Endless summer afternoons

It’s 48 degrees in the shade and Delhi is not baking but burning to a crisp, like bacon. The proof is the oil dripping off my face. I do my best to not fight it, to embrace the heat. I try and remind myself that there are people across the world who yearn for a bit of the bone warming sun. And I do my best to make the home comfortable, with thick drapes, chilled aam panna, cool creamy lassi and the good old desert cooler that fills our home with the lovely fresh scent of khus. But it’s an undeniable fact that the North Indian summer is deadly and kids on a school break feel trapped inside the home.

For years I’ve flip flopped between summer camp or not. Last year a friend ran a special summer camp at a very special school and suggested I send the kids with her. It suited me because the kids travelled both ways with her and I didn’t have to organise the logistics. Her kids and mine are friends and it worked out well for everyone. I’d even sent them in the earlier years in Delhi because we were locked into our third floor house and the kids couldn’t get out of the house until 6 pm. It just seemed cruel.

This year, now that we’ve moved into our lovely little house with a garden, I decided I’d keep them home. The entire point of a summer break is to give them a break from routine. To let them lounge like lizards and come up with something of their own to do. To let them whine, ‘I’m bored, mama’. And then tell them what my grandmother often told me – ‘Only boring people get bored; interesting people have a whole world of fun going on inside their heads.’ My brother and I hated it when she said that. And yet it taught us so much. We learnt to entertain ourselves. And we learnt to be still.

They say an idle mind is a devil’s workshop, but I disagree.  Left to themselves kids can be amazingly creative and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with some of the things they’ve come up with. It’s not easy, particularly since I work from home and that means the kids bang on my door ever so often with a ‘What shall we do?’ or a quarrel to settle. But I soldier on without succumbing entirely to the tempting air conditioning of malls. Remember this post on keeping kids out of malls?

What is lovely about the new locality is that there are so many parents who parent just like I do. We may have nothing to say to each other (but funnily we do!) but we agree almost blindly on matters of parenting. So each morning the kids go off to have lunch with someone and every 3rd or 4th day I have about 4 kids at mine. They play hide and seek around the house, they paint, they create entire farms of playdough, they lose their tempers and throw the ludo board at each other with accusations of CHEATING!, they drag bedsheets over chairs and create castles and pirate ships and put on feather boas and masks and create stories. On a Saturday the OA plays math games with all the kids while another mother runs them through their Hindi workbook for a quick revision. I do a storytelling activity followed by a quick art and craft session. In case you don’t know how to come up with stories, you can take a little help from this game the kids were gifted (thanks Aneela!) that I thought I’d share with you. It is called Shape Your Story and is very handy to keep the kids entertained. There is a set of cards, a dice and a marker. All you need to do is add to the shape and create something. And that is the starting point for your story. Much fun and much inspiration for the wildest of stories.

What is nice about this system is that each house has it’s own set of games and at another home located at a dead end, they play cricket and football. A third home is  bang opposite the park so they run out and play in the shade. The kids learn to eat pure vegetarian at one home while the vegetarian kids learn that meat will be put on my table even though I will ensure that they don’t touch it. But every single one of these homes offers only healthy homecooked food and fresh fruit. And very limited TV viewing. I couldn’t ask for more or better.

In another two weeks the kids are off to spend 3 weeks with my parents while the OA and I take a much deserved trip to Istanbul and the US. Before we know it, these long lazy summer vacations will be over. Real life will begin and they will never know more than a 20 day break in the year. Until that happens, I want them to know what it feels like for a day to seem endless, a night to be cool and restful, a break to be never ending and a week to be full of possibilities.

I leave you with some pictures of what they’ve been up to.

Breaking a lump of clay to discover Dino fossils. Some of the toys you get these days are amazing. Just right for my geeky son.

The Brat creates an octopus from a couple of sticky straw thingies.

The Bean draws the Taj Mahal from memory on the chalkboard I’ve painted in a corner of their nursery.

The Brat’s latest obsession – big cats. I think he was trying to copy a Serval or something here.

A friend joins them on the mess mat for an afternoon of finger painting.

The Bean’s ladybird on canvas

Planting veggies for the summer

Arrogance is the new intelligence

A few days ago we took the kids to a party and they pretty much shocked the pants off everyone with their Good evening Uncle, Good evening Aunty, Thank you for having us, except for the Bean saying her goodbyes and ending with, ‘Thank you for coming’! Yes, she’s four and easily confused but very particular about manners.

