Tag Archives: #mumbaimom

Mommy Friendships: My Support Network

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Having a child makes you feel like you’re in college all over again. You go to mother toddler classes or take them to school, and moms everywhere are out to make friends- in inverse proportion to the amount their children want to befriend each other. As we mommies plan play dates so “the kids can get to know each other”, the kids exchange wary looks while the mommies connect over bottle-weaning and baby woes.

Some people dismiss these interactions as “socializing” or trying to expand your mommy network but I see this as a very crucial part of a mom’s life. Women, innately, feel the need to talk and share. Mommyhood is a huge change in any woman’s life, and it’s a very confusing time as you grapple with a newborn who is suddenly
completely dependent on you, a husband who now has to deal with being second best, and your own roller coaster of emotions wherein it feels like your identity has been robbed by this seemingly innocent angel of God. It is a time when you need advice (are those explosive, trucker farts that this little human is capable of emanating, normal?), camaraderie (do you also pee a little, nowadays, when you laugh too hard or wait too long?) and a shoulder to cry on (does it mean I’m a bad mom if I lock myself in the bathroom and read Vogue, while my baby cries outside for the umpteenth time?). We need someone to talk to- someone who truly understands.

That’s why mommy friendships are important, and shouldn’t be disregarded as frivolous. They are what keep you sane at times when you’re sure you should be checked in at The Mental Hospital of Mommies. Through mommy socializing, I have made a group of friends who are my lifelines. I share my deepest, murkiest secrets with this group of people I recently got to know, and they empathize because they are going through the same.

My best friend and I got pregnant at the same time, and I find that our friendship has reached a new level of closeness because of our two little monsters: BabaV and BabyA. From laughing about our protruding bellied-summer ready bodies to crying about our inability to control our hyperactive toddlers (who do WWE moves on us all day), we share everything. Our bodies were so delicate before we had them and now, an otherwise killing karate chop to the vagus nerve behind the ear, doesn’t even result in a raised eye brow. We are fearless as we feel that we have lived through all the unintentional physical abuse our body is capable of taking. It’s only the teenage years that can frighten us now!

Our husbands don’t understand mommyhood, just the way we probably don’t get daddyhood. For the Stay-at-Home-Mums, we are constantly encountered with a look of disgust, and questioned every evening about what it is that we do the whole day. Our men think we sit around sipping on cocktails while our kids diligently play on their own, pick up after themselves and feed themselves. The truth would be closer to the fact that I wish I had a bottle of Sauza stashed in my cupboard so I could take shots while I lived the enslaved life of a mum.  The hubbies themselves feel exhausted at having spent ten minutes with these imps on a Sunday. Nandy needs two hours of sleep after every half an hour spent with BabyA. Men seem to understand their own need to socially network for business but dismiss our mommy networks as unnecessary.

It’s so hard to know if you’re doing the right thing: after all, no one offers Mommyhood 101 classes, otherwise I’d have been the first one to enroll. It’s my friends that teach me, soothe me and heal me. When I landed up smacking my daughter because I was sick and she was being very demanding, it was my mommy friends who told me it was ok… to be human. They also gave me alternatives to how I could have handled it better, but only after I had stopped crying. It’s refreshing to have them when all my hubby maybe doing is telling me how out-of-control I am.

It’s important to have friends who know, love and don’t judge– but serve as your confidantes, counsellors and anchors. After all, we all need an anchor since we feel completely at sea (drowning, most of the time!) while bringing up these multi-limbed, freakishly lovable creatures.

Post-Raj Hangover: No Hindi Please!

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“Pannas dabbe tyachya office la pathvayache aahet!” (50 boxes have to be sent to his office!) I hear someone speaking Marathi at the gym. My instinctive reaction is to be appalled but then my research in Postcolonial Literature has taught me that I should be proud of my country and its languages. Yet, as this man continues talking, I see many people turning to look at him, wondering what kind of a man would speak his regional language in an upscale gym space.

Colonialism teaches you to associate shame with your language. It’s a very deliberate way of enslaving a race; by teaching them to be shameful about everything that is indigenous to them. I have read a Kenyan author, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who said his friends and him suffered corporal punishment at his English-medium Christian school for speaking their mother tongue. I went to a Convent school where we may not have been hit, but everyone who ever uttered a word in Hindi (or worse, any other Indian language) was termed a “verni” (vernacular). They were the pariahs of the class; the people the cool girls never touched with a pole. Thus, it was more subtle in our school, but nonetheless, growing up in the 1980’s and 90’s, we had still received the message of the Raj loud and clear. English was cool! Your mother tongue is what you spoke behind closed doors, when no one who could judge you was within ear-shot. Hindi was like an urban deep, dirty secret.

