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Motherly Musings - Sunanda Vashisht Sunanda Vashisht Sunanda Vashisht was born in the beautiful valley of Kashmir, India when Kashmir was known for its unparalleled natural beauty and not as a cauldron of fear and terror. She did most of her schooling in Delhi and dabbled with several professions before moving to U.S last year. she is currently pursuing higher studies here. she likes to introduce herself as an explorer because she wants to spend all her time in this world exploring unknown. Writing for her is a cathartic experience. She can't remember when she began writing first but she does know that writing has always helped her to be at peace with herself and with the world around her.

My daughter, Meera, turned one recently. She officially moved from babyhood to toddlerhood, an important milestone for her. As she moves from baby food to adult food and formula to cow’s milk and starts interacting more and more like Homo sapiens, the species she actually belongs to (sometimes you wonder about their species when they are tiny babies), she is doing great, but I can’t say the same for myself. Now as I walk through baby food and formula aisles in grocery stores and don’t turn my cart my heart skips a beat. I reluctantly let my child grow. My friends say I am crazy but it is hard to pack those faded, out grown pile of clothes in a box and put it out of sight or worse donate it. .

I must confess that I haven’t enjoy every moment of my motherhood. Far from so. Motherhood really brings the best and the worst in you. And here I was pitted against a baby who was thrown out of nursery when she was less than 24 hours old, because she was screaming as the nurse had committed an unpardonable sin of taking her out of the only rocking cradle in the nursery because it another baby’s turn. She screamed really loud and made sure she woke other newborn babies who were still learning to open their eyes. When the nurse brought her to me and started complaining her dad and I were really proud of her. The first step begins from knowing your mind and making sure everyone else does too. However soon I realized the hardships of being a mom to such a child.

One such watershed night is really vivid in my memory just after Meera was born. . It was 4 a.m.. My eyes ached from fatigue and I prayed, really prayed that she would go to sleep. Sure enough as I nursed her back to sleep and tried to lower her in her crib she would begin to wail and I would have to start the process all over again. I remember feeling terribly sorry for myself in the 4 a.m. darkness and wondering why I had done this to myself. All I wanted at that moment was not to be fat, not to be married, not to have to put a child to sleep, and not to be grown up. I really wished to be back with my mother, dressed in skinny Lycra black dress and staying up to 4 a.m. but on purpose. However one thing that motherhood does teach you is that now there is no going back and henceforth, the challenges become bigger and bigger and you start becoming smaller and smaller trying to overcome them.

It also teaches you that although you might not know it then but every mother is a winner in a game. Maybe I am being hopelessly sappy to be this sad about her transition but being a parent really does change you in many ways. My good friend Sagarika has a daughter, Anoushka, two months older than Meera. Our friendship goes back to many many years. There was a time when our conversations would be about profound topics like existentialism or neo-realism. For entertainment we discussed Tom Cruise’s latest hot affair or Sharukh Khan’s acting skills or lack of them, but now all our conversations are about our babies.

‘Have you been noticing Anoushka’s bowel movements lately’ I asked her one early morning very earnestly. The reason I am saying so, I continued was because Meera has been having these yellowish, greyish, greenish weird colorish bowels and I was wondering if that’s normal"

Sagarika is always one step ahead of me when it comes to baby stuff. She said very confidently that she had been reading Dr. Spock about the bowel movements and it is pretty normal for babies of their age. I was relieved and thankful both to Sagarika and to Dr. Spock. Gone are the days when I would challenge my thought process by reading James Joyce and Salman Rushdie, now my library boasts of Dr. Spock and What to expect when expecting and to what to expect in first year and all other what to expect series.

Despite all this I am feeling sad about Meera leaving her baby days behind her. Sounds strange. But I guess that is what parenthood is all about. You give everything you have and more and expect nothing in turn. Because every time Meera smiles I melt and everytime she says ‘Papa’ her dad gives into all her demands. So it looks like Meera is the winner all along.

When I was a little girl my dad would often tell me that I was an extension of him. As a child I neither understood what he meant nor cared to really understand. But today when I look at Meera, I know exactly what he meant. Our children are nothing but extension of us and we dream through their eyes.

Till we connect again...

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