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Anthe

 I started this weblog as exactly that, a web log of E’s growth from birth. I’ve chronicled her introduction to life, sleep ( here and here ), food ( here and here ), and play ( here ) in these sites and I am grateful to have had the time to make this. There is a gap where I haven’t chronicled her toddler-hood; ages 3 onwards. I stopped for two reasons: I sounded like a sanctimonious twat (excuses for same here and here ) I didn’t think I was a good parent anymore because E’s father and I separated. Mommy blogging is sanctimonious bs. The truth is that none of know what the fuck is going on and we’re all just trying to get to the end of the day with some of our sanity intact. Some days are great, some days are awful but mostly it stays at an average mean and we wipe our brows, call it a day, and get ready for the next. Babies change as they grow into children. Toddlerhood is that in-between. E learned about divorce just as her language skills were developing. She understood our figh
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Raising E

It’s tiring bringing up a child in Bangalore.  In my previous life, I made plans to take her to a place that mirrored “my" India. The India of malls and indoor play areas. I stopped taking her to public parks because I think they are disgusting. The way I looked at it was: I did not spend 9 months breeding a human, and x years raising it, to have her play in some rusty jungle gym, to discover a used condom, or find used syringes or get pushed around by lousy (as in, with lice) children. Yeah, the play area in my building was good enough. At least I knew that the kids who play there were clean. Sounds classist? You bet it was. Nah. I just took my kid to The Oberoi - they have a lovely lawn there, you see. Who needs jungle gyms when you’ve got bread-loving koi fish. Who needs to deal with the ill-mannered kids of people-who-can-barely-make-ends-meet when you can be sure to be in the company of people who know what a social contract is.  But on our way there, I’
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Separate. Connect. Separate. Connect.

If you've ever gone through my posts and decided that I sound like a sanctimonious mommy blogger, you're probably right. I have one daughter and I'm dispensing potty training advice? The intent isn't to dish out spoons full of self-aggrandisement. This website is one of the many ways for me to say that I was a harried mother. That I tried. And failed. Many times. But I kept trying until something worked. Can Attachment Theory Explain All Our Relationships? is writer Bethany Saltman's   essay in the New York Magazine, in which she analyses and compares her attachment to her mother with her attachment to her daughter who is now 11-years old. Ms. Saltman writes of feeling lonely and overwhelmed in the early days of motherhood and making scary faces and muttering angrily at her nonplussed baby. Words that mothers are terrified to confess to one another. The article made me think about the evolving nature of my attachment to 2-and-a-half-year old E. Before she
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8 Lessons from Active Potty Training

I asked two mothers I admired when they potty trained their now pre-adolescent children. They both didn’t seem to remember and said, 'it just happened.'  I was anxious. It seemed like a very grown up thing to do - teach a human how to use the toilet. We didn’t really cinch house training with the fuzzball so I severely doubted my ability to teach another living being this essential life skill. I’d bought the No-Cry Potty Training Solution  around the same time I bought the No-Cry Nap Solution but only got around to reading it when E was 10-months old. We had minor successes with getting her to eliminate in the potty (read about our adventures here ) but I think she forced herself to learn how to walk because she just wanted to get away from the potty. The poor expensive potty sat in a corner of the bathroom, unused. We didn’t force her to use it because we’d read enough Freud or at least the Wikipedia entry on Freud  to suspect that the premature potty training of an u
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Pre-Potty Training - Start potty training your baby at 11 months

At 11-months, E was on four meals of solids and just around 6 milk feeds a day. My body was slowly becoming mine again, and I was excitedly learning the basics of steaming and puréeing fruit and veg for my baby with budding tastebuds.  As with all food, what goes in must come out. I quickly learnt that the introduction of solids meant that her poop was no longer the lovely sunshine yellow, smell of fresh yoghurt that it used to be.  It had began to smell and feel like human excrement. And when a child is in diapers, it just smooshes all over the posterior making the cleaning a long and smelly process.  Up until now, the husband and I would coo over E's multiple times a day output, calling it our "golden treasure" and grinning through poop cleaning because we were convinced positive body image starts early (and also breastmilk poop is cute) but suddenly, we were finding it hard keeping it together. My mother, as mothers are wont to do , helpfully infor
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Mourning the End of Breastfeeding

I breastfed E for 26 months. It's been only a few weeks, and I don't even remember the exact date. One day she asked, I said no, she fussed about it for a bit but didn't cry or insist. And that was it. I had breastfed for the last time and I didn't even know. In hindsight, I suppose I did know, because the last feed was different from all the feeds that came before it. In the last one, it was me and her, sitting in our nursing chair lit by the blue-green from her nightlight - both only as old as she is. As we've sat hundreds of times, the only ones awake in the quiet nighttime house, she lost in thought, and me, staring at her, willing at her to be the person I know in my bones she is. In the last feed, she watched me closely, something she rarely does. She always liked to unfocus a little, puzzle out her world while the repetitive motions of her mouth made her verdant brain, process the individual tendrils of life. She may notice me once in a while, giggle whe
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The Paradaox of Being a SAHM - Can I Have it All or Part 3

This post is part 3 of a three part series on the conundrum of modern motherhood. Read part 1 and part 2 . Can I Have It All? I get conflicting messages from women like Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, telling me to 'lean in' to the male-defined workplace, and stop being held back by my perceptions of why, as a mother, I can't participate in the workforce in the way that I'd like. Then there are women like Anne-Marie Slaughter, lawyer and professor of international affairs at Princeