Of Careers and Creches

Today I want to muse a little on parenting - as loyal readers know, it is one of my favourite topics. Mostly, it's a chance to say unkind things about The Child, who is, thankfully too preoccupied with a pile of books borrowed from the library last week, to get back at me.

I attended an interesting session at IIT today. I was the "Chief Guest" at the creche in the campus. I agreed to go simply because a friend of mine asked me and I found it hard to say no (she is most accommodating and I owed her one). I was a bit hesitant at first, 'cause I didn't have a ready made speech to give. I know, I know, that has never stopped me before, and it did not stop me today either.

I laid out a salwar kameez to wear then on the spur of the moment ditched that and wore a sari. It was a purple-ish one and I wore matching earrings and a bindi. My parenting moment involved the walk to school to drop the child off, during which she laughed loudly and informed me that all three were different shades of purple, and nothing matched. Oh well.

My parenting philosophy has mostly revolved around Role Modelling. I can't for sure say that it has worked out super well for us or anything. But it is something that makes sense to me, and it gels with my own personality. Some aspects of role modelling are such that it can backfire on you - for e.g. the fact that I wake up early and run regularly leads to a certain disdain for running, for sure! But so be it! I am hopeful that in the future she will be somehow inspired by it, and last week I distinctly heard her say "I need some exercise now, it has been a while since I had a proper workout."

Speaking of creches, I think an important thing to bear in mind is the fact that all the feminism and equal rights and lack of a glass ceiling and so on falter at the altar of early motherhood. I know that in the absence of a high quality day-care center, on campus, right close to my work place, with a reasonable philosophy of child rearing, I would not have managed to have a career.

I could have handled a job, yes, I would have worked for sure, maybe simply because I am not very good domestically, but having a full fledged career would have been well nigh impossible without a set-up such as the one I was at this morning [My own early motherhood was dedicated to a sister concern that is in IIT Bombay, where the child went from the time she was 16 months old].

For that reason among others, I am immensely grateful that such things exist today, unlike when I was a baby. While the grandparents are super awesome and are any day better at parenting than any creche (or myself), the guilt I felt for putting them through the whole feeding - diaper changing - nap-time - and other routines of babies, was strong. Plus I think for a single child, having a set-up outside the home and some friends and non-family adults to interact with, were valuable.

It was a great walk down memory lane for me today. It was nice to introspect a little and tell the eager young parents that were in the audience, that the "Food Battles" are really not worth it. It was so hilarious to think about how much I used to agonise over her food, considering that she is 3 inches taller than me now!! I tried to convince them that it has been one of my failures as a parent.

Most of all, it felt good to do this informal session and spend the rest of the day mulling over the various things said and heard this morning. As we move on to Phase two - 'Parenting a Teen' - due to happen soon, while all is said and done, it has been a really wonderful journey. Although it sounds geeky to say it, the apple of our eye has grown to be a good (if distinctly disobedient) friend, and perhaps when she reads this she will recall those early creche days with fondness...

A long-ago memory captured for posterity

   

Miles of Fun

We drove some 3000+ kms all over the mighty USA over the past few weeks. By we, I mean he. I sat in lotus position in the passenger seat with my right index and thumb on google maps.

"Want to add on an additional driver for free?" asked the friendly guy at the car rental.

"NO" my husband said - a little too loudly and firmly in my opinion.

Not that I wanted to drive or anything. We rented two cars. The first one was a boat of a thing that I could barely see out of. The second one was better, and also, guzzled less gas.

It was quite an experience. I don't think I have enjoyed the country as much during all the time I lived there, and also the several trips I have taken in the past ten years (mostly for work, so no wonder), as I did this time.

First of all, it was just amazing to be together like that. I had thought that we would fight like cats and be yelling at each other a whole lot. There was yelling of course, but for the most part, I think we discovered each other and just relaxed as a unit.

We met many friends, held so many babies, attended a family function, drove to both our alma maters, met my Phd advisor, saw snow, rode on super scary roller coasters, ate and slept very well, and shopped for only what we had put on our respective lists.

We talked so much. I was really looking forward to that a fair bit. I assumed that the child would sleep for much of the drive and we could talk adult talk. That didn't happen (at all - the monkey did not take a single nap the whole time, I swear). But still, we talked. Sometimes in code.

We took thousands of photos. I was looking at a couple of them just now and frankly, not too happy with them. But the act of taking photos gave us a good feeling, so we did that a lot. Maybe some day they will be fun to look through, long years from now. Heck, am sure that will be so!

The child has settled back into her usual routine of reading too much now (though she is currently asleep in a jet lag driven afternoon nap). I am trying to control the yelling. Especially since I sense some sort of change in her - a teenage-y streak.

The house is more or less back in working order. One airlock to be removed, a few kitchen items to be re-stocked, one missing maid to be urged out of laziness, couple of kittens to be evicted from the BMW, and it will be like we were never gone....

Desi Barbie

As the child grows up, I finally have time to sort of step back and think. About her. Me. Her as a child. Me as a parent. About choices we have made. About thought I have paid to choices I have made. About rules, and opinions, and objectivity and most recently, about this whole boy-girl stereotype business.

The trigger was simple. The child needed a haircut. Her hair had grown out in ungainly manner and even the father was starting to complain about it! She swam for eons and then her hair was wet and it was impossible to dry it out. Plus with all the chlorine and ick it looked in bad shape.

So I resolved to take her and, as I have been saying the past few sessions or so, said, I am going to get it cut short. NO. She said. Okayy... She wanted it to be cut REALLY SHORT like a boy. I tried various tactics to dissuade her. But I was outnumbered. So I caved in and now she looks completely like a boy wearing gold rings in his ear.

I was reading some of my old posts and also glancing through photos and remembering the pink phase. It really didn't last long, but that was bothering me as well, I find, as I read myself. In that phase, she was the opposite of me, wanting to wear pink and purple, and bangles, and occasionally, sporting lots of colourful clips in her hair.

I did knuckle down and enjoy that phase though, on hind-sight. I made all those hair things for her - something I have never allowed myself to do. I selected bangles and sorted them and packed them when we went on trips. Again, something I have never done for myself. Suddenly, I found, I was enjoying this stuff!

Through my own childhood, I resisted the pulls of what I thought of as 'frippancies.' No make-up. No jewelry. No flouncy frocks with frills and so on. No fancy footwear. I dressed in simple cottons, wore brown Bata sandals, kept my hair short. I wore running shorts under my school uniform skirt, all the time, and even went through a phase where I smothered my hair in oil with the explicit intention of looking nasty.

And no, I wasn't a teenager necessarily through all that. Y'know. When your body is changing and you don't know how to deal with it. I was like that through that period as well, but also before and after. Even in grad school, heck, even recently. I don't even look at my face in the mirror, really. I don't really think I am hideous, just that I don't allow myself to do 'all that fashion stuff' (whatever that entails).

So on the other hand, here I am, as a parent. Trying to tell the child that its awesome to be a girl. And that, we, as women, can really do anything we damn well please. Hopefully, considering my abject faith in role-model parenting, I am not just saying that to her. Not just empty words.

Then I have a child who insists she 'wants to look  like a boy.' I thought it was a phase. That its that damned Georgina. Surely she influenced me as a child as well. But it is a long phase. She says she genuinely dislikes 'fussy clothes' as she calls them. Things she cannot play comfortably in (even if she doesn't play so much, sitting around reading piles of books). Hates hair-clips. Likes bangles and bindis but for about 10 minutes at a time, only. Loves to play with colourful beads and buttons and bells and so on, but not to wear them. Favourite colour? Blue. Most hated colour? Pink. Poisonous pink, she calls it. Vomit-inducing, she says.

And...it bothers me. I resist it. I fight it. I work on her from various angles about this. I react by finally, FINALLY, embracing my gender a little more (in a manner). I wear pink now. I line my eyes, and like how they look when I do that. I wear long ear-rings (only the wooden Fab-India kinds), and love them. I wear my saris often. I am wearing my hair long. I am even considering if I should pin back stray strands of hair (this is something I have never done, if you can believe it!).

I still won't go so far as to colour my hair. I don't paint my nails or wear lipstick or touch anything other than Oil of Olay/Pure Vaseline to my face. But the reasons for some of those at least are related to how sensitive my skin is in general, and my dislike of chemicals (despite day job). The worst part though is? I am enjoying it. I am even feeling occasional pangs of regret that I didn't learn stuff about clothes and fit and hair and accessorising when I was younger...

