That’s right! In our home division has little role to play. Not because we’re excessively cohesive as a family but simply because MLM doesn’t like to do division. *rolls eyes heavenward*
I’ve recently realized my folly in asking in why certain things find favor with him and why some don’t. The answer is extremely simple for him and terribly baffling for me- he just doesn’t like some stuff.
When they started doing division in school I wasn’t terribly worried about it because barring reading and writing he’s had a rather accepting attitude towards maths and seems to enjoy it by all accounts. So when he started arbitrarily leaving out specific maths problems I was quite surprised and asked him why those weren’t getting done. Pat came the reply, ” I don’t like them.” No rancor just a bald statement of facts.
And so began the process of trying to understand what kind of grave injustice 56/7 had done to merit being left out of the line-up whereas 44/4 happily got answered. I asked, I coaxed, I frowned and finally I gave up. Apparently division is not our thang. And so it shall remain until it regains favor once again.
P.S: kids are *really* weird. I wish those What To Expect series of books had clued me in. Some days it’s like going down the rabbit hole with Alice, the Mad Hatter and the Jabberwocky all at the same time. Truly maddening. If I was tweeting, this post would be hastagged dafuq!
Me: FINE! Stay that way! (tacking on whatever threat is the most effective at the moment).
MLM: Drags himself out of bed a la The Walking Dead and goes and plops himself onto the couch.
Me: AREYOUKIDDINGME?!! GETUPNOW!!
Red: (stumbling out of bed and frowning) Why are you yelling? (directed at me). Go have your coffee and I’ll handle this.(prepares to be the good cop)
2 minutes later
Red (to me): Go and get him to drink his milk, he’s not listening (absent mindedly goes off to brush his teeth while scratching his left bum cheek. Always the left. Don’t ask me why.)
Me (fully caffeinated and back on the job): COMEON! LET’S GO! WE’RE LATE!
Ah the joys of parenting and predictability of a sleepy child’s behavior on a winter morning. AND…I get to do this all over again. Tomorrow. And the next day. And the next.
This is a gym diary. Expect more blood, sweat (swear words) and tears than in the Spartacus series; barring the nudity *winks*
And that is the only nod to the adult humor I’ll be indulging in before I embark on my journey into discovering who is hiding under all the lard lovingly piled on in the last 7-odd years.
How do I know it’s been that exact amount of time? Well despite not being svelte back in the early 2000s either, my life underwent a paradigm shift in 2009. Mommyhood..cue the trumpets and drum roll.
My sleep cycles, metabolism and adrenaline levels went haywire and then they seemed to have plateaud at a point which is neither good or desirable for an almost-37 year old with an active husband and grade schooler.
A therapist I had interned with many aeons ago said I had all the makings of a myopic-personality. It was fed through my inherited myopic vision and it kept me from being able to envision the future realistically with all the curves in the roads.
I thought it was quite a big load of bull and carefully earmarked it as the kind of ambivalent and vacuous utterings I would have to make if I ever became a registered psychotherapist.
At 36+ am neither-a psycho or a therapist. But what I am is a person who hasn’t been careful enough with her health although I have enough sense to know that bacon, grits and sirloin burgers well done with home fries need quite a bit of legwork to not settle around the hips and torso. And am vertically-challenged into the bargain as well.
Definitely not a good half decade of eating and physical health decisions.
But realizations only takes you so far if you lounge around munching on low-fat chips or celery with dip and still aren’t doing anything to push yourself out of inertia.
So for my 37th year am attempting to give myself the gift of good and sustainable health.
I will attempt for more self-control and endurance and not try so hard to resemble a pear. Or a pineapple. Or a tomato.
The 3 of us (me, Red&MLM) rang in the new year inside a loud, creaky, semi-uncomfortable airport shuttle bus. But I got to wish my folks, my bestie and also make an SOS call to good friends who came and picked us up from a drop-off point since Hyderabad cabbies decided to be sadistic on the last day of the year and go on a strike.
While I *am* known to bitch and gripe for fairly long periods of time when the fit is upon me, last night’s events seemed quite amusing. Here we were, fresh out of the First Class lounge followed by flying Business Class back home and we stepped out to get lumped in with the rest of the world when it came to getting back home. And lump it we did! And it wasn’t as tough as I thought it would be at all.
There was a little boy incessantly asking his dad when the bus was going to move, there a conductor who was loudly asking about tickets and drop-off points and there were people who were (again loudly) discussing the taxi strike and those who were just so bleary-eyed that they didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything except their face hitting their pillow.
So why was I not grumpy and adding to the less than happy vibes floating around the bus?Well some of the credit for that goes to the champagne I had in the flight and the other was because I was going HOME!!
We aren’t the society creme de la creme by any means. But we’re comfortable. And we’d had a lovely fun and sun-filled week in Thailand. I had behaved like a glutton and was going to need most of 2017 and 18 to work off all that. But I’d really Zenned out while in Thailand and no bus, even one that needed a total overhaul and a muffler change STAT! was going to take that away from me. Add to that my child fell asleep quite quickly even before the bus started to move and it was an easy ride back home coloring mandalas (my latest thang) on my phone.