The hosts laughed their butts off and then proceeded to lecture us on ‘making’ the kids wish other adults the time of day and say please, thank you etc. This is something I’ve always found rather strange. Why is it that people don’t think manners are an unimportant lesson? Or that there is such a thing as teaching your kids manners too early? No, it doesn’t come naturally to kids to say Please, Thank you and May I, so if you don’t teach them, who will?

Oh he won’t say hello unless he likes you, says one smiling father. Another mother shrugs proudly – He’ll hit first and ask questions later. Eh? What am I missing? And parents are okay with this? Others believe it’s a part of modern parenting philosophy and throw words at you like  - space, privacy, choice, development. He has only one childhood and we don’t like to tell him to do this or do that… says another, fondly watching her son throw stones at a stray dog. And what do our kids have – nine lives? “The books I’ve read and the school philosophy is to let the children find their own feet and decide what they think is right or wrong… ‘ she says, as her son pushes my daughter off her cycle roughly. I break the conversation and go running to save her since she’s about half his size.  Clearly her son thinks there is nothing wrong with raising a hand on a little girl who is half his size. I hope all that psychology is useful as he grows up aggressive.

I understand some kids are shy and some are aggressive – but I am horrified when I don’t even see parents make a token effort. A simple reminder – say Good evening/Hello/Namaste to Aunty. Never mind if the kid doesn’t say it – you’ve begun something that he will slowly absorb and someday even surprise you by saying without prompting.

But (Yes, I am aware that you shouldn’t start a sentence with ‘but’) no one seems to care, by their own admission. All the kids go to new age schools where they are encouraged to explore their surroundings and find themselves. Where there is no discipline. No enforcement. I agree with that in theory. My kids go to a similar school. But are we throwing away decency and manners in this whole new way of parenting?

If your kid has looked deep within and only found arrogance or bad behaviour, how about you find some manners for him? Another kid stalks off from the skating class because he is punching a younger kid in the face and I stop him. I’m nobody of any relevance according to him. I’m not his mother and I’m not the skating coach, so what business is it of mine? I glare at him mencingly and firmly tell him that he MUST STOP HITTING. Or else, his eyes challenge me? Or else… I drift away. Or else nothing. I can do nothing. I am positive I won’t find any support in his parents. If they cared, he wouldn’t be as much of a bully as he is.

For instance, I recently saw this advertisement on TV and it horrified me. I’d skin my kids alive if they slid a coin across a counter so rudely to a shopkeeper, specially an elderly person. But advertisers clearly have been doing enough market surveys to know that arrogance is the new intelligence. When we were kids the advertisements enticed you with promises of growing to be like Kapil Dev or the smarter kid. But no, we no longer aspire to be hardworking or tall.  We aim to be cocky. We want to be arrogant.

Because in some twisted way parents believe that being arrogant shows that we’re smart. We’re witty, we’re intelligent, we’re irreverent. That it makes their kids brave and intrepid. They don’t demand instant obedience. I get that. I don’t want zombies for kids either. But surely having your own mind and being well mannered are not mutually exclusive. And humility isn’t really an old fashioned virtue. I’m out of options now – I think I’m taking the next ticket to Mars.

I leave you with a piece by Samina Mishra. A senior from college, a sometimes colleague and a woman I admire tremendously for what she does with her life and the way she thinks. Enjoy.

 

Sweet heart

It’s a nice crisp  morning-after-a-night-of-rain and we decide to drop the kids to school and then go to our favourite park for a jog instead of the OA hitting the gym and me the pool. Breakfast at a lovely little organic cafe, Roots and then home to dress and rush to work, is the plan. And so we head out to school.

The windows are rolled down and the kids are clowning around. The Bean’s hair is flying in the breeze and she’s pretending to be a pup and barking at other cars. The Brat is cheering her on and squealing with laughter. The breeze has blown our papers all over the place, the kids have had a pillow fight with the two cushions in the backseat, the OA and I are in tattered shorts and tees and sneakers and we’re dancing to whatever RJ Sarthak is subjecting us to. This car is a far cry from peaceful.

Just then the Brat sees his classmate in the car next to ours and waves excitedly. The other child is sitting quietly in a chauffeur driven car with his older, neatly groomed, dressed-for-office father reading the newspaper. Peace and calm reign in their car.