So, as I was saying vaguely on facebook... I think I am rebelling against my child. Who knows? Next I might purchase that thing called 'Desi Barbie' in the wedding finery or something and start playing with it. Oh wait. That would be totally weird... :)

That Parenting Gig

The child turned eight earlier this month. For days I went around my eyes all saucer-like, at the wonder of it. Eight years old. Gosh. I have nearly forgotten those initial days when she was that tiny lump. She is this strapping girl, in her yellow glasses, and full of opinions now. I look at her though and feel that same familiar lurch I used to feel when she was that lump of a baby.

I was not in the frame of mind to have our 'usual' birthday party. Which, frankly, is not a particularly relevant child's birthday party. We have a large number of friends over and hang out. The friends have a large number of kids who are the child's friends. The kids hang out, watch some videos, the boys invariably get on the child's nerves because they do things like throw lego pieces around.

Last year, I had a 'painting party' which was a bit more relevant. Bunch of kids came over and made some drawings and spilled some paint over the floor upstairs while we parents hung out and drank and ate and laughed downstairs. It was fun, and she did have tons of memories about that, but this year, I was not ready for the 'commitment' of having so many people around.

"I would like to go to the planetarium" she said. That sounded like an awesome idea to me! Especially since the place is like a five minute drive from our house, is open 365 days a year (+1 for leap years), and the ticket costs some 10 Rs. a head. We had been recently, the chairs are a bit broken, the 3-D show sucks big time, the exhibits are all giant posters like we would make for research meetings, and well, the dome show is not spectacular either.

But what the hell! She doesn't know any better. And there is a play area there with swings and slides that she loves despite the oppressive heat and sun. And I knew just the right set of kids who would appreciate this local neighborhood experience and not act all hoity-toity about things or complain about the heat...

So we had 5 kids. Two of them are her absolute 'best friends' They are the main reason she has settled in so well in Chennai. We also love the parents who are the coolest people on earth, and definitely ready for something insane. Then I invited the two kids associated with my home. Kids of my cook and gardener. These girls are the same age as my girl but they rarely hang out with us, I figured this is a good time!

The only thing was, there were 4 girls and 1 boy. RRJ is also a 'manly man' type of boy. At least he tells me he is. But he bore it all bravely. They seemed to enjoy the show (although it was really bad. It was about the telescope and so very very badly made that my husband & I were really squirming in our seats and making mental notes about how to make a movie about telescopes ourselves). They played in the park. I gave them the juice which they consumed in double time.

At home, the girls gravitated towards the kitchen set which annoyed RRJ. Actually my minx is also not a big fan so soon they found the balloon game to play. Its the simplest birthday game ever but something they always seem to enjoy in all the parties. So they did that. And then we cut the cake and the parents (the mommies blog over here and here) came over and we chatted downstairs. It was all awesome and relaxing though the child had tons of tons of fun and was super excited for days...

Which brings me to language. The two prof kids-best friends speak almost exclusively in English. Though one of them speaks Bengali as well, her parents were saying, thanks to her grandmum. The other two girls know English a little bit through school, but converse in Tamil. So my minx of a child was the 'go between' so to speak. Since she can at least make sentences in Tamil, and translate between the languages. To the extent of saying 'lets play with bubbles' or 'lets go downstairs' or 'here is your return gift' (which was a simple set of crayons, sketchpens, and colour pencils for some summer fun.)

Especially since I was thinking about this whole conscious effort of raising multilingual kids (and sort of lamenting the fact that I had failed in that): see my post at SimplyBike: Raising Multilingual Kids; I was particularly happy to see that at 8 years of age, it doesn't really matter. When it comes to playing and having that brand of fun that kids specialise in, language is really no barrier for children...

Jerk Alert!

I am on XP now. The fonts look weird. But the ubuntu experiment is hereby declared a failure. Construction has started again outside my office. Delicate electronic items are again coated with fine layers of mud and cement. I have trouble getting access to the windows network for registering my software. A monstrous digger is patting the ground - about 10 meters from my face - in loving taps with its extensible arm. In other words, all is right with the world. Things are as they should be.

Among my favourite people in the world are - V.S.Naipaul; Salman Rushdie; Albert Einstein; Ben Johnson; Diego Maradona; Boris Becker; Sunil Gavaskar; and a bunch of random engineers no one will know (unless they are reading their books or papers for work purposes). Generally though, I seem to have poor luck when I pick role models and favourites. Though immensely successful in their professional spheres, the people I am attracted towards have a tendency to be, to put it mildly, jerks. At least in popular perception. They do crazy stuff with their personal lives - relationships and so on. People love to mention this every time you try to gush about them.

