The Pihu Diary: Keeping up with the Expectations

If you have a child way past preschool which means you are very much into the hustle and bustle of motherhood, you’d like to think you have at least mastered some of the elements that make up the art of good parenting. Let’s face it: we live in a world where mothers are no longer just that and are probably juggling multiple roles as a seasoned professional, caretaker to elderly parents, super-efficient homemaker and a highly supportive wife to an equally multitasking husband. This means we are 24/7 at the mercy of a practical formula where work has to be distributed, delegated and disciplined. Pardon the alliteration but we do not live in an ideal world and Murphy’s law almost always swings positive in a mother’s case. So if your child is so much as sniffling, chances are she will come up with a fever the next day and you will bunk work because she is at home. If you have that important meeting the next morning, of course your husband will not be able to drop the children to school that very day and just when you want to give some time to your child’s study before dinner, your food processor will choose to call it a day.

If our lives weren’t so challenging by themselves, we have a cluster of people surrounding us who obviously always mean well but have a bundle of expectations to saddle on to our already bending backs. Here are my most popular gems:

So have you enrolled your child in gymnastics, aerobics, contemporary/classical dance, foreign language classes, swimming, singing, football, cricket, no? And God forbid if you do in all of them, you are a compulsive pushy parent who is crushing her child under the weight of all that ambition, some of them means you are never doing enough and if you don’t do any, you might as well disqualify yourself as an able parent.

Once you have done the good deed of signing up your child in a respectable size of extracurricular activities, who is going to drive her around? Of course, you darling. So if you don’t know your accelerator from your gear, which century were you born in mate?

Birthdays, how can we forget this one. So if you haven’t planned a theme party to go with the celebrations, what were you thinking and does that mean you can’t afford one or you just don’t care enough to know what your child’s favourite animation character is? Duh, loser.

And while we are on birthdays, are you one of those negligent and couldn’t-care-less lazy mommies who buy cake from a bakery for their child’s birthday? So basically your daughter’s cake isn’t homemade? Whaaaat? No baking skills? Awww, that poor, poor baby! Eating cookie-cutter, branded, baked, fluffed up, inorganic trash in the name of a cake.

Are you bilingual? Because by the time your child can say “hungry” she better know how to say it in both languages and whatever else they are teaching in school. And if you have multilingual roots as parents, hahahaha! Multiply that by 3,4….and I pity you. That is why you should have just stuck to your roots and married within your religion, community and linguistic borders like Molly Aunty suggested.

The most popular as my mommy pals suggest is checking on milestones. This one is of course centuries old. So if your child hasn’t started teething, been toilet trained and been able to recite the national anthem by 3, are you sure you took enough vitamins and almonds and did the right breathing exercises or whatever it takes to achieve above-mentioned feats?

And before I end this tirade, how can I end this post without mentioning the Malaika Aroras, Kareena Kapoors, Jessica Albas and Beyonces of the world. Yes, they all have kids and look at those hour-glass figures my friend. Never mind if you never had it even before motherhood. That love handle in the middle and those thunder thighs aren’t really going well with the shift dress that is rebelling against your bottom post childbirth. So if you haven’t found the ‘fat exit’ button in good old power yoga, zany zumba or the gym, well, what are you waiting for- the next lunar eclipse?

I know, I am back to my ranting ways but hey, don’t blame me. I am a full-time mother in COVID-19 times, home-schooling a child who believes I can play the role of a full-time teacher apart from all the other things I am trying hard to keep up with. Of course, the teachers have a swell job at this time, enjoying a pupil-free stint while we scramble to ensure our kids don’t lose a precious year. Arrrgh fine. I know no one wished this on themselves but how about reducing the syllabus by half considering that parents cannot be teachers and considering teachers are often parents themselves? Oh wait…I just realised my child is in kindergarten. Oh-my-God.

The Pihu Diary: Introducing the Part-time Permanent Parent

Do you have a full-time job? Do you have children? Do they go to child-care for more than four days a week? Are you able to spend a full 24/7 period with your child only on weekends? Congratulations! You have just won a job to become a Part-time Permanent Parent!

What this means is that your child obviously belongs to you and stays with you and hence you are his permanent guardian and sponsor. However, this also means during the active hours of the day (between 7 am to 7 pm) your child is mostly in the care of a person who is not related to him and is most likely a professional caregiver. Usually this means that the child is bonding with this person and is mostly going to pick up his early learning when it comes to his mental, emotional, physical, verbal and social development from this person/these people. Considering this is a paid service that the professional caregiver is offering to your child, there are chances the person will have a very mechanical, enforced, regimented and disciplined approach to your child’s nurturing. The care given will be holistic and healthy in most cases but will also be impersonal and standardised leaving very little room for customised attention or approach since each child is different.