A lot of the experiences we have in life, the good and the bad are usually colored by the thoughts going on in our head at that time. I’d spent a good amount of time travelling back to India irritated with my child. He was being a brat and I still wanted my Zen bubble around me. But the husband, a great guy to travel with, had intervened throughout, suggested I have some champagne and most importantly had changed seats with me so I was able to get a little more head space away from the offspring and his monster persona.
2016 had been quite a dramatic year. Quite a few things took me by surprise. Shook me up. But most importantly, the shaking stopped. And now I have a whole year to stabilize and look forward to more; memories, laughter or even Zennishness.
So here’s raising the virtual toast to 2017. May you prove to be an outstanding successor to 2016. And may the adventures continue…even if in a bus.
My son can be a lazy lump. Anything that requires more effort than he’s prepared to put in; gets shoved under the rug (literally and figuratively) and often outsourced to us.
He’s starting to make some strides in reading now and today’s homework has words that distinguish the gender between people viz mother-father, brother-sister et al. That it doesn’t address the third gender type didn’t worry me much. He still mixes up his right and left shoe so am sure we have long walk ahead of us before we tackle that topic.
I was super happy when he wanted to add to the list by bringing in the animal kingdom. So we sat down and started writing out the animals names which have separate terms for their hes and shes. We did the usual ones..lion-lioness, tiger-tigress when my son started naming all sorts of weird “girl-animals”. In order to show him how not everything is called a girl-fox or a girl-whale I told him to look up what a female fox is called; because let’s admit it…if I say thing is white he won’t rest until half the world aka the internet has confirmed it as well.
Now comes the laziness part. He didn’t type it in but used OK Google instead.and got the answer- vixen. Yay for technology and all that jazz.
Then the lump decides to see how vixens look because he thought the girl animals will be different from boy animals (not sure if he was expecting big bows in the hair and whatnot) and told OK Google, “show me vixen” and that’s when a small child’s mouth dropped open because that particular command brought up all manner of busty, latex-clad women instead of the demure, orange-fur fox.
Thankfully he doesn’t have “boy” hormones yet and made a face and asked Google to show him the girl fox. Google apparently does have boy hormones because it showed him girl f****. And after a heated struggle between mother-child and an under-attack laptop I yelled out Jesus Christ!! GIRL FOX! That too was a bad call because Google turned up images of Jesus Christ of Fox…whatever that means; and studly men appeared in the search.
After that it was a toss-up who was going to be airborne- my BP or the laptop; out the window. And so I counted to 20 in my native tongue and found that it didn’t help a bit. In the meanwhile a small child was wondering why his already excitable mother was looking to strangle the laptop and he started tip-toe away. I hauled him back, opened up Google and asked him to type out ‘what is a female fox called’ with his stubby little fingers and LO and BEHOLD! Eureka and all the gang appeared and there were vixens and foxes raining like manna from the heavens. There were National Geographic picture quality ones, even some Disney ones thrown in for good measure and finally I could breathe again.
Until I heard him evoke Google again saying, “show me a girl whale”. I rushed back in time to see whales AND massive thongs and butt cracks appear on the screen.
Gods of Google: Please put in a disambiguate plug-in for the sake of my sanity.
I’m not sure why but farts, peeing, pooping, burping, drooling, mucus (from various parts of the body), wet dreams, menstrual flow; it’s all just stuff you file away under ‘ewws’, ‘icky-yucky’ ‘must-nots’ and either talk to your physician about or your best friend. Or you talk to your husband if you have what mine refers to as “potty comfort” aka using the toilet in front of each other without major gag reflexes coming into play or the question of the marriage surviving popping up.
But people’s’ personal preferences aside, I wanted to shine the spotlight on parents (moms in particular) and how they have to battle the insidious inside of the human body especially when it comes to their kids.
Right from the first constipation to cleaning the first vomit there is nothing more satisfying for a parent (read mother) when a badly backed up kid finally gets it out. Whether it’s through the poop chute or the nose but the sight of turd in the toilet after a tight-tummied kid has driven you crazy is like Nirvana!
The disgusting, gluggy mucus that makes your kid go from a normal pitch to a baritone is also treated with less revulsion and more of kindness when you try to coax it out of your kid’s nose with the contraption of horrors aka the nasal aspirator!
Once you open the tap and watch the snot swirl away or you flush the poop down the hatch, the kind of lightness you feel can give the Jenny Craigers and Atkin dieters a run for their money and probably win too.
It’s disgusting. It stinks. But it exists. And God help you if your kid needs something to be excavated. Better don the miner’s hat and go digging.
Unlike the Good Book says, it’s “Damnation WITH relief”.
I’m up. Again. I’ll be useless by 11 am unless I have 2 super-duper coffees (one of them black) in the first half of the day.
