My son is five years old and ever since he was 2.5, I have been getting subtle digs from the MIL’s side that have gradually become stronger over the years – about her looking after her grandson without me hovering in the background, cluttering up the picture. Before you ask, yes I have left him in her care during the day, in order to acqueise to her hankering, whilst I have taken care of some odd jobs nearby. So what is the problem? Well, she wants to keep him overnight. This is where I draw the line.
A day and a night away from my son is not something I like to contemplate. Truth be told, it is the stuff my nightmares are made of. I lose my temper, I shout but I have to bind him good night and take him to bed; in the morning, I want to be there when he wakes up and comes searching for me. It still takes a while for him to shake off the sleep and the minutes he still lies on my shoulder, holding on to the last vestiges of sleep are too precious for me to let go of, even for a day.
It took me a while to form a bond with him – though I loved him to bits from the minute I set my eyes on him, it was a while before we both relaxed into our respective roles. In fact, as he becomes older, I find we get along better. And I am loathe to test this hard-won bond with my boy by letting him away for a whole day and a night. That is the second part of my nightmare – if I let him go once, he would go away and would not be my little baby who comes crying for his mummy every morning anymore.
I know I have to let go but not yet. He is just five – I want to baby him for some more years yet. Already, he shows signs of growing out of his babyhood by changing his routine – increasingly, he takes himself to bed and acts like a big boy. There will come a day when he can take care of himself but until that day, I want to enjoy every single moment. And yes, that means not letting him stay overnight away from me for a few more years.
My mum let me and brother go off to our father’s native village with assorted aunts, uncles and grandparents from the time we were four – I cannot imagine sending Pratik off like that! Maybe one day, when he is 12 or 13, maybe, certainly not when he is 5 or 6!
I know S thinks I should relax a bit but he is my only baby and I am not ready to spend a night away from him yet.
Like most children his age, P loves to do stuff he has no business getting his hands into. DIY, stripping wallpaper, cooking… every activity we ‘big people’ are involved in always starts with the obligatory ‘can I do it too?’ The resultant NO generally never puts him off.
But the cooking thing has been cultivated happily in the nursery and school. He even went to a friend’s cooking party recently. I have actually found it rather lovely to do something with him. One of our favourite things to do is pancakes. He loves holding the blender and pressing the button for all he’s worth. Most of all, being so actively involved in the cooking process, he’s quite eager to taste the results. Here are the pictures from our breakfast do this morning:
Yesterday, P and I decided to go to the next town to visit his cousin so he can have a play date with some family. His dad was at work and P was quite puzzled by the fact that his pater was away working and not having off-days and play dates like him. When we saw more than usual number of cars parked in the nearby streets, he was prompted to remark ‘lots of daddies are at home today, mummy.’
I said ‘yeah, possibly.’
He carried on, ‘but my daddy has to go to office. To earn money so we can have mumm-mumm (food)’.
Me (absently): Uh-uh.
P: Then we will have loads of mumm-mumm and we can give some to Paris.
Me (startled): What? Paris? Why?
P: Yeah. If we give them some proper mumm-mumm, they can stop eating froggie legs.
Once upon a time, there lived this little boy called, let’s say, P. One day, P went on a play date to his best friend, K’s house, which was a good distance away. He reached there alright and played till sun down. Then, K’s mum said ‘snack time’ and gave the boys some yummy thingummies to eat. P, who’d never tasted something like that before, stuffed his face and asked K’s mum for its name, so he can ask his mum to make it for him.
K’s mum replied: ‘it’s called kozhukattai, P’.
Soon after, it was time for him to leave. He asked the aunty for the name again and to make sure he did not forget it, he kept repeating it to himself. ‘Kozhukattai, kozhukattai’ mumbled he as he walked back home. On his way, there was a short ditch and the man walking ahead of him took it at a running leap, exclaiming ‘athiri bacha’. P too copied him, with the requisite ‘athiri bacha’.