No matter how advanced and altruistic a childcare service is, it has the humongous task of nurturing your child multiplied by 22 (for children of preschool age for example). Imagine where you can barely handle one or two of your own, a maximum of two-three professional caregivers are saddled with the responsibility of supervising and caring for over 20 such children. How much individual attention can therefore be expected to be given to each child? How much time do you think will be invested in understanding and responding to each child’s needs? And how far do you think the child will be able to solidify his bond with that caregiver given that he will move up a class every year and will be introduced to new people every time this happens?

So who’s side am I on: having been on both sides of the road I now know what it feels like being a parent with a child in daycare and how it is for professional caregivers who take care of my child at daycare. In my studies in Early Childhood Education and Care, I have seen all kinds of parents and teachers and can vouch for the fact that mostly, both parties have the child’s best interests in mind when they keep children in daycare. However, when children as vulnerable as 6 months of age are sent to childcare, it means we are placing them in an environment that is not natural to their upbringing. It is an environment where at least 4 others of their age will be vying for the caregiver’s attention and children can be a dollop of disaster waiting to happen if neglected for even a minute. I empathise with every caregiver who is therefore responsible for children in daycare. Knowing that they can never take the place of a parent in the child’s eyes, they still have to relentlessly pursue the role of being a parent/teacher/caregiver in the child’s life, for a significant period of time knowing that the child may never recognise them when they grow up. It is a job which can influence and change a child’s personality for the better or worse but one that is barely acknowledged by those who have built this system or the ones who benefit from it. So pardon them if this is a thankless job they are clinically pursuing most of the time.

On the other hand, parents and especially mothers these days are bound by their educational qualifications, professional aspirations, economic circumstances, social expectations and a liberal government who wants more taxpayers to go out there and do a job. We women take it upon ourselves to balance the heavy weight of running the house as well as the workplace, uncompromising as both may be in their demands of us. Most of us resent the role but also know there is no other way of doing it. Feminists would have us believe that we are not justifying our identity if we do not share the world stage with men and conventional wisdom will not leave us in peace until we ensure our children’s comfort and wellbeing. So I am not here to judge a parent who is trying to pull all the strings at the same time and deflate her efforts at being worthless if she is not a completely devoted mother. My earlier barrage of questions however is just a way to make us realise that this is not an ideal situation that we have carved for our children and they are most likely the innocent recipients of this modernised urban caregiving system.

Most children from the time they are born will always want to spend more time with their parents than in childcare and the best place where a child from 6 months to 2 years belongs is home. A childcare service simply tries to be the best alternative to home but can never replace it. A woman who therefore chooses to stay at home and look after her child is simply fulfilling her responsibility as a parent because she consciously chose that role for herself. There should be no guilt or demand made to force herself to go out and work. She should have the freedom of choice to decide which role she prefers to take on without being judged. As an educated woman who has been a working professional for the best years of her life, I am often questioned for taking a three-year break from it all to take care of my child. This came from well-meaning relatives, neighbours, friends, ex-colleagues and even those who interviewed me for a job after I wished to get back.

In all of this, we should not forget that the child we bring in to this world is not a puppet and deserves more respect and worth than what a part-time, permanent parent can afford. We are already robbing that child of his time at home and with us when we send him to childcare. Being brought up in a home where a mother figure was a constant and the rock around which the whole house functioned smoothly has made me realise how important it is to give a wholesome, personalised and unconditionally supported upbringing to one’s child. When we choose to not give a child that time and support, we already ‘compromise’ his upbringing and question his worth. This puts additional responsibility on us to shine as the permanent parent figure in whatever little time we spend with the child. So don’t hesitate to ask yourself, “Am I doing enough for the child simply by spending heaps of money on him and providing him all the material comforts of the world- read expensive holidays, a shop’s load of toys and splurging on Sunday treats, clothes and extra-curricular classes? How often do I hold the child and comfort him? How often do I sit and enjoy some interactive activity with him? How many times do I have a conversation with him, yes, even when he is an infant? How many times do I put him to sleep holding his hand long after he has closed his eyes? How many times do I motivate him to get up and try again when he fails at something? How often do I sit or lie down in the grass at the park with him and look up at the sky?”

As a parent, whether full-time or part-time, we owe our children much more because they deserve it and because we chose to bring them in to this world.