I was a classic example of this Convent education, where we proudly came from a line of girls who spoke atrocious Hindi. Once we overheard my friend saying to her uncle “Baddadaddee meow!” (which translated to “Badda Daddy mein yahaan hoon!/ Uncle, I’m here!”) and we teased her, all the while thinking it was so cute that she spoke Hindi like that.

It didn’t matter that we came across as complete idiots with no credibility while talking to our staff (and pretty much more than 50% of India) with our ridiculous command over Hindi. We were cool in front of who mattered and Hindi-speakers didn’t count. We even looked down on the Dilliwalas, laughing at their English (never realising how stupid we seemed to them and the rest of the country!)

When I had BabyA, my cook told me, “Bhabhi, isse English mein hi baat kijiyega!“(Madam, only speak to her in English!”) When I asked him why, he said that to succeed, one only needs to know English. Hindi is a useless language. He believed that his life could have been so much better had he known English. Better? I’m not sure, but richer (in terms of material wealth)? Yes-that was sadly true.

I knew that I didn’t want to bring BabyA up this way! I wanted her to speak Hindi well, unlike me, and I wanted to teach her to take pride in her language. Being a bit of a mongrel, I neither had any lingual command over Punjabi or Marwari- either of my mother tongues.

On a mission, I went out to buy her books that I could read to her in Hindi and was pleasantly surprised. There were fantastic publications like Katha and Tullika that had stories with gorgeous illustrations in Hindi and most other regional languages. It was like being in a candy shop; I didn’t know what to choose. I came home excitedly and started reading to her. I messaged my closest mommy friends pictures of these wonderful books like “Dinosaur-Ek-Sau-Sathais-Bachchon-Jitna-Lamba” and “Maa Ganga aur Razai ka Sandook“. None of them were interested. They asked me if the same titles were available in English. Most of them were very clear that they didn’t want to buy their kids Hindi books. The excuse was that the kids will learn Hindi at home, as it is. I disagreed because none of my school friends or I ever did- not fluently at least.

There are such few communities that talk to their kids in their language any more. Shame is so deeply ingrained that sometimes we don’t even recognize it. We justify it saying that when they go to school, they need to be competent in English but in reality, we all suffer from Anglophilia. Fear of rejection at schools is a legitimate fear but this belief in the superiority of the English language basically stems from a Post Raj hangover that we all suffer from.

So I march along (a lonely crusader)- telling my maid to try to talk to BabyA in Telugu, and asking my mother-in-law to only speak to her in Hindi. I read several Hindi books to her and try my best to talk to her in it as much as I can (hoping the scars from being exposed to my fragmented, stammering Hindi heal due to better influences in her life).

At first, she just doesn’t speak Hindi but after turning 3, she likes to dabble in the language. It makes me happy every time she starts a sentence in Hindi, but then I can’t help but cringe as she sounds like Sonia Gandhi (or much worse, like Remo singing Hindi songs in the 1990’s). She looks at her maid and says, “Didi, main school jaayega today so snack box ready keep-ega. Ok?”* I look at the maid and open my mouth to translate, but I stop, hearing her say, “Ok baby. I keeping ubla bhhocolli tiffin mein ready!” (I have kept steamed brocolli in your tiffin box). Baby A looks away from her cartoons for a minute to flash a satisfied smile at her, and I realise that although I’m failing in  my mission, I have to compliment the odd pidgin language these two have created to understand each other better.  It’s like watching a cacophonous symphony that everyone seems to be enjoying while it wreaks havoc in my brain! Bhagwan, Mujhe Bachana!**

 

*Didi, I’m going to school today so keep my snack box ready!”

**(God, Save me!)

Chai and other lies: The Life of a Mumbai Mum

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BabyA comes, handing me the jet spray, and says, “Mamma, why don’t you wash yourself?” Silly me! I really believed that I can steal a minute of peace to sit and answer the call that nature hollers out to me every morning. I wasn’t asking for newspaper time, or even a peek into Facebook to catch up on the important events featuring on my Newsfeed. I just asked for a minute so that I could feel like a human being with some amount of personal and private space so I could empty my bowels without emptying my self-respect. No such luck!

The other day, my nutritionist tells me, “You’re constantly skipping your afternoon green tea!” She doesn’t have kids, so she doesn’t understand that I don’t have the luxury of mulling over life’s ironies as I sip on chai. Does anyone realise what a long and self-reflective process drinking tea is? I never fully understood this till I had a kid (because earlier, time was commonplace- always there): You brew the tea, and then wait for it to cool down, burn your tongue a few times while waiting, and finally slowly sip through it (lavishly slurping if no one’s around) when it reaches the perfect temperature. This takes time, and feels like ‘living on the edge’ when you have a toddler who loves to jump all the time on anything she can find- be it a pillow or more excitingly, your head lying on that pillow.

Some time ago, there was a tea ad campaign that proclaimed “Chai Time is My Time”. Now that I have a toddler, I fully appreciate what that means. It means that drinking (and really enjoying) tea takes time. It is a meditative experience. Moms don’t meditate because moms have no time! “My time”- what’s that? Occasionally, I do encounter this phenomenon but it happens so rarely that it warrants great excitement, wherein I put updates about the hours I slept or movies I watched or I share Instagram images of my “Daffodils” inspired tea cup alongside my fancy Rose Pouchong tea leaves. After all, afternoon tea for a mum is an event and it must be treated as such.

I read blogs, once in a while, wherein people on the outside, wonder what moms in Mumbai (especially SoBo) do. They imagine us to be much like “moms of the Upper East Side” (did you read that article?) who just sit around spending hours on narcissistic activities like getting manicures, exercising and having shopping-mommy-lunches all day, while our kids are brought up by our nannies. I guess some moms live their lives like that (and that’s entirely their choice), but most of the moms I know, don’t. I would love to live that life, but I don’t.

I do take the time out to exercise and take care of my health, especially now that my child is getting older and goes to school, but I don’t understand why do moms have to apologize for prioritizing themselves, or for having a support system? And just because we have a support system, why do some people assume that we are less involved mothers? I have a full time maid for BabyA, and I live in a joint family with a helpful mother in law, and an eager mom who lives 20 minutes away so the world tells me that I must be having lots of “my time” and yet, here I am, trying to schedule a cup of green tea at any point in the day.

It’s not that I don’t have time because I don’t trust anyone with my kid. When I go out, I never call to ask the 3 Ms: my mother in law, mother or maid the quintessential mommy concern, “Baby ne khaana khaaya, kya?” (Has Baby eaten her food?) In fact, I never call home because I’m too busy taking selfies of myself having a good time- because it is an event in my life!

So even though I have so much support, and I do manage to sneak in a mommy lunch every now and then, in reality, I spend most of my day with BabyA. I pick her up from school, and after her lunch, we play board games. We have “chutney time” where we make “chutney” out of each other, hugging tight and squashing tighter till we’re both paté. We go for coffee dates often to the local bookstore, where after our reading session, I drink cappuccinos while she sips on babycinos (milk) at their cafe (she’ll let me drink a hot beverage in peace as long as “coffee time is our time”). I do realize that this is a luxury in itself, because I don’t have to do housework or work outside to supplement the house income, so I can truly spend quality and quantity time with my child. I thank God every day for blessing me with this luxury, but I resent when people make a caricature of my type, and write that we don’t have time for our kids because we have so many people to help out!

I grew up with a mom who was always home when we got home, and to me, that was the biggest joy, whether I expressed it to her or not. I don’t mean to pass judgement on someone who doesn’t have the opportunity to do that, but I do mean to share what was important to me while growing up, and I want to be the kind of mom I have had. That’s why, when people think I have a decadent life where I wonder what to do with the oodles of time I have to myself, I want to believe in that fantasy too. I shut my eyes, and imagine myself all alone on some beach, holding a tall glass of chilled Sangria and a copy of “The Lowland” by Jhumpa Lahiri (of which I have read the first chapter four times, as I have never had the free time to escalate to the second), the cool sea breeze mixed with the hot sun lulling me to sleep… and just then, a squirt of tepid water hits my face. I open my eyes to see her standing there, looking impatient, with the jet spray pointed towards me like a gun:

“Mamma, why are you sleeping on the potty? Come on quick! Wash yourself!”

And I’m back to reality.