On he continued with his mumbling: ‘athiri bacha, athiri bacha’ and reached home soon.
The minute his mum opened the door, he went, ‘ma pls make me athiri bacha. K’s mum made it and it was real yummy’.
And she went ‘athiri bacha? what is it?’
He replied ‘athiri bacha, i want athiri bacha’ and started whining.
After a few more mins of this, she lost it and said ‘I shall give you athiri bacha’ and gave him a smackeroo right on his cheeks.
P started wailing and by dinner time, sported two huge swollen cheeks. His dad looked at his swollen face and went ‘look at the poor child’s face, kozhukattai maadiri veengi pochu’ and P shouted ‘kozhukattai, kozhukattai that was what K’s mum made yayy’.
His mum laughed and cried and went ‘oh u poor mutt, I shall make u loads of kozhukattai’.
‘Get your Easter bonnets in by Friday, as we will be having the Easter Bonnet Parade later on in the day’, stated the missive from the school. Easter bonnet? What the hell! I had visions of P walking up and down his school, looking like Peter Rabbit. Why in God’s name would these boys wear bonnets in the first place anyway? After all, this is the land where the tiniest smudge of pink isn’t allowed anywhere near a boy (lest he become traumatised or gay in the future?) and here we are talking about decking them out in bonnets. That was when I was firmly steered in the direction of caps, hats and other manly accessories. No easy way out, then.
Giving in, I asked around work for ideas. ‘Make a top hat – make it green so it looks like grass and then put Easter eggs and chickens on it’ suggested one colleague. ‘Or, you could dress up a baseball cap to make it look like a nest and place the eggs, chicks and things on it’, quipped another. Whazisthis? Top hats? Nests with chicks and eggs? When did I die and come back as a Blue Peter presenter?
By now, I was panicking big time and decided to take refuge in that temple of modern materialistic society, Tesco’s. And whoop-dee-doo, right at the entrance there was a massive aisle full of Easter-y things. The firang know how to make money, I tell you. Crepe paper, cardboard, balls of cottons, paints, all in a variety of colours, were stockpiled to the ceiling and harried parents were digging into them like they were manna from heaven. I did not have a clue what materials to procure and ended up getting two of everything. Which turned out to be the one smart thing I did.
Once home, the real battle began. I sat with the bag of goodies spread around me, along with other necessities like scissors, sticky tape and baseball cap and realised I did not have any glue. After a long trek for the same, I was now ready to tackle this thing – or so I thought. That was when I realised having ideas is one thing, execution is something else entirely. I sat looking at the pieces of cardboard, felt and the baseball cap alternatively, hoping the spirit of Martha Stewart would come and join me for a while and make the whole thing a doddle. As that did not transpire, I set about trying to tap into hitherto undiscovered, and possibly non-existent, wells of creativity.
As concocting a top hat from pieces of card were beyond my capabilities, especially without a compass to keep me on the curve and narrow, I decided to plump for the baseball cap / nest idea. My thought process ran somewhat as follows: cover the cap with green felt, send some brown felt through the shredder, glue the resultant strips in artistic disarray all over the now-green cap, plonk assorted bits and pieces of junk all over it and hey, bob’s your uncle.
Remember what I said about thought and execution? Well, read it once again ‘cos, as always, reality and my thoughts had nothing in common. For starters, the green felt refused to stick to the cloth cap, even after I slathered half a gallon of glue on it. I now had an extremely sticky ex-cap and some sodden pieces of green felt. Then, I shoved some brown felt through the shredder, hoping for some lengthy pieces of felt which I could twist to look like twigs. But the shredder decided to make a meal of it and I ended up with some brown felt mince. Pulling my hair out at the roots did not help. Not one bit. So I decided to stop fiddling with technology and cut the darned things into strips using old-fashioned scissors.
