It’s common knowledge that as you grow older, you get calmer. Experience teaches you patience; maybe because you realize that people are going through their own hardships in life, so not to react too quickly.

I have always been the black sheep of the family. My elder sister has been a sea of calmness, while my younger brother was Gandhi-esque in his patience towards my bullying as we grew up. I’ve always been the firebrand of the family: choleric, impatient and the “don’t-take-crap-from-no-one” kind. I imagined that this attitude would wither and I would learn to maintain a tighter reign on my very slippery tongue, as I matured.

I can’t say people were wrong: for a long part of my life when I had no child, I did start getting more mellow and understanding people better. Either that, or I entered a comfort zone of school/college friends who were like-minded, so I didn’t have to deal with people that didn’t sit right with my sensibilities. Either way, I was seeming more and more patient.

But since the day I pushed a child out of my body (starting on that very day itself), I lost all semblance of patience. As the anesthesiologist placed his hand kindly on my hand and explained to me that the baby was ready to pop, so he could not give me the epidural injection, I swatted his hand away mercilessly and told him, “Get your hands off me doctor, and get me the bloody epidural!” And then I erupted into a blood curdling scream, not fast enough to miss seeing my husband’s face turn tomato red in embarrassment at the way I had just spoken to a doctor.

Since that day, I have no patience for any damn bullshit* that anyone wishes to dole out to me. I can’t stand the nuts: From the moms on the message groups dictating to everyone which brand of chocolate must be distributed for birthdays, so as not to offend their little princes’ tonsils (taste-buds?) to the overbearing mums you meet ever so often who are so full of themselves, throwing at you parenting techniques and warnings on how your child will turn brain dead the moment his fingers touch an iPad or showing off about how her daughter eats on her own, sleeps on her own, pees on her own, can play Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 29 on her own (while doing a headstand, at that), at the delicate age of 2.
Stop with the damn BS* already!

Newton’s 3rd law of motion says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This has gotten so deeply ingrained in my psyche that I can’t stop myself from being confrontational: I must tell the messaging mom very sarcastically that I shall only distribute dark chocolate truffles freshly flown in from La Maison Du Chocolat, Paris from now on (because 3 year olds are such connoisseurs of truffles to begin with) and I have to turn around and tell Sri Sri Maa Parvati that her sermons must stop because brain dead computer nerds are ruling the world right now! The only thing dead is Beethoven!

I talk to my friend (a fellow mum of a 3 year old) about this, as I am often scandalized by the things that come out of my mouth soon after someone has annoyed me, and she says that she’s the same. Her explanation is that the Terrible Twos, and the Horrendous Threes, take up so much of our patience, that after that we’re left with nothing to help us counter the huge amounts of BS we encounter in life.

But I hear the life of our children is made up of stages- so till now we have only encountered negativist, tantrum throwing toddlers. How aggressive am I going to get when BabyA becomes TeenA, and scares me with her disappearing hemlines, plunging necklines and dope-head, grungy boyfriends?

By then my patience will have worn out so much that I will don a “BS-Terminator” suit and roam around armed with a fake Austrian accented one liner and a tranquilizer gun, by which I can shoot all these crazy mommies so as to paralyze their mouth muscles temporarily.

Or else, I will land up shooting the one mommy who needs some “tranquil”izing the most to get her chakras in balance-> Me, just so I can calm down and become more zen (chemically-induced or otherwise) in life.

The only fear I have is that the tranquilizer will eventually wear off, and I’ll still be the “high BP due to no tolerance for BS” psycho mom, donning the suit and toting the gun, mouthing off, “I’ll be back!”
Steer clear poor mommies! No one messes with the mom-inator!

*bullshit=BS.