The Brat gestures to the other child who begs his father to let him roll the window down. The Brat then calls out, “Yours is a really cool racing car. You’re going to come first – yayy! I’ll see you in school.”

The OA smiles, “Only our son would tell another boy that he has the better car! He never feels the need to sound cooler or better, does he?”

I nod and smile back. That is our Brat. And we’re making our peace with our non-competitive child who will give visiting kids his cycle, share his Beyblades, offer you the better piece of cake and forgive you for punching him in about ten minutes.

A few days ago they went for a birthday party. The kids were mostly older and it was time for the pinata. The Bean usually gets stamped on and pushed out of the way, emerging from under the pile of kids with only a handful of sparkle. The Brat usually wanders around on the periphery, uninterested in the proceedings. I was surprised to see him dive in this time and emerge triumphant. In his hand, other than a few odds and ends was a pink sparkly pencil sharpener in the shape of a PC mouse.

Clutching it tight he came to his sister – I got this for you because I knew you wouldn’t be able to get anything out of there. Ma ka dil and all that jazz, I blinked back tears and looked away. Unwilling to bear witness to this sort of honest love. The Bean held up a bag – she’d already got herself a bag of loot!

The OA and I took one look at each other and burst out laughing. Clearly our little Monster no longer needs to be looked out for. Although I still felt bad that the Brat dived in there only to get something out for her and nothing much for himself.

Oh well… everyday in little ways we learn something about them. And almost everyday, what I learn about the Brat, breaks my heart just a little bit.

Trying to be a better person

The operative word here being, ‘trying’.

We all talk about being better people, but I’m not sure how that works. In fact I find it hard to make that general ‘better person’ cut and what works for me is picking up a facet of my life and working on it. Wife, mother, sister, friend, employee…

I am not much of an employee because work features at the bottom of my list. I deliver on time and as promised and maybe a little more than promised, but that’s about it. On the other hand, I try everyday to be a better wife to the OA. Not by cooking or cleaning or whatever else one might expect from 90% of wives across the world. But by trying to be a more understanding wife. Giving him more space, more time, more energy and more encouragement to be the person he wants to be. I try to be a better mother to the kids by doing as much as I can for them without smothering, guiding without leading and so on. Let me hasten to assure you that I don’t think I’m excelling at either, but that I am always trying, always eager to work on them and often aware of where I am failing.

But the one relationship I realise I haven’t worked on as much as I should, is the relationship with my parents.

Born to them, you grow up taking them for granted. If you’ve always been snappy and short tempered with them, if you’ve always been the indulged, whiny one, if you’ve always got what you asked for, if they’ve always stepped in when you need something, you continue in the same vein. How many of us make an effort to improve our relationship with our parents?

How many of us have begun to indulge them? I think back on my last post on parents and the pressure on them where so many people responded that it is unfair to expect people to give up their lives abroad and move back to a country where their ageing parents are comfortable. Very true. All expectations are unfair. And yet we so often do sacrifice for our kids. I look upon our move to Gurgaon as the worst thing to have happened to me, simply because I have no choice in this matter. I WILL give my children the education I think they deserve, even if it kills me. So why then are we never so generous with those who spent a lifetime doing stuff for us? I don’t say you should give in to unreasonable demands (heck, I say you should never give in to demands, reasonable or unreasonable – now requests, they’re a different matter). But I do believe that as children ourselves, we rarely stop to consider our parents and their desires and wishes and hopes and dreams.

We all carry baggage and so do they. My relationship with the Bean is a very easy one. We are so alike that I just need to look at her to figure out which bit of mischief she is getting up to. With the Brat though, I am usually reaching for a cyanide pill. He is nothing like either of us and parenting him is a challenge. Every choice we make, is an effort. Every time he does something the OA and I have to count to ten so as to not lose our cool. Without doubt, he is the child that challenges us and I can only see this getting worse as he grows. Inspite of being the cutest, friendliest, more adorable toddler, he is an introvert who has his own ideas, is uncommunicative and moody and unbelievably stubborn. Naturally this means we cannot parent him in the same way we do the Bean. That we don’t have the same easy relationship but a more careful, calculated method of parenting. We’re constantly thinking – ‘Will this upset the Brat? Do you think he’ll agree to do this?  Have you noticed him do X – do you think he now needs Y?’ It puts a huge strain on us as parents and often we’re drained with the effort because the easiest thing to do would be to just shake him up and the collapse.