In a sense, its like a person cannot be successful and brilliant and so on unless s/he is screwing something else up hugely. Must be stealing someone's work. Must be discarding and marrying women (or men) like there is no tomorrow. It must be drugs. Has probably made real bad enemies at the work place. Of course for people like Rushdie (I still remain a die-hard Rushdie fan, whatever he does or does not do) are sort of too famous and too rich and too whatever-else.

But even in our everyday lives, if we find someone doing well, we try to look behind and figure out that their personal life is in shambles. If they are suddenly being very rich (I vaguely think this means they are buying property?) we think it must be kickbacks or some other illegal stuff. Considering the dual role we play at my job, the minute a person does well in one of them, we assume that they must have severely compromised on the other. A quick succession of promotions (or whatever they are called) makes you check quickly on the spouse - must be neglected. Children of working parents are always under a magnifying glass, so we can turn around and say "Yes, with both of you being out so much, this was bound to happen" (meaning some particularly annoying tantrum).

On a logical level some of this makes sense. Where did all this extra money come from? There are only so many hours in a day, how can you do so well at work and manage to keep your family happy? How can a person suddenly finish the 100m in 9.83 s? How can one make more runs than anyone ever did unless one played the game for making records and not necessarily to win? How can a child possibly grow up well when the MOTHER has work-related things to worry about for a good part of the day?

In a strange way, I was thinking of these things recently because of the movie 'Fashion.' I am an avid reader of movie reviews. I have a very poor strike rate when it comes to actually watching a movie the review of which I have read. Maybe 1% (I assume that means that I watch 1 movie for every 100 reviews I read; is that what Strike Rate means? Not sure). I read the two reviews by Mayank Shekhar every week in the TOI. I read Brangan sometimes. I read the ones in Tehelka. So a total of about 100 reviews in a year. We watch a movie a year (I mean at the local Multiplex; am not counting movies seen on flights or on TV - which are anyway also very small in number). Anyway, I generally read these reviews because I like to. MS's reviews are awesome because I feel like he does - that all these things are a bunch of baloney and waste of time. So why does he review them? And why do I read him and attempt to watch some of them? Oh well.

I somehow seem to have read a whole bunch of people's comment on this movie, however. I have never managed to watch 'A Madhur Bhandarkar' entirely. I have seen bits and pieces of "Page 3" and have of course assiduously avoided 'Corporate' and cannot remember any other movies of his right now. But this I thought I would like to watch. To add to my general knowledge; in the same compartment of random stuff as The Devil Wears Prada and another book of that genre by someone who is called Ira or Ila if memory serves and who was in some Miss India type contest and wrote a book about it. But what I got out of all the reviews what this - that a message from this movie is that in order to be super successful in the world of 'Fashion' (whatever that might imply); one has to compromise on a lot of things, including one's morals (whatever that might imply).

It is sort of scary. I am bringing up a child. I want her to do good things with her life. I want her to do enjoyable things. I want her to do well; whatever she chooses. I want to tell her it is possible to really marry personal and professional and hobby lives and really do good stuff in all aspects. I want her to be able to make prudent choices. I want her to compromise on things but never on internal ones. I want her to feel that hard work always pays, someday. I want her to learn all her life. I want her to be nice, pleasant, well-mannered (ha! She is far from it now!) but also to stand up for herself and her rights.

People of course write nasty stuff out of a sense of jealousy at times. I cannot write such a book as the Bend in the River so let me trash the guy instead and go after his personal life and insist from my high horse that he is an abrasive old fellow and please don't read his books because he never says nice things about MY country. I am not trying to say I am above this. I am still vaguely suspicious of Usain Bolt for example; though as I often say, he is so cute, I really want to believe that he is that good without any nasty drugs coursing through his veins.

And meanwhile there is my parenting mantra of Role Modelling. So I better go work. If not for anything else, just to show the child, who is busy in school in her pink shoes, that I can (and not be a jerk about it either).

Now here is a mean looking spider is crawling around, it has explored all the crevices of my printer (which is not yet installed). Must have emerged from the dug up ground outside... Yes this is right.