How I got cornered

I consider myself to be a fairly smart mother. I have enough life experiences to kind of figure out what my children are up to most of the time. But then again my children have learned the fine art of cornering me without me even realizing it.

I was taking my kids for swimming this evening and was stuck in the after school traffic jam. My daughter ( Yaya) very nicely asked me if dancing is considered a sport?
I didn’t waste too much time thinking about it. I was busy concentrating on the road. Besides I had this visual image of ice skaters competing and I told her yes, dancing is a sport.

At the pool it was time to decide if Yaya wanted to train for Quad as she has completed the swim levels. She informed me that she wasn’t going to continue with swimming.
We have 2 family rules that are enforced very strictly
1. They will join one sport ( minimum) and my kids chose Swimming.
2 If anyone wanted to do quit a sport they joined, they can only do so after a year.

I reminded her about the one sport rule and the one year rule.
She looked straight in to my eyes and said
“Mama, I finished all the swim levels and I want to join a dance class now”
And I asked her
“Since when did dance became a sport?”
She gave me that smile.
And I knew I lost!
( And I hate to lose)

The trobule with Everybody

My mother not only had 4 daughters, but also an entity called everybody. We always had to do what everybody did, irrelevant if we wanted or not.
Everybody mattered.
Perhaps it was her obsession with everybody that made me such a rebel, to an extent that I don’t care what everybody thinks/does/wants etc.

Yesterday was our garbage collection day. I am extremely particular about recycling and coupled with the fact that the city only collects recycling bin every alternate weeks means that my recycling bin is always full.
But my mother found perfect solution. She dumped all the Newspaper in to the normal bin saying that everybody does it. I tried telling her that I don’t care what everybody does, but things like Newspaper that can be perfectly recycled will go in to the recycle bin. If the bin is full, we will keep the newspaper for the next round.
She then had the audacity to tell me that I am weird! and I have lost my marbles. She doesn’t see why I should bother about such trivial things when everybody doesn’t bother.
I don’t know when she will understand that I am not like everybody. I am me.

My son went to school without saying bye to me.

He woke up angry. He was mad at me for every little thing from the time he woke up. I did try to make him calm down. But nothing worked. The more I tried, the angrier he became. Then I thought I would leave him alone, that made him even more angrier because he felt I was ignoring him.

It is quiet possible that I will have to meet with the principal some time this afternoon. ( Every time he has this anger moods, he usually does something that gets him in to trouble.)

i wish I know what makes my child so angry.
I wish I know how to help my child.

I was reading an article about gifted children this morning and found that kids like him have

Intellectual traits
Exceptional reasoning ability
Intellectual curiosity
Rapid learning rate
Facility for abstraction
Complex thought processes
Vivid imagination
Early moral concern
Passion for learning
Powers of concentration
Analytical thinking
Divergent thinking/creativity
Keen sense of justice
Capacity for reflection

Personality traits
Insightful
Need to understand
Need for mental stimulation
Perfectionism
Need for precision/logic
Excellent sense of humour
Sensitivity/empathy
Intensity
Perseverance
Acute self-awareness
Nonconformity
Questioning rules/authority
Tendency to introversion
(Silverman, 1993, p. 53)

Negative traits
• stubbornness
• non-participation in class activities
• uncooperativeness
• cynicism
• sloppiness and disorganisation
• a tendency to question authority
• emotional frustration
• absentmindedness
• low interest in detail.

He has all of the negative traits, every single one of them.
How do I raise him?
I don’t know.

139

My son did the WISC-IV few weeks ago.
I got the report yesterday.
I guess I was afraid what the report might be and delayed getting the report till yesterday. I do that often. ( Closing me eyes and think that problem will go away).
After going through the challenges of raising Yaya, perhaps a part of me hoped that my son would be “Normal”.
Then I feel guilty for thinking like that when most parents want a smart child.

His IQ is 139.

I am happy for him. At the same time I am terrified, because my child is a loner. He keeps his friends at bay. He doesn’t compete with anyone else. (He competes with himself). He hates it when he is wrong. He gets in to trouble at school often because he questions authority. He goes through guilt conscience, sometimes over things that happened 5 – 6 years ago.
I am terrified because most children like him can go off tangent in a split second.
Every day is a struggle between persistence-perseverance and perfection. Add obsession to it and you have a nightmare in your hands.

