Away until Monday.

Posting my current favourite song..

Hope you all will have a great weekend..

Adios

S

That is growing old gracefully.

I know my blog posts  always have something about my mother. It isn’t intentional, but that being said, I have gone through half of my life with my mother and have many issues that I need to deal with, so I won’t turn up like her.

One such issue was Amma’s fear of growing old. My mother started dyeing her hair when I was 10 years old. Initially she used a comb that had hair dye on it. Her hair looked like it was painted with matt black paint. Because she was always in a hurry and was not careful, she always had bits of hair dye on her forehead.  My mother Is very pretty, but with all the goshti  she was fond of doing, she looked horrible ( cream blouse with all her sarees, rat tail hair tied with thiruppan (false hair) in to a weird knot that she thought showed everyone that she has ‘thick’ hair, badly cracked heel adorned with bata slippers completed the picture).

I still have weigh the same weight I was  20 years ago.and am always impeccably dressed. I promised myself that I will never dress like my mother and that I will  grow old gracefully. Unfortunately, though I have the figure of a 20 year old, my hair is that of a  50 years old. The grey hair seems to have won the war and I look like an old crone. I love to style my hair in to a punk hair style ( lots and lots of hair gel, but the looks I get from Indian crowd is worth it) in the weekend and my hair was a really sad sight. There was only one solution to my problem. Hair Dye.

I thought I would start with Henna. My neighbour in Bangalore was an old Sindhi woman who loved using henna on her hair,  and her hair was orange colour !  I didn’t want my hair to be like hers. After a lot of trial and error to get a perfect shade, I finally found the recipe to perfect Henna colour.I use the natural henna (without PPD), mix it with a bit of water and few drops of eucalyptus oil ( essential oils are rich in Terpenes and react with the hennotannic acid in Henna to release the dye) in an old rusted cake tin, keep it aside for a day and then apply it on my hair. Wash after 3 hours using shampoo and then apply conditioner. I repeat the process every 2 weeks. I get a lovely shade of copper to dark brown and my hair looks like I have gone to a salon to apply highlight. I do not use tea/coffee/lemon juice etc in the henna mix.

So, yes I am still growing old gracefully.. albeit with highlights in my hair..

When Yaya was in grade 3, one evening, She came running to me when I went to pick her up from school, holding a piece of paper in hand ” Mom, I got 49 out of 50 for maths”

Without thinking, I asked her “Why only 49? What mistake did you make? Did anyone else get 50?”

Have you ever watched the sky during a storm? Have you ever seen massive dark clouds fly straight over the sun and block it? In an instant the smile from my beautiful daughter’s face vanished and was replaced with a ugly frown and I realized I am turning out to be a typical Indian mom. What surprised me even more is the fact that I myself got plenty of mottas ( zero marks) and still expected perfect results from my child.

I realized that I made a huge mistake. What my child expected from me was something totally different. She wanted me to be happy that she did her best and accept that sometimes her best is 49/50, not 50/50. I also remembered my grandmother teaching me that there will always be someone better/smarter than me, just as there will always be someone not as smart as me.

It is very tempting to ask each time when my children tell me how many marks they got for the exams, Did anyone else get the same/better score? But I don’t, because my children are my pride and joy, I am happy for what they achieve and my joy  is not related  to someone else’s achievement.

Now that the older two are in high school and a lot of their projects are group work, I get to meet a lot of other parents. Parenting is a very competitive industry and often my children are used as a yardstick by other parents. Mother of one of my son’s classmate asked me recently what grade my son for the Science assignment. He got an A+. She said ” You know what, my son got a B and I was so mad at him and asked him “Are you kidding me?” And in the next sentence she said ” He did his assignment in the last minute and I didn’t have time to read it and correct it, I think that is the reason why he got a B”

I know there is no point trying to explain to her that my children do not always get an A. My son got a B for history in grade 7, Yaya got a C for history in grade 9. I am sure both of them got few other B’s over the years. Of course they are smart, but they are not perfect and I don’t expect a perfect score. I have not scolded them for getting a score less than A. What I expect from them is that they give their best in everything they do.

To this day, I haven’t edited any of their assignments. I won’t do it because it is not my assignment, it is theirs and if they don’t know to do it, then they better learn and do it. If I correct their work, then it is me who is writing it and it becomes my assignment. I don’t want them to get an A, because their mother is very smart, I want them to get an A, because they  took the time and effort to learn and did their work well..