And that makes me realise how tough it must have been for my mother to parent me. I am the exact opposite of her. So much my father’s daughter. So hard for her to have two of us hot headed types to handle. So unlike her in temperament and so much of an effort to understand. Even today we’re careful about what we say to each other and not to hurt each others’ feelings. My dad on the other hand, tells it like it is and I feel free to repay him in the same currency. Secure in the knowledge that he will forget by night, as will I. My mother, I know will nurse the hurt and recall it years later.

In the last few years I’ve begun to try but even I have to admit that I am not good at it. Some time during my pregnancy with the Bean my relationship with my parents reached its lowest ebb and I was shouting, banging doors and fighting with them. I was going through certain problems and felt that they weren’t being supportive enough. Four years down I’m trying harder. Even a few days ago my father and I had a showdown but this time I merely called him *koff koff* ‘mean and unsupportive.’ Yes, I can be  childish when I want. But we both stalked off,  cooled off and came back bathed and calmer. I laid out some snacks and the evening tea and then we looked at each other, grinned and put our arms out for a hug. I sat in his lap (did I mention childish?) and we made up. It might take time but I realise that like all relationships, we need to work on the one with our parents too.

With Ma, I now try to say my words in my head before they spill out of my mouth to leave a scar that won’t go away. Mostly though, I am trying to stop thinking of it as my sovereign right to take them for granted. To stop saying, ‘But I am their daughter and have always been this way; they should have learnt to deal with it by now. But I am their daughter and they owe me this.’ I have to admit it doesn’t come easy.

At this point I must also admit that working on a relationship with your parents after you become a parent yourself is even harder. Everything begins to sound judgmental. If Ma says, ‘You should have done XYZ with the kids,’ I am most likely to turn around and snap, ‘Why? you didn’t do it for us.’ Not only do I end up feeling judged, I take a potshot at their parenting too. It’s not deliberate, but it is the instinctive reaction to being criticised. To hit out at the other and point out where they failed you. And everyone knows, the only people who can tell you where you went wrong in your parenting, are your children. I am so often carried away by my vile tongue that I am ashamed of myself. Yes, maybe they made some mistakes, but they were young and did the best they could. And while it’s okay to blame your parents for certain things in life, it is also time, that at 30, I take responsibility for the person I am and the things I say.

A small example is the way I trash my mother’s taste in clothes mercilessly – What is that crap, Ma? Are you planning on going out in public dressed like that? Because junta will just run for cover when they see that tee shirt.

She holds her tongue and either quietly submits to my better judgment or ignores me. The one thing she doesn’t deny is that I am always right. The one thing I can never forget is that I get my taste from her. Every choice in cotton sarees or crisp chikan kurtas with huge red bindis is one I learned from her and then fine tuned. But what I am yet to learn is to be nice while I go about it. Because the honest truth is that she looks awesome – I just want her to look better.  And so I have now begun to shop for her when I see something that would look good on her, regardless of whether I can afford it or not. I’m busy getting her packed for a family wedding in Australia later in the year. I was supposed to have attended but no passport yet and so I am deriving my joy from planning her sarees for the various dinners and parties. Knowing that she likes the clothes I choose for her, I’m doing this the other way around. Holding my tongue and simply buying what I think will suit her.

With dad, I’m just learning to hold my tongue. Period. At other times if we’re arguing over how much television the kids should be allowed, I simply find an article that illustrates my point and leave it on his bed. One evening he came up to me twice and said, ‘You’re right and I was wrong. I apologise.’ I almost collapsed in shock. But if he can do it, so can I.

We’re learning. It’s not easy as adults to re-work our relationship. To put aside our emotional baggage and treat each other with the respect due to another adult. And yet, even here, as I struggle to improve my relationship with them, I realise that I am only able to do it with their help and cooperation.

What are you working on today?

More spirited behaviour

Yesterday I forced myself to do something that broke my heart. The Brat’s stubbornness is legendary. It’s the bad stuff that my blog is made up of. Now I am equally hot-headed – as you can see from my comments – and that makes it difficult for me to remind myself that I am the older person, the parent, the one who needs to stay in control of my emotions and let him get it out of his system. If only it were easier.

So yesterday he got back from school and I told him I was taking them out in the evening and suggested a  nap. The Bean obediently lay down and slept. The Brat said he didn’t need one. Fine, I suggested some quiet time. He lined up a row of AC and television remotes and began some game. A little later I realised he’d falled asleep.

