I'm consumed by it sometimes, and is so mellow that I bask in its warmth some other times. He's everything that I ever wanted.

As they say, we've only just started. The best is yet to come. Belated Happy anniversary darling.

A dream that may never be..

This is going to be a difficult post to write. I wondered for a long time whether I should even write it at all. But then, in the end I decided to go ahead because I wanted to sort out the thoughts inside my head and, obviously, I wanted to hear from you guys even though I already know what some of you think about this.

I am an only child as the regular (read 2 nos.) readers of this blog might know. And as Boo has pointed out in her latest post, I always thought our family of 3 was just perfect. I had loads of cousins and extended family staying in Coimbatore and even though we did'nt live under a single roof, we met up very often. I, however, was not very close with any of my cousins while I was growing up. I was always a bit of a precocious child, quiet and shy and was happiest when I was in the company of my books.

Amma and appa made for wonderful company but they were also quite happy to leave me alone in the company of my books and imagination quite often. I have never known the joy of playing long hours under the sun, getting into mischief with cousins and siblings during balmy afternoons while the rest of the household slept, of small adventures in the neighborhood. I always got all the action I wanted from my books. I lost myself in a world of mystery and intrigue, got hopelessly thrilled by the adventures of the Enid Blyton books and the action in the Nancy Drew series well. I started reading these books while other kids my age were still reading Amar Chithra Katha and Tinkle, I moved on to bigger things.

The strange thing about all this is I never felt anything was amiss while I was growing up. I was never the athletic rough and tumble kind anyways and it wasnt long after the last vestiges of childhood were gone and I was married and listened to hubby talk about his childhood did I wish that I had had a little more action-packed eventful childhood. That I had been a little more naughty, a little more bold and daring and had lived, at least for a while, a little dangerously.

Today, after all these years, I wonder if some of my timidity may have been due to lack of company as a child. And it brings to fore uncomfortable questions for me. Do I want to deprive kuttan of a sibling's company the way I was? Is another baby right for us?

When I got married, I never had a single doubt that I would have 2 or more kids. The more the merrier, I thought. Then came the c-section, the nightmarish post-partum recovery period and the intensely frustrating period of the first year of kuttan's life when I quit my job and realised I did'nt enjoy it as much as I thought I would. After a couple of disastrous attempts to get back on the career wagon, I finally succeeded in doing so by the fag end of 2006. Things, touch wood, have been reasonably stable since then.

It seems to be my nature to rock the boat when things are fine because suddenly the desire for another child slowly seemed to be forming in my mind. The famous baby shower with so many moms expecting their second babies strengthened my conviction that it is the right thing to do. When I finally found a moment of peace and quiet that is required to discuss matters of grave importance such as these, I enlisted the err...help of my partner-in-crime. He succinctly said, 'no'.

Simple and straightforward describes husband best. He definitely did not mince words. He reminded me in painfully embarrassing detail about all the times when I had whined and cried about having to stay home. He played his trump card when he cunningly asked me, 'Do you really want to give up your career after having fought for it so hard? And if you don't, can you bear to leave 2 kids instead of one in the daycare day after day? How much time can you spend with them?'. I was defeated hands down. I let things lie low for a while before deciding to take it up on a war footing again. But no matter how much I begged and pleaded, this usually sweet-natured, easy-going man seemed strong-as-steel on this one.

I don't blame him. I think I might have put him off babies forever with all the whining and crying I did. We got married when the husband was barely 25 and had a baby by the time he was 28. He had given up doing all the fun things for 2 years and now he was READY to get back his life..he deserved it. And in many ways, he is right. But that's not why I am still hesitating about this. My reasons are quite, quite different from his.

My first and most important reason is lack of support. Amma has been diabetic for 12 years now. Every year, I see her systems getting weaker and weaker as she battles with this insiduous disease. It took all the energy she had for her to see me through my first delivery. I do not think she has it in her to see me through a second one and I am worried about the effect it could have on her health. The MIL is faring no better in the health department either which basically means we will be left with 2 kids to take care of, all on our own, and the prospect is daunting, to say the least.

My career is another thing that I have to think of. 2 kids definitely means quitting my job. Double the expenses and half the income. But the most important thing is this - it takes two to make a baby and I want both the people to want it just as badly. The husband is an ambitious man. He wants the best in the world for kuttan and me and I love him for it. How can I not? He has taken up the MBA course for this very reason and he will need the flexibilty to experiment and take a risk or two when he is done with it. How can I weigh him down with a baby at that crucial point in his life?

I am not saying that we will never ever have another baby. Life is funny that way. Just when you think you have it all figured out God smiles to himself and alters all your plans. But it is unlikely that it may happen anytime soon.

And still, whenever I see a tiny baby, whenever I hug kuttan and wistfully see the baby frame disappearing and a gangly boyish frame taking its place, when I go to a toy store and see the cutest possible cribs and smallest possible booties that I am sure no human feet can ever fit into, whenever I see the tiniest pattu pavadais and I bury may face into sweet smelling babies of other people, I have to admit, the heart does skip a beat and I desperately wish things could have been different.