Yaya’s assignments are all in Spanish, so I don’t get to read it even after  it is graded. My son will bring home the work he did and was corrected and graded each term before the term holidays and I go through them.. It is such a delight to read his assignments. I love the way he writes. Sometimes the teacher will not return the assignments because he/she wants to keep their work as a sample for the next batch and I will never get to see those assignments. My son finds my behaviour too intrusive if I asked for a copy of the work the teacher kept and we go on this merry go round “why do you want to read it? It is my assignment, what are you going to gain by reading what I wrote?”. so I stopped asking.

My point is this..Each child is unique. Your job as a parent is to encourage them, not to clone them to be a perfect child following others. And if you do follow others, accept that those children are also not perfect.

When my children were little, every Christmas and  their birthday, I used to pay and get my friends to send my children gifts purportedly from their grandmother ( my mother). I couldn’t change my mother and get a new one and I couldn’t bear to see the envy my children had whenever their friends showed them the gifts they got from their grandparents. How do I answer the question, “Mama, how come our grandmother never sends us a card/gift?” I wanted to be honest and tell them that unfortunately, they got the worst grandmother on planet earth. I just couldn’t tell them that, though that was nothing but the truth. So even though my sister younger to me called me a bitch in  front of my children, I lied and convinced my kids that No, she didn’t say bitch, she said Witch. I played this one sided drama hoping I could protect my children from harm inflicted by the members of my own family. To this day, I have never spoken evil about my family members in front of my children. I didn’t want my kids to judge them through my eyes. I may not get along with my mother and sisters, but that shouldn’t be a hindrance to my children having a relationship with my family.

My mother played this wonderful game called “always remember, you only have each other, your father’s side, everyone is like a ? palakkuru. ( I have never seen a palakkuru, apparently the seeds face opposite to each other, in other words no togetherness) Amma herself will instigate a fight, like the time I came back from Dubai after meeting my father. I had internal exam that day, so I didn’t have time to open my bag and give Amma the loot I got for my older sister. I told Amma very clearly that I will come back in the evening after my exams and give the stuff. Amma phoned my sister while I was away and together, they both went through my bag and took whatever caught their fancy, including stuff I bought for myself. I was just so mad when I came back to find that my sister took everything that I got and my mother showed such a sad face and told  me ” Pottey, saram illa, ninety chechy alley aval, ningalkku ningal mathremey ullu, ariyamallo, appanttey veettu kar palakkuru mathiri anenennu.. ( never mind, your sister taking all your stuff isn’t a big deal, after all she is your sister and you should never forget, how your father’s family don’t get along ) You need to be in my place at that moment to understand the unfairness of it all and how much I wanted to kill my mother for the way she did things. Was I not her child? Did I not tell her that I will come back and give chechy her stuff? The worst part is, my sister never ever had any relationship with us at that time and even then I didn’t forget that she is still my sister and even bought her a thermos lunch box, so she could take hot lunch to work.

Although I know for sure that my children only have me and each other in this world, I was determined not to play the same game Amma played. After Amma hid in the room on Yaya’s birthday and the way she was treating me, my children understood what my mother actually is capable of and I stopped sending gifts to them on my mother’s behalf. But, I still didn’t say a single bad word about my mother to them.

The past few weeks have been hectic here with the kids having their third term assignments and exams. General academic award is already decided ( you need 5 individual A’s for Yaya and 8 A’s for my son), but not the individual medal for the subjects. Three of Yaya’s classmates are fighting for the same medal and Yaya is one point ahead. Obviously she has to do the exams and assignments well and is under a lot of pressure. Last Friday, Yaya was very tired and crabby and was laying down on the couch to watch TV. My son came home with a bad flu and has 4 assignments to complete in the weekend. He too was very crabby. They decided to solve their crabbiness by having a territorial war.  How much space on the couch each is entitled was the issue. ( there are other places to sit in the living room.. an Ikea poang chair with foot stool, a day bed and a papasan swivel chair) Eventually it led to violence. I am very particular about physical fights. I don’t mind them arguing as much as they want to, but if I haven’t hit them even when they drove me nuts, then they shouldn’t be hitting/pinching/scratching each other. besides, only a fool will go and fight with a brother who is big and strong. My son pushed Yaya off the couch..and she scratched him. Both got 30 minutes corner time and no TV for the rest of the evening. But that wasn’t what bothered me. As Yaya went to sit in the corner, she said ” I hate my brother”

“Hate is such a big word Yaya” I replied.