I gave him an hour and got the Bean ready and then began to wake him up. He cried and wriggled and wailed and I carried him to wash his face, applied his sunscreen, dressed him and fed him a cool milkshake all the while talking him into a better mood. Please note, this is not easy for me because I was in a rush, I had errands to run along the way and the heat was getting to me too. And then just as we were ready to leave the Bean picked a book to read in the car. He threw a tantrum – it was one of his dinosaur books and he didn’t want her reading it. In a bid to reduce hostilities I siad I’d hold the book  and read to both of them. At this point the Bean picked up a dinosaur and said she’d like to hold it all the way in the car. Now I don’t know if she was doing it to annoy him or not, but it really pressed his buttons. He threw a huge tantrum saying it was his. The Bean rarely plays with his dinosaurs so I don’t know why she picked one. But he has about 50 of them  so I saw no reason for him to lose his shirt. I tried to reason, I offered him another, but he wasn’t having it and I didn’t think it was fair to take it back from the Bean. So I finally said I was leaving and he could come or not, as he pleased.

I went downstairs, cleaned my sandals before I wore them, filled a bottle of water for them to drink in the car, dialled my number so that the maid could redial me if she needed something. And basically gave him enough time to change his mind. But he was having none of it. I yelled out one last time that I was leaving and he could still join me. NOOO he screamed. I left with the Bean.

We were out for a whole 5 hours and he was at home with the maid. No TV I’d said, but he could go down to the park and play with the other kids or swim. He was so upset that he just sat with the maid when she took him down and didn’t even join his friends. I felt really bad being so heartless but on the whole I felt it was a lesson he needed to learn. We’ve had these tantrums before but it always ends with me either kissing him and hugging him and carrying him to the car or then losing my cool and picking him up and marching to the car. Either way, he cools off in a while and is fine. This time however, I wanted him to face the consequences of his choice and I left him alone.

The last few weeks have seen him get more firm on what he will do and not do, mostly ending in him cutting off his nose to spite his face. I want to help him but as someone who is guilty of the same crime, I am not really the right person. His birthday was an unmitigated disaster. Now that we live in an apartment complex we have to invite the kids who live here, we have our Delhi friends and now that he is older, classmates. The crowd was too much for our home. My cook was on leave and I got in a temp who came really late, delaying dinner, and the heat was unbelievable. Even with the ACs and coolers on we were all sweating, the plan was to take the kids down to play but one minute it was hot as hell, the next minute a storm brewing (this is the second time we have had a summer storm ruin the Brat’s birthday plans) and the humidity had us all cranky. I set up the cake and all the kids kept poking and licking the icing off it even while I was trying to put the candles on. The Brat wanted to light the candles and I said no playing with fire. And then just as I lit it, all the other damn kids leaned in and blew out the candles before he could (is it just my opinion or are kids getting more badly behaved everyday?) and he lost his temper – naturally, he’s only six! I would have lit them again but the room was full of people, everyone sweating more because the fans were off, and I couldn’t be sure the kids wouldn’t blow it out again and neither could I scream at them to leave his cake alone. So I gave it one minute of begging and then sadly let the Bean cut it because we just couldn’t wait any longer. Naturally he sulked some more and stomped off without even tasting the cake. I gave up – exhausted, sweaty, cranky and wishing I had thrown the party in Switzerland. Next year it is 6 kids to a kiddy movie and lunch. No need to return all the invitations we receive if it is going to kill us. And yes, doing it at McDonalds will also kill us.  And oh – this is one birthday we have no record of because the OA and I were so run off our feet that we didn’t take pictures.

The long ride in to Delhi with the Bean suddenly made me understand what parents of single kids talk about when they talk about feeling  complete. It’s happened to me before when I took only one of the children out, rare though those occasions are.  I don’t sit there feeling like a limb is missing. It is usually for a reason that one is not part of the event and they are always in good hands. And when you live in the moment you realise that it is very easy to feel very complete. Not because the other child is not important but because the relationship with each one is so complete in its own way that you don’t need the other around to make it feel whole. Do I make sense? Any other parents of two kids who want to explain that last bit of gibberish I wrote?

And oh, I came home to a very subdued Brat who has promised to behave better. Let’s see. Tomorrow is another day.