I watch mom sitting at the dining table, working on a flower arrangement. She peels away the cellophane binding the bouquet, sorts and discards wilted flowers, trims the long-stemmed lily buds and arranges them carefully in a vase.
Continue reading “To live is to adapt”From the hospital
I veer between happiness and dread as mom is wheeled out of the ICU.
Continue reading “From the hospital”Parenting decisions
It was six in the morning. I was done with the tiffins and was making a start on the kids’ breakfast as I called out to them to wake up for school. N woke up after a call or two but there was no response from H. When he refused to get up after repeated entreaties I went to check on him only to find him burrowing deeper under the covers.
‘My head hurts’, he mumbled, ‘I couldn’t sleep all night. May I please not go to school today?’
‘Not today!’, thought I, ‘God! please, not today’. Today I didn’t have the patience or the bandwidth to cajole or to fool around, to bribe or to offer concessions in a bid to keep the morning-before-school peaceful. Somedays it is almost stressful – this struggle to keep the mornings stressfree.
Annoyance rose up inside me. No sympathy, no concern, just plain annoyance.
I was supposed to go for a much postponed medical examination that day. This was something I’d been planning since the start of the year but just hadn’t been able to get around to. It would have taken up the entire day so plenty of planning was involved. The maids had to be informed, the children entrusted with a key to the house and told to manage their snack on their own when they got back from school. The zumba class had to be rescheduled and I was expecting a package from amazon so the neighbour had to be informed. As a stay-at-home mum, stepping out for one whole day is challenging.
Finally everything had been done and I had let the anxiety of the medical exam wash over me. The sense of achievement at having scheduled everything had faded at the thought of the ordeal ahead – the poking, the pricking and the drawing of blood and then of course there were the results to consider. What if there was something seriously wrong?
It was something I was looking forward to as much as I was dreading it.
For over a year I had been struggling with niggling aches and pains. Somedays I’d wake up with all my joints, right down to the digits of my fingers hurting. Somedays I’d wake up with a headache and carry it around for two or three days before it decided to leave. With no one to push me to get that checkup I had just let it be. I do hate going to the doctor on my own.
Finally, however, I had managed to ready myself and now this! I thought in frustration. This was something my already strung out nerves could have done without. Annoyance bubbled up again as I glanced over at my sleeping son. I’d have to reschedule and replan, provided I found the will-power to rebook that appointment. And all for a headache, which in all probability, would disappear even before his bus disappeared round the corner, I rued.
Am I being too soft on the children? Should I push him to go to school? It would be a struggle but I knew he would go if I pushed him. But was that too harsh? What if his head was really hurting? What if it was the beginning of one those terrible colds that seem to catch him all too easily? What if it turned into something serious, a fever, maybe? I touched his forehead. It felt cool. He turned over, forcing his eyes open, ‘Please ma, may I stay home, today?’ How sorely I missed the Husband at times like these!
I looked at H waiting for my response, his hair tousled, his blanket half on the ground, and I nodded slowly as a wave of guilt washed over me. Guilt. How could I feel annoyed at a child for being ill? Would I push him to go to school when he could barely open his eyes?
I saw his foot sticking out of the covers and reached out to pull up the blanket. He might be an 11-year-old tween with a size 10 foot but he still is my baby. The baby who comes looking for me at night when his nose is blocked or when he’s been all macho and watched a scary movie in the day.
Sigh!
Often I feel the children’s pain, physical or mental, more acutely than they themselves do but somedays, just somedays, I lose all sympathy and feel plain frustration, followed soon enough by guilt. And even while I know both feelings are way out of proportion I find myself unable to do anything about it.
Five reasons malls are bad for kids
When the kids were tiny I would put them in their stroller and head out to the mall. I’d park them in the food court and dawdle over my coffee while spooning mashed bananas into their tiny mouths. I liked watching people and they did too staring around eagerly with their button eyes.
A visit to the mall was quite a treat till..
…they discovered their feet
That was the end of all the peace and quite. Since the day they crawled out of the stroller they never stopped. They kept growing and so did their need to explore. They looked everywhere including loos, trial rooms, lingerie sections and under mannequin skirts.
Then they discovered ‘want’
.. and after that nothing was enough for them. It was ‘I want’ ‘I want’ ‘I want’ all the way.
9 years later
I dislike malls with a vengeance. They make the twins go a little berserk. I wrote about their mall adventures earlier here. A friend said it was because I didn’t take them often enough, which may be true. However there are other reasons:
Here’s why I’d rather not take the kids to the mall
Malls are exhausting:
The unending aisles, the walk-walk-walk, the no-place-to-sit (The coffee shop is a bit of a dream with two restless kids tugging at the leash). Almost always the twins end up cranky and so do I. The air-conditioning and the crowd might have something to do with it.
They offer too many choices:
And that’s not a good thing, not for kids. They end up confused and unhappy as they flit from store to store and toy to toy. Either I am waiting endlessly for N who can never decide what she wants or I’m dragging H away because he wants everything.
The kids never have enough:
No matter how much we shop or how many games they play, there is always that one more thing they want or one last game they need to play.
They encourage mindless consumption:
Even as a rational adult (I hope!) I end up spending more than I intended. I can fully understand how much tougher it would be for the kids. We started off with the one-toy-each-visit rule. However, even that is such a waste. Why should we shop for a toy (even one) if that is not the purpose of our visit to the mall? What’s worse, it will probably be lying forgotten within a few hours of reaching home adding to the ever-growing clutter.
They offer nothing new and the kids learn nothing:
.. other than mindless consumption. After a point malls are just the same. They do not stimulate the kids’ minds specially since they outgrew looking under trial room doors!
Mercifully the kids dislike shopping so I just find it easier to leave them home. Somedays I we do make a trip together – when they need to be fitted out for something or when we plan a gaming zone-food court trip. But that remains an occasional treat.
Do you like frequenting malls?
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Linking to ABC Wednesday for the letter M. With grateful thanks to Mrs Nesbitt who had this wonderful idea of bringing together bloggers from across the world through ABC Wednesday and to Roger who keeps it going week after week.
‘I’
Somedays I want
No food to cook, no beds to make
No laundry to fold, no rugs to shake
No fights to sort of girls and boys
a little respite from all that noise
No kids who slowly drive me mad
Not even their ever wonderful dad.
Somedays I want to put up my feet
to pick out a book and read and read
to sit in a mess if that’s what I want
to wear raggedy rags I wouldn’t dare flaunt
to swing in a swing or snuggle under a quilt
to watch mindless TV without a shred of guilt.
to listen to a song and sing out loud
or lie on the grass and watch a cloud.
To rekindle a friendship over a hot cup of tea
A long forgotten friendship with myself and me.
In the books and quilt, the grass and the sky
Maybe that’s where I’ll find a little bit of ‘I’.
Linking to ABC Wednesday for the letter ‘I’ with thanks to Mrs Nesbitt who thought up ABC Wednesday.