“Like you could talk Mom, you hate your own family” she said.

What I wanted to do was to shake her so hard and tell her ‘you have no idea the years of abuse I have endured in my family for me to hate them, you only hate your brother because he is stronger than you and you are bitter because you lost the fight and ended up on the floor. Clearly, you are older and wiser and should have known he is stronger than you. All you had to do was to share the space on the couch, instead you claimed the couch is yours because you were the first to sit on it’

I am the adult here and I knew if I was going to get involved in this fight, it was only going to get worst. “what you said was uncalled for Yaya”. She wanted to continue with the argument, but I walked away.

Later that night, I shed bitter tears. I wished I was an orphan, at least I wouldn’t have had such a lousy family. In the morning, there was a card and apology letter on my dressing table from both of them. But the thing is, what Yaya said is true..but I just wish, it wasn’t so.

When I started my blog, Yaya was 7, Toothless was 5 and baby was 3. We lived in a small 2 bedroom basement suite in Vancouver. Now they are 15, 13 and 11 and we live in Brisbane. My journey from then to now is there in the blog and many of you have been with me from the time I started the blog.

They say people come to your life for a reason and stat for a season. Still there are people I have known through my blog and haven’t heard from them for a while.

First would be Starrynights. Her name is either Lalitha or Latha. Every time I read her comment on my blog, I felt a connection with her..Her last post on her blog was about a CT scan and she was hoping for a normal report and that was years ago. I keep thinking about her and wondering if she is alright.

Then there is Inji pennu..Most Mallu bloggers would know the trials and tribulations she had gone through as blogger.Then she vanished. For a brief period she had an English blog and there was an article about a college shooting ( probably Virginia Tech) and she mentioned how she looked at the list of dead to see if there were any Indians for which someone left a nasty comment saying so many kids died in that shooting and you worry about Indians ( something similar). The funny thing is, every time there is a  natural calamity or man made disaster, I always look for Indian names among the dead. It is an inherent behaviour that has no rationality whatsoever. And every single time I find myself doing that, I think about Inji pennu.

Anitha from my treasures, my pleasures. The one food blog that I love absolutely and I still go through her blog every now and then. I have even written to her cousin @ Marias menus asking about What happened to Anitha. So far no luck.

I hate going through my old blog posts. I already suffer with my amazing memory and if I read what I write, then I feel the pain even more. ( I know, I don’t make any sense). I can’t remember your name. You had a good grasp of English and you used to comment frequently in the first few years. You were the first to understand why I was very insecure when it came to my English grammar and spelling and you actually wrote a comment about that.

Then there was Jiby, dew drops, thanu’s rambling, Nilu, Dhanush, Q8techdrive, YASJ, Visithra. Except for Nilu, no idea where the rest have gone..

But you are all thought of fondly and it was a pleasure knowing all of you. Do drop a line if you are still reading my blog. daofto at gmail dot com.

I am looking forward to spending my first weekend without any basketball games…Imagine beautiful Spring days..clear blue skies, garden in full bloom.(.My Chinese star jasmine is so full of flowers that you can hardly see the leaves) a trip to the beach, few good books and few bottles of red.. It is all good.

Wishing you all a great weekend..

There was a group of guys named Daddy 1, daddy 2 etc in the medical college. They have been studying medicine for a while and are considerably older than the ‘normal’ students. Daddy 3 has been doing medicine for well over 10 years and no one knows how he managed to get the admission. Every year he came to the college a week before the exams ( apparently, no one in his family knew that he didn’t pass medicine and he was already working as a doctor in a clinic set up by his father in their village..that was the rumour, I don’t know if that was true or not!) and his roll number was before mine. We were all waiting for our Anatomy viva and it was daddy 3’s turn. Obviously he didn’t know the answer to any of the questions and the examiner was getting frustrated with him. Finally the examiner asked : What is your mother tongue?” for which daddy 3 replied ” sir, I have never seen my mother’s tongue”

Jokes aside, today I want to talk about mother tongue. A friend, whose daughter is in the same grade as Yaya is frantically looking for an English tutor, because of poor grades. ( it doesn’t help that Yaya’s grades are better) Her daughter is very smart, but unlike primary school, teachers in high school expects a lot more from kids and her report/assignments do not reflect her intelligence.

Mother is a firm believer of cultural roots and mother tongue and insisted that they only speak their mother tongue at home and the child was taught to read and write their mother tongue at home and learned English as ESL at school even though she is born here.