If your child puts his arms around you to say,

“I love you, you make my day,”

toast yourself with a glass of wine

because it means, you are doing just fine. 

The Auscillating Indian: Why you need to hold your ‘Mother’ Tongue!

The fun part about moving to a new country is how you suddenly seem to be thrown in to a multicultural melting pot. So you are neighbour to a Chinese person, your colleagues are Australian, Japanese, Korean, Phillipino, Samoan, British and Bangladeshi, while you can dig in to a new cuisine every time you hit the restaurants with authentic chefs dishing up a recipe with flair. This often brings your language abilities to the test because here it’s not about speaking English fluently but also understanding accents, observing cultural sensitivity and closing the gaps in communication with people for whom English might be a second language. I find it amusing how we Indians are always so keen to prove our English language speaking skills to every foreigner we meet when in countries like Germany and France, locals will probably snub you for speaking in English and not their native language. Unlike people from other nationalities, we don’t take enough pride in mastering our identity and are a bit too eager to embrace the ‘western’. Alas, we have paid a very high price for this mass adoption.

In spite of Indians speaking in 19,500 languages and dialects as mother tongues, the emphasis on English as the language of administration, educational progress and professional, economic and social status, has meant that we have largely cold-shouldered our origins. We millennials can barely decipher literature written in our mother tongues anymore, most parents and children insist on speaking English at home meaning that even verbal language skills are slowly becoming defunct. Precisely the reason I have immense respect for those who are genuinely making an effort to preserve their rich linguistic heritage through cinema, art, culture, heirlooms, literature and education. I remember being taunted for taking up Hindi and not opting for the more sophisticated French as a second language option in college at St.Xavier’s, Mumbai. I admire people who speak a foreign language but often, it becomes a criterion for judging how ‘cool’ or ‘accomplished’ you are. In my office in Delhi, there were two distinct groups that hung out together, the English-speaking and the non-English speaking ones. I once invited people from both groups to a party at my place and it was hilarious how they all ended up drunk and dancing to cheesy Hindi item numbers and thumping Bhangra beats together! So if language can tear people apart, it also has the power to bring people together.

If I were to claim I am a linguistic expert in Maithili you’d wonder which planet I am from. Maithili, what’s that again? Thankfully, my parents insisted on us speaking in our native languages at home so my sister and me were already speaking two languages before we joined kindergarten. When my cousin brother in Nagpur, Maharashtra graduated in Pali literature, no one in the family raised an eyebrow. So yes, as a mother it is imperative that I pass on the wealth of language diversity in my family to my children, in the hope that they can carry on the tradition.

Here in Australia, when someone generally comments on how much language diversity he sees in my motherland, it makes me proud but also reminds me with a sense of guilt how I stutter every time I have to read the Bengali script even though it’s my mother tongue. Or how my Marathi has got stilted ever since I moved up to north India after marriage, being out of touch with people who speak it every day. And when it comes to writing in these languages? I am sorry, is that even needed these days?

Truth be told, I love English, a passion developed and nurtured through reading countless books in the language since I learnt to read. Blame it on my English-medium ‘Convent upbringing’ but I went on to graduate in English literature and realised very early in the day that, even my thoughts originate in the language. It has helped me find my voice in the professional sphere of journalism today and I will be eternally grateful to it for ensuring that I can seamlessly carry forward my skills to any English-speaking country.

Does this mean I wave goodbye to my roots? NO! We can still be Indian and very much preserve our traditions while on foreign shores. Bilingual citizens are more proficient and score higher on intellect, acceptance of diversity in the workplace and communication. I continue to devour films in all regional Indian languages, spreading the net to encompass songs that I love irrespective of what language they are worded in. As an NRI, I regularly attend multicultural events, speak to fellow Indians in native languages and insist on correcting my child’s pronunciation every time she may stutter on a word.

Up on my wish list is learning one more Indian and one foreign language, may be even post retirement as learning a new language is fodder for the brain and a way of exercising those grey cells. Why stop at speaking four, reading and writing in three and listening to twelve? Thanks to my linguistic skills, I can speak to a Bangladeshi in Bengali and converse with a North Indian in Hindi even in a foreign land. It cements your relations by bringing you closer to other people, while sharing an immediate fellowship, lending a whiff of intimacy and confidentiality to your banter. So next time you walk up to a person whose mother tongue you know you can speak, try replying back in the same. It won’t bring your economic or social status down a few notches, but it will win you more smiles, warmth and genuine friendships than you may realise.