I didn’t tell him about the results.
First of all I don’t believe in IQ tests. The school wanted the tests done so they could prepare an IEP. ( Individual Education Plan). He really needed an IEP ( he didn’t want to go to school because he was bored and he was being very rude to his teacher)was so I agreed for the tests.

I didn’t tell him about the result because knowing his IQ level is not going to improve his life right now.

Motherhood is not easy.

I am so horrible

When I became a mother, I felt I was at the top of the world. I wanted someone to love and cherish, that someone I can call ‘mine’.
At the same time I also knew that I didn’t want myself to be anything like my own mother.
I was going to be different.
I was going to raise my children differently from how I was raised.
I was going to be there for my children.
And I knew I will protect my children, come what may.

But life doesn’t come with an erase button. Neither there is an undo button.
I am still my mother’s daughter.
Today I lied to my son. And I have always told my children that I will not tolerate them lying to me. I have always told them that, it is not that they lied that would anger me, it is that from now on I wouldn’t be able to trust them.
Yet I had no qualms lying to my son blatantly.
Amma used to snoop around my stuff when I was growing up, even coming to my medical college hostel when I was at the hospital and going through all my mails. She even perfected the fool proof way to open a letter without me knowing. She snipped the side with a sharp scissors, took the letter out, read it and then put it back and seal the edge with glue. When I get the mail, I never notice the difference.The only way I found out was once she used a cheap glue and the edges didn’t stick, so when I was putting the letter back, it came out through the other end.

I have been wanting to know who is my son’s latest crush. He wouldn’t tell me and I decided to check his email.
Why I did that, I don’t know.
I shouldn’t have.
But I did.
Unfortunately my son checked the log and noticed that someone accessed his email when he wasn’t home and asked me if I opened his email.
I should have said Yes
But I didn’t
I lied.
I am horrible

House Exchange, Brisbane. Australia

I am trying to organize our Christmas vacation.
I don’t want to stay in Brisbane during December. (it is too hot for me and I haven’t yet got myself adjusted to cooking Christmas dinner on a BBQ!)
So here is the deal
4 bedroom house, fully furnished in Brisbane. .
I would like to do house swap for the month of December.
What have you got?
Do mail me.

I want to die !!!!!

Really.
All that I did was to answer Yaya’s question as to what specifics in a guy that I consider ‘hot’
and I replied that
He needs to be tall and have sharp features, like Mr.Z, your PE teacher!
My little one must have overheard me.
She went and told Mr. Z that my mom thinks you are hot.
How am I ever going to face Mr.Z?

This is crazy

I have a list of places I want to visit. I have been having them for years. I go through the list often and make sure that we visit one place in my list each year.
I suffer from a serious case of dromomania and have just come back after a 2000KM camping trip driving to the northern region of QLD. I am digressing here.
I travelled 2000km in the hope of seeing a Kangaroo and may be a Koala.
I have been here for almost 9 months and have only seen roadkills, not a single live kangaroo. Even as a kid I knew Australia is a land of kangaroos and thought it really is pathetic not seeing a live kangaroo.
So we went up the Bunya mountains where we saw Wallabies, down to Berembah from there to Murgoon and then to Gladstone and back to Brisbane. 2000km
Not a single kangaroo.
Not a single Koala.
Kids had a good time, so did I
Back to the issue that is troubling me
I won a 3000$ travel voucher few months ago.
By right I should know what to do with it.
But I don’t
I want to make full use of the 3K
Where can I go that will bring that cute smile on my childrens face.

The spirit of freecycling

Now that the summer is long gone, I thought I will go through the kids shoes and throw away the ones that are damaged.
My kids have an uncanny ability to destroy shoes and I am so tempted to tell them how I wore the same sandal for two years ( Remember the one I was so sick of wearing and sliced the strap with the blade and Amma melted the edge and stuck it back!!). I don’t tell them because I know exactly what they will tell me.

Amma was watching me.

In the end when I bundled them all in to a grocery bag, so I could throw them in the garbage bin.
Amma asked me
money ! Why don’t you place an ad in the freecycle? Won’t people come and pick up stuff?”

I don’t know what makes people like my mother think that someone else would want the stuff we ourselves can no longer use.
I remember my mother so generously giving our ‘old’ clothes to a beggar family that came to our house one Sunday afternoon. Later that evening I followed Amma to the flour mill and on the way we saw all our clothes being dumped by the side of the road. Even the beggars didn’t want them!
( And by the way, Amma really wanted to pick up those clothes,so she could give them to someone who would appreciate it!!!)