None of my children speak their mother tongue. They don’t identify themselves as Indians either. I would have loved to see my daughters wearing silk pavada, lots of glass bangles in their hand and them having beautiful long hair adorned with jasmine flowers, or my son wearing kasavu mundu.. If I really wanted that, then I should have stayed back in Kerala. It would have helped them tremendously, if they knew their mother tongue and we lived in Kerala. There would never be any cultural shock for them. But what is the point in them learning their mother tongue, if they are never going to live in Kerala? How would the Continuation of language and culture benefits them? It is not a crime against humanity that my children don’t identify themselves as Malayalees.

Learning a language doesn’t give you a cultural connection. I speak fluent French and Mandarin, that doesn’t make me Chinese or French. My cousins in Mumbai only speak in Hindi. Apparently it is really fashionable among the Mumbai mallu crowd to speak only in Hindi, but they are still Hindi speaking mallus.

If you are living outside India and are raising your children there, what are the chances that your children would want to go back to India and live?  Besides, you can always learn a language anytime in your life, but wouldn’t it be much easier for your children that they are proficient in English?

The first time I met her was 4 years ago when I attended a fundraiser. Her brother is an accomplished cellist and was walking on to the stage to play the cello. She ran across the aisle, screaming at the top of her voice. Everyone was looking at her, that didn’t bother her. She was screaming and screaming and saying something totally incoherent and only stopped when her brother kept the cello on the stand, came down from the stage, held her hand and walked to where their parents were sitting.  Lovingly he patted her hair, said something to her and she nodded her head. He went back to the stage and played the cello. He was 12 years old then and she must have been 8.

Most of my friends think that I am totally nuts for driving long distance to eat good food. I think, you will understand this quest for good food if you are a Malaysian   When my children were little, I used to drive from KL to port Klang to eat seafood dinner. ( 40 km one way) My son loved to eat crab and a restaurant there served the best Singapore Crab ! There were plenty of seafood restaurants within walking distance from my home, but I still preferred to drive to all the way to Port Klang to get the best !

There is a Chinese restaurant ( Lucky Corner ) in Oxley that serve the best Char Kway teow. The place is tiny, looks run down, but the food is exceptionally good. So, even though it is very far away from my home, I still drive all the way there to eat Char Kway teow. I was surprised to see her family there. Apparently, I am not the only crazy one who drives such a long distance to eat good food.

While waiting for my food, this is what I saw. She mumbled something incoherent, her brother gave her pieces of chicken from his plate. Another mumble, he filled her glass with water. then she screamed and ran out of the restaurant, her  brother got up to get the toilet keys from the staff and run after her. When they came back, he pulled the chair out for his sister, made sure she is comfortable before sitting down to eat his meal. In the half an hour they were at the restaurant, she ran out thrice, each time her brother ran after her to take her to the toilet or even just to watch the cars. Not once he got mad at her.

Pottan surely had a real name, but I don’t know what it is. He lived next door to my mother’s ancestral home. I heard him, even before I met him. Amma’s ancestral home was at the bottom of a hill and as  we  got off the bus and walked down the road to her home, you could hear Pottan’s cry. It was not like any cry I have ever heard in my life. It felt like someone inside Pottan is screaming to get out. All through my childhood, I knew the existence of Pottan by hearing his screaming. I also knew Pottan was mad and his family chained him to the wall at home all day. I have heard his mother and his brothers cursing him and  thrashing him when his screaming got louder.

I was in the 10th standard when I actually met him for the first time. He was chained to the coconut tree and was given a spade to dig around the tree. Scrawny looking man with sunken eyes and his  ribs were sticking out. He saw me and mumbled something. He could hardly lift the spade. His brother was sitting outside in a cane easy chair and when he saw that Pottan is not doing his work, he got up from his chair, walked to where Pottan was chained and slapped him hard. I ran inside the house and even then I could hear the brother screaming at  him and threatening  him with bodily harm, if he stopped digging. Years later, when I read Nazi history and saw the photos of the prisoners of war, I was not shocked, for I had seen a human being in worst form in my own hometown.  Everyone knew what was going on in that house. Everyone kept quiet. Human rights are only for those who can fight.

What happened to Pottan after that is totally hearsay. Apparently someone forgot to lock him up one day and he escaped. Unfortunately, some neighbour saw him running away and called his brother..he was caught and beaten. No one has seen him after that.