That complete, next on the menu was the lawn on which I had to lay my nest. Sticking it didn’t work; stitching it proved lot more difficult. I binned the lot and watched ‘House’ for an hour. Contemplated committing blasphemy during one of the breaks by modelling the nest along the lines of Christ’s crown of thorns. Finally, at 11:00 PM, S hit upon the idea of just laying the (spare piece of) green felt on top of the rudimentary circular cardboard crown base I had made, a la a green lawn and just plonking the nest and its assorted bits on top of it. Typically, I wasn’t sure any idea of his would actually work. But as I sat plaiting the brown strips and strategically placing coloured feather and balls of cotton all over it, it seemed like a neat one after all. After grappling with it for a long and sleepy half an hour, I finally finished my creation. And boy was I one chuffed mummy or what?
P adored it when he saw it the next morning, thereby making it every bit worthwhile. I also got lots of ‘ooh’s and ‘aah’s at work so I think I may have pulled this thing off. I realise now that I got off lucky with the Dressing Up as a Fairy Tale character lark the school sprung on me last month. It was by sheer chance that I realised how seriously the other mums took this when I eavesdropped on a coven of them discussing what their children were going to show up as, the next day. Peter Pan! Tinkerbell!! Dick Whittington!!! Jack (not the Ripper, the other one – him with the Beanstalk)!!!! I would never hear the end of it if I sent my little man to school as his own adorable self. I had a major brainwave when I spotted a white sherwani of his hanging in the cupboard, unused and unloved, and made a golden crown to go with it and sent him off as Prince Charming, armed with a red rose, no less!
When I saw the other mums rolling in with huge bonnets, their girlies fighting their way in through swathes of tissue paper or trying to balance a tray of eggs on their heads, I felt rather proud of myself. I had come through this, hopefully without scarring P for life! And now, I am ready for the next challenge. Produce your own mega serial type saga? Come dressed as an eco-warrier? Discover the cure for AIDS for school science project? Easy peasy!
I am now Super Mummy, P says. I can do anything. Bring it on!
This is what my baby got me for Mother’s Day this year. I know I said I did not believe in that but he, being angrez thinks Mum’s day is an essential part of the year’s calendar!!!
We recently bought a hoola hoop for S and me to use, to help reduce our extremely fetching love handles. Of course, as with everything P decided to try his hand at it, to some hilarious moments.
P is 5 today. Unbelievable! It seems as if it was just yesterday (how cliched does that sound!) that he was a wee baby and I was a mum going crackers. New place, new role, no friends, that was my state. Struggling with the day-to-day things such as breast feeding, mashing up the potatoes and carrots, and just holding it together from one day to the next. As I see my group of blogger friends, the mommy bloggers, the mom blog network and things like that, I can’t help wishing I had the blogosphere five years back. It would have prevented me from dissolving into incomprehensible tears at every point. I somehow might have been a better mum to P, if I had had a creative outlet for all my pent up frustrations.
TIme was, when Pratik used to be really interested in my lippy – well not that way! The colours were so bright and sparkly and he always wanted to see how I put it on. Then there was this period when he wanted me to kiss him once I’ve put some lipstick on. Even when I kissed him goodnight, I used to get this question: ‘have you got lipstick on, mummy?’
But in the last week, he’s changed. Yesterday, I kissed him bye bye at school and he was frantically wiping his cheeks! Now, he makes sure I DON’T have any lipstick on, before I kiss him!
*sigh*
Every morning, just a few minutes before 9.00 AM, you would find me dragging self and P up the cardiac hills of Brentwood, to land up in a heap in front of P’s school. We would arrive, breathless, dishevelled and at least in my case, wheezing like an age-old steam engine, while all around me will be the cool mums and dads, dropping their children off and taking off to work, gym or the coffee shop, without breaking a sweat.
Some of the moms are of the yummy-mummy variety – clad in designer togs and killer shoes, flawless makeup and superbly accessorized, they are the epitome of Superwomen. Some are athletic – they even come to school in their cropped, jogging bottoms and trainers to prove how fit they are. Then there are the biz types – pin-stripes, pencil skirts and formal, say bye bye, kiss kiss and off they go.
