I worry constantly about not being a good mother or being responsive to my children's needs in time . I know I get hysterical if anything troubles them and I get mad when they run to AG when they are in deep trouble and not to me because he represents solid security to them . I am bipolar - swinging between deep discipline and fun .
But yes , overall , motherhood has seemed to make me a complete person in terms of being more perceptive to emotions and feelings , I am more intuitive .I have never for a minute regretted putting them foremost and everything else on the back burner . I have learnt to look beyond myself and taking their opinions into consideration . Today Srin is an adult and I have complete faith in her sensibilities . Tani still has a long way to go but her levels of intuitiveness amazes me It has also been important create a bonding between them and me and encourage openness .
My feelings about being a mother range from the mundane to the poetic , from cuddling the babies and singing "Hello Sunshine , hello leaf ,hello flower, hello , hello " - and having the satisfaction of huge baby eyes looking solemnly at me as I nattered on , to pressing my ear close to Tani's chest to check whether her breathing was vacillating wildly towards an asthmatic attack for the nth time , to despairing as to whether she would actually ever talk , to wiping cacky bums and mopping up puke, to holding hands and listening to teenage confidences and wiping tears and handholding over rough patches - and stifling homicidal instincts at the perpetrator of those tears .
Therefore ,to actually pin down 5 points is extremely difficult . But anyway here goes :-
- Approaching delivery was scary but at the end of a short labour when I held Srin, smeared wet with my bodily fluids and shivering in the January cold , close to my breast ,she looked up at me with slanting eyes of a pure Byzantine mosaic green , like her father's and grabbed my thumb with slimy fingers , I knew a love that makes me cry every time I think of it. Tani was a miracle baby because I was desperate to have another child and she was conceived after a shattering miscarriage and I came close to losing her because of physical problems . So holding her a day after she was born reinforced those feelings all over again .
- Being a mother is a constant challenge . Children are very intelligent and I love the battle of wits where we try to see how much Ma knows and how much slack she's likely to give .
- Both my children are very different from each other .Over the years I have learnt to handle both of them in diverse ways without comparing them . Srin is a compulsive bookworm but Tani was always too lazy to go thru the entire book - it was always that much easier to read the beginning and end or listen to my stories. I have loved the constant stoking of my imagination that Tani prompted when she was smaller and I wish I had written them down! Srin has had it easy but everything Tani achieves is like a milestone . But somewhere there is a common strain that runs through both of them and it never ceases to amaze me as to how similar they actually are .
- I love seeing the world through my children's eyes . It has kept up this yearning for constant learning in me . I love being around Srin and Tani's friends and they make me feel younger than my fifty years .
- I love my unit of 4 as AG calls it . It was a struggle in the early years but now that we have grown up along the years - we have our understandings , our lessons in values and morals , our jokes and our nuttiness . I love it when the girls gang up against me - I love it when they pamper me because through all this I can sense that to these two girls I am a rock and I am never going to let them down.
I am tagging Onedia ,Mystic Margarita & Sandeepa , both in the USA, Susan in Kerala , and The Muser , also from the USA. Oh and I cannot resist adding Mrs T from the UK - would love to read her take on this .
Happy tagging ladies .