There is no moral of the story here..when I heard the little girl screaming and running out of the restaurant, I remembered Pottan and felt his story should be told.

Few days ago, Yaya came back from school and gave me a hug and said ” guess what mom?”

I do hate the guess what mom scenes, especially the ones that follows a hug. Usually, the hug is a pre-emptive strike and I imagined all sorts of trouble that she could be in.

“What?” I asked

“My friends and I were talking about mothers today and everyone agreed that I have the best mother on planet earth”

I was a bit surprised to hear that and I looked at her to see, if she buttering me up to get something from me. She didn’t look like she was joking.

“Really?”

“Yup, all my friends adore you and think you are the best”

When I was expecting Yaya, I hoped I would be the mother I had hoped I would have, the one who is understanding, loving and supportive. I also wanted to stop the cycle of abuse. It takes a lot to undo the damage my mother inflicted on me and I know I will always have the scars. It feels good knowing that I didn’t turn out to be like my mother and that, even though I come from the most dysfunctional family on earth, I am still the best mother.

As I wrote sometime before, my father stopped financially supporting me when I completed 3 rd year Medicine and I didn’t even have money to pay mess bill and survived on bread and bananas. However, lack of money wasn’t an impediment for my style or fashion. I bought cheap fabric whenever there was a Khadi exhibition and got the tailors in the rural areas who charges very little to stitch my salwars. Often, I would wait at the shop while the tailor was cutting the fabric, not because I was worried that he would steal the fabric, but because I wanted my salwars to have looooooow neck, especially at the back because no one ( ie professors) would see the low neck and get scandalized because it is covered by my lab coat, but I didn’t need to wear something different to scandalize my friends and foes when I wore the same salwar for parties. Win win situation if I must say !

The hardest part was to get the tailor to cut it low. He himself was scandalized and refused. The first time, I told him, I want the back to be cut in a tear shape with strings attached that I could tie and hold it in shape. My idea was a huge tear shaped opening in the back, what I got was a tiny opening that closed automatically when you tied it, so I ended up waiting at the shop to make sure that the tailor cut it the way I want. Anyway, long story short, all the good girls from good family were totally scandalized seeing my outfits and I looked like a good girl from a good family only when I wore my lab coat.

I do have a good figure even now and I don’t wear anything that hides my figure !

Yaya is getting the academic award this year and wants something “totally cool” to wear when she goes up the stage to collect her award. I am so fine with that.

She plans everything in advance and asked me if I would take her for “academic award dress shopping” I am so fine with that too and took her for shopping.

“What do you think?” She took a dress from the rack and showed me. It looked beautiful, tiny white and pink flowers in navy blue silk fabric..

“Very Pretty” I said

“Shall I try it on?” she asked.

“Sure” I said.

She wore the dress and walked to where I was standing. My first instinct was to grab a jumper from the nearest rack and ask her to wear it over the dress.

“So?” She asked, giving me a full 360 degree turn.

“the neck is too low” I replied. I actually can’t believe I said that.

“Mom” She said, It sounded so much as if she called me a  hypocrite.

“It is true” I said.

“Mom, do you like the dress?” She asked.

The truth is, she looked gorgeous..

We bought the dress..but I, who wears low neck dresses without any qualms, am not happy. This is nothing but double standard.

There is a time in every child’s life when they start to identify and like certain genre of music. Yaya started her love of music with the song Black horse and Cherry tree by KT Tunstall. She was in grade 2 then and played that song over and over.

My son’s music discovery started with Owl city’s fireflies. He played that song over and over for months

When baby was 4 years old, she sang “you spin me right round” by Dead or Alive all the time.

She was in to Dora at that time and even had Dora hair style. I remember her wearing her favourite purple colour Dora shorts and tee shirt and sitting on the floor in the living room, colouring yet another dora colouring page and singing “You spin me right round baby” over and over. It was a song from my youth and I felt a connection between me and her.

Yesterday, as we were driving back home the radio station had songs from the 80’s and the DJ played “you spin right round” I looked at baby and said ” Do you remember the song?”

She had no idea. She doesn’t even remember singing it. Yaya said from the back of the car ” I remember baby singing it all the time Mama, we found that song in Alvin and the Chipmunks and she was crazy for it.”

I know not everyone is like me and Yaya who can remember everything. I know baby is normal..Yet I feel sad..that she doesn’t remember it.

Away until Monday

Have a jolly good weekend