It’s been three
months since Anakutti’s birthday, and I’m yet to write a post about the party,
her first year in this world, how my life has changed after her arrival and
such relevant data as needed for a mother who has a bad case of forgetfulness,
like me. And this is a dangerous sign of things to come. Anakutti’s cuteness
and antics are multiplying day by day, plus there are so many changes in her
personality that the camera is just not able to capture. Many times she stands
mutely when I focus the camera on her, only for her to jump back to her antics
the moment I put the offending object (for her) away; also one of the reasons
why I have too many pictures of her with a poker face. People even ask me if
she smiles at all, when the little imp is forever gurgling with laughter and
flashing cheeky grins and making goofy faces at us...just not in front of the
camera.
I’m digressing; of
course that it is not new for those of you who have the patience to read
through all my blog posts. So, why haven’t I been able to competently record
her growth and milestones? After Anakutti’s entry into our lives, I seem to be
losing track of the days going by. Everything happens either incidentally or as
a reaction, with very few things good and bad that is happening as expected.
For example, her first flu and cold attack. It started rather harmlessly and I
started her medication feeling on top of the game. Only that it was a flu and
it refused to budge even after a fortnight. And though there wasn’t much for me
to do than to follow the doctor’s advice of avoiding crowded areas and other
people with similar symptoms, it was rather heartbreaking to see her struggling
to breathe through her blocked nose and cough. That was incidental and S and I spent
many days helplessly reacting. Before the bout of cold, there was this
beautiful time around her first birthday, from her 8th month to be precise, when there were
so many things happening. She was cruising in her baby walker one day, crawling
another day and suddenly she was up and about – walking hesitantly at first,
falling on her nappy clad butt a lot; coasting the furniture a little and then
just running. All this by the time she reached her 8th month. It was a pleasure to see her
comical penguin walk – her feet stuck out, her hands flapping as she barreled
forward. But before we knew it she had progressed from walking to climbing and
getting off the bed and sofa. S and I hardly felt like we had taught her to
walk and run. I don’t remember coaxing her to take those faltering steps towards
me or even holding her hand to steady her gait. It was like she was determined
to do it all herself. Since she was preoccupied with mastering that milestone,
I got all of that recorded. But to sit down and write all that down? She was
living her life in front of me and I was damned if I were to take my eyes off
for even a second.
Okay, I did sound a
bit bombastic over there. There were times when I just couldn’t wait to get
hold of a book and pen or even my laptop or phone to write something down. How
hard must it be, you wonder, to get these implements to do your bid? Much like
the pen playing truant every time you would want to write down a number or an
important piece of information, my book to pen bid is rather grandly sabotaged
by my curious daughter. The pen is pulled, jammed, swatted or flicked with
robotic precision. And if I managed to save the long, pointed object (that’s
how she must be seeing it, I think), then the book takes the brunt of her ministrations.
The same for the laptop too. My phone is a different game all together. Earlier
she was happy to merely do any of the above with the phone too, but I can
already see what peer pressure is doing to her. A couple of silent and studious
interactions with her older friends (read, older by two - three years), and she
has taken to plucking the phones and swiping her fingers randomly over the
screen. And she’s not very happy with a blank screen, as she stares or holds
the object tightly in her fingers willing it to glow. Thankfully she doesn’t
yet throw a tantrum when we remove this potential threat to all our sanity from
her hands, but our determined troubleshooting of this problem belongs in
another blog post.
So pending a choice of swatting at her and
shooing her away from the above implements, I find myself trying to write when she
is asleep and found to my surprise that I hardly had any time at all. And when
I do, my brain refuses to cooperate. Her morning nap coincides with my yoga
class or my training assignments, and her afternoon naps are coming to a
grinding halt. She sleeps only by 8:30pm as against those ‘restful’ days when
she slept by 6:30pm. By 8:30pm there’s only few things left to do – prepare and
eat dinner, surf channels mindlessly, stare at the newspaper and build enough
anger and worry at what kind of future is in store for her as she grows up,
return calls of exasperated friends who very soon might give up on you, watch
Master Chef Australia and wonder when you might get to eat or try such recipes
in the near future, toss between a fantastic book and social media, with the
latter winning most of the time, and then hit the sack. You get my drift don’t
you? All of the above activities are mindless ones and do nothing to improve
the quality of my life. Leave recording Anakutti’s milestone for posterity,
there is not even a tangible record of the time that is slipping away in my
day. Only if I am aware of what is happening around me during those pockets of
free time – the time when I am not reacting to something, will I be able to
understand what I want to do with it. If I don’t, then I lose focus and these
precious years will hardly register in my mind. I’m reminded of this
beautiful expression from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale – “What I need is perspective. The illusion of
depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface.
Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. (...)Otherwise
you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.” Definitely for my
dimpled baby’s sake, I’d like to get some perspective of my life at present and
that’s why this ramble in the blog, which you have painstakingly read through.
Thanks for that! It means
a lot to me. It’s your interest and your patience that has helped bring this
sporadically updated blog to cross 10,000 page views. Long time coming, but
yeah I’m stoked.
Let me leave you with
this beautiful, addictive Ilaiyaraja’s number, that’s been playing around in my
head on loop for a few days now. This long forgotten song has many associations
of my childhood, and it brought a warm, much-needed nostalgic interlude into my
rushed life. It pushes past my throat and my tongue and works its way out as
long forgotten lyrics which I hum as I go about my chores and thereby earning a
grin or a snapping of fingers or a brisk bobbing of a little body that follows
me every waking second.
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