2005
The twins are born preterm.
This means I have to alter sleeping patterns, translating as no sleep at all. At 10, it is right breast for Baby 1 and left breast for Baby 2; at 12, it is left breast for Baby 1 and right breast for Baby 2, ad nauseam.
For company I have a helper, a lady who needs her TEN hours of sleep, so she sleeps in the hallway. “Can’t take the cold fan you turn on,” she says even when it is really hot.
When babies are sleeping preemies, they do little. I have to pinch them hard to get them to wake up and feed. Ambition, an unlikely accomplice, floods me. I can work now. These kids don’t really need me right now. Look at them godly and innocent, comfortable in anyone’s embrace.
So I start writing.
2007
You are not the same person mom concludes with her usual I’m your mother and so I know everything about you look. She says this a lot these days on the phone, on the web cam, when I meet her in person, when she comes over, jet lagged and unchanged by being away from home.
Since I believe her, I think about what is responsible for this earth-shaking change in the alpha to omega of my personality. My twin boys? Every like and dislike within me has been rewired. They have touched that trigger mechanism in my genes that makes me prefer tandoori to pasta and chicken to fish. Red my favourite colour goes blue. Malls, the favourite haunt, turn parks.
The twin boys are two and a half. Motherhood has started working on my personality. In the beginning, I liked being post pregnant, especially taking the special oil bath, part of the therapeutic post pregnancy spa treatment. Later when I came home, changes started seeping in slowly and gently, the way the moon pulls and pushes the tide back and forth.
When you are alone in a city with four eyes looking at you, you start questioning everything you know or thought you knew. I know about books but books are no real help with crying, potty training, disciplining the mind, cooking the right amount of food at the right time, creating a stress-free environment (even though kids can be responsible for the once in a while tearing-your-hair feeling). What do they teach us in schools anyway?
My two godly individuals can bring out the Satan-inspired bottled up round-eyed Edvard Munchian hollow desolate scream. Sometimes. One must count one’s blessings. You have two, no reason to complain. God is kind. Of course, I have my sentimental blessed teary-eyed moments when I watch them play and share and communicate, as the sun’s rays create shiny soft haloes around their little heads.
However, when they fight, I observe the animal instinct barking, fluttering, neighing, mooing, tearing, clawing—the zoo gates open and the animal arising in us all. We are divided 1:1:1. No one on anyone’s side. Baby 1 wants to bite Baby 2 for taking his potato (this is a fact). Baby 2 has the concept of revenge all charted out. Myself—I want to be free.
No time for the potato. I do not need the potato unless I want to make one of those sour sweet curries again. So the old adolescent uncontrolled volcanic anger erupts, my face contorted, and I yell: It’s always about you, the boys who have bad tempers. The twins are now united. They hit me with all the spoons, blocks and books they can lay their little fingers on.
Defeats lead to revelation. I begin to deconstruct motherhood—a natural instinct like the milk that floods the breasts. Have I changed at all? Self-doubt settles in my bones.
One night Baby 2 is down with the flu. I only hear an imperceptible whine. As my motherly genes perfect themselves, my husband’s paternal instincts are on the decay. I wake up just like that, get Baby 2 his medicines and heated water, croon a tune at two in the morning.
It isn’t like me to sing at two in the morning. I can’t even think at two in the morning. And now suddenly, I notice how the motherly genes are functioning without rebellion. That’s the great motherhood feeling, isn’t it? Ceasing to exist and you, you, you diminishing into your children.
I hadn’t noticed how gradually I was learning to get around the children’s problems. Instead of resorting to pushing all the panic buttons, I play a game. You have to outsmart your kids—put up the brave face when they are down. Be the reliable boss when they want you to be.
Mom is right then—I have changed down to every molecule; she must have been there, done that.
2012
The twins are chatterboxes: Mom what is sexy? Mom where did we come from? Mom where is God? Mom I hate you. Mom your cheeks are so soft.
I start and end most conversations with them by asking the staple question, as staple as rice can be a staple part of my diet—‘Did you do your homework?’
Most of the time, I get a disappearing act as response or maybe a full-blown tantrum that did create a bit of hair fall at one point. Then there are the calls from school with words of wisdom like Children crave routine, give it to them.
This part of my metamorphosis is called going philosopher—I have a solution for everything. When a child throws a tantrum…, When a child wants junk food…, When twins are gaming too much…,etc.
What I have understood (see the philosopher in me is craning her neck?) is that the lessons I learn now will have to be rewritten for the year 2015 (that’s another diary entry for you) and then again for 2018. Being a mom is about going to school all over again, doing your homework every day to battle new challenges, and coming up with easy solutions that could maybe help other moms in crises.
Everyone is good enough if they care to keep learning and relearning. Metamorphose every day and you grow with your kids.
- Neelima Vinod
The writer’s first book ‘Unsettled’ has been published by Indireads. Follow her on twitter @neelthemuse or on her facebookpage: https://www.facebook.com/neelimavinod
