What happened next

One child starting big school (needing all sorts of things everyday – labelled clothes, art materials, show and tell stuff, needs someone to ride the bus with him to school while the driver learns where he is to be dropped etc)

One house where none of the stuff from our old house fits. Curtains, furniture, everything the wrong size, hence nothing feels like home

One messed up iPhone

AND

One robbed BlackBerry that didn’t belong to me – means no contacts – friends, family, work

One maid going home since her duty is done

One new maid who can’t speak or understand a word of English including things like ‘bed’

One absent driver who went home to get married and apparently can’t get enough of his new wife, professional duties abandoned. Which means taking a mix of lifts, autos, buses and metro rides that take the commute up to 3 hours of exhaustion one way and a very tired person with aching fever-in-the-bones-knees

One long commute that is 2 hours one way. Unless it rains in which case it goes up to 3 hours

One little girl to be admitted to a new school

One cook who is willing to cook for the maids but cooks absolute crap leaving takeaway as the only option

One flooding house and ruined furniture and carpets. Wooden flooring swollen and uneven and coming apart

One set of facilities to be shifted including gas, phone lines, billing address, bank work, locker…

One set of knees unable to move. Pain on a scale of 1 – 10? About 15.

One case of PCOS acting up and taking the body’s cycle haywire, so that I am now weak and anaemic with the blood loss (apologies Arun, Anand, Devakishor, Alok and the other men, I did try to keep this as polite as possible) resulting in black out and fainting spells. To say nothing of a pimply, oily face that would scare the life out of you if you encountered it in a dark alley at night

One travelling husband

All equals a complete breakdown and a few more blackouts where strangers took me home. So yes, I’m on a week’s leave. My doctor says my knees are degenerating really fast and there is no cure. Which means I will soon be chopped off at the knee and walking around on stumps. Not funny. I’m lying in bed, keeping me knees rested and just moving from room to room and instructing maids in the purest of Bengali on how to order and settle things. I have dug out my old laptop and typing on a tiny little keyboard is no fun so don’t expect to see too much of me.

The only bright side is that the kids are thrilled. They don’t realise I am sick and are thrilled to be able to get into bed with me, cuddle while it rains outside and play games and be read to. The only silver lining to this cloud. Frankly the more I think about it I realise that God sometimes does what is best for you in His wisdom. The only way to take me off my feet and make me rest, was to literally take my legs away from me. Maybe this is time to take stock of my life and slow down.

Stay  well you all.