I don’t mind waking up ahead of time. I like the near-solitude that the apartment offers. The offspring is sleeping in some odd modernistic dance pose and the husband is just blissfully asleep. People look very different when they sleep. You either cringe or look lovingly at them. No middle path there am afraid.
I am FILLED with love for my child when he’s asleep. The curl of his lashes, the pucker of his mouth and I notice everything about him; the crud in the corner of his eyes, a small spot of toothpaste he didn’t properly rinse off his chin and usually how his pajama bottoms are gradually heading north of his ankles.
A few days ago I was (yet again) deleting stuff from my email account because it was close to being full and I really didn’t know if I wanted to fork over money every month for more space yada yada yada. I found some utterly delicious videos of my kid. Sadly they were taken with the sturdy, never-let-you-down-hardware-wise-but-otherwise-with-a-lame-ass camera Nokia I used to tote around before Samsung Galaxy came and changed my life for the better.
So there I was unearthing these treasures which I’d totally forgotten about…these grainy videos of him while still diaper-clad and with the requisite amount of baby fat when comes in the subject of those videos in present day avatar- lean, bucktoothed and with his run-of-the-mill dino t-shirt and asks me why am I going “awww” and smiling at my laptop so much. I tell him am looking at videos of him when he was a little(r) boy and it’s making me happy to remember those times. All sorts of maternally feelings are going on in my head with the past and present right in front of me and the world seems awash in those pretty shades from the color palettes which mothers apparently see when they feel a surge of love for their kids.
He looks over my shoulder, with his surprisingly pointy chin digging into my shoulder bone and says “I was a cute baby” and with the same breath telling me to move over somewhere else because he wanted to watch something on tv and my exclamations were too loud for him.
And just like that, in a snap, your maternal feelings evaporate and you longingly look at that diapered bum running around, chin all shiny from drool, making bird and airplane noises and wish he was back just for a little bit. Instead you leave circa 2011 behind and face 2016 with semi-resignation and just plant your butt more firmly into the couch and say I was here first! And before the whiny and knee-jerk “Nooooo” starts off, you get your ‘talk-to-the-hand’ face and gesture in place and get back to viewing that chubby kid who ate everything under the sun and was cute as a button. This dinosaur-loving one could just do with cooling his jets for a wee bit!
Main Tenet of Dealing with Nostalgic Moms- NEVER mess with the nostalgia process…it brings forth the inner dragon; complete with fire and brimstone. And the claws.
I know if I get on this particular pulpit, the few people who do read my blog from time to time might vamoose for good but I can’t help my self. I HATE HAVING COLDS!!!
I mean let’s examine it a bit closely. It’s a half-assed health problem. It’s not even a sickness. But a measly symptom of a larger problem; which often goes away on its own without even needing proper medication at times. And still manages to bring on the misery of a much more serious ailment.
In the world of frauds and duplicity- a cold wins hands down! It’s a minor league health trifle masquerading as a major league disease!
Case in point- your nose is no longer a nose. It’s a toxic tomato that is bipolar to boot since it emits geese-links honks at times and at others is a factory for more slime than ought to be physically possible inside a human body.
A quick digression at this point- slime IMHO ought to be those two-bit flimy-ass barrels which come in all sorts of different colors and keep your kid engaged for all of 20 minutes. Then said object goes back into barrel or gets scraped off whichever surface your kid last left it on and goes in the garbage. End of story.
Back to my woe-is-me tale…
A cold is a particularly nasty piece of work because it robs you of your senses. Imagine a weekend when you want to kick back with the taste of food you shouldn’t be eating, drinks you shouldn’t be drinking and BAM! The mucus mobile parks itself in your head and your weekend brunch is toast. You can’t taste galangal for Christ’s sake! You resort to eating chillies from your Thai lunch instead because the Galactic Ameba who hands out colds and aromats with the same indiscretions deemed that even if your gustatory and olfactory systems are on a lock-out, THOU SHALT ALWAYS SENSE AND SUFFER A CHILLI. Amen.
Why do I really hate colds? My head is heavy, my throat is choked with flotsam-jetsam and I’m cranky enough to be deemed as the twin of the cat lady from the Simpsons.
Image courtesy-pinterest
All I want on a weekend is to not *have* to do stuff. Take it easy…well easier than I do the rest of the 5 days. I want to fob off my kid to my husband and not think about him till Monday morning. I want to stay up late on Friday nights with wine and watch stand up comedy or movies till it’s Saturday morning. I don’t want to have a mini jack hammer going off in my head rendering me useless to read or watch television and I certainly don’t want to be the evil stepmother whenever there’s a moderate amount of noise from the offspring and his toys. Moderately evil mother is what works for me just fine!
A cold is horrid! It holds your taste buds, your sinuses ransom till you gargle, spit, blow, steam the hell out of yourself and at the end all you have to show for it is this- sitting up before 5am on a Monday morning, surrounded by a sea of tissues and remnants of chillies which are travelling down your digestive system with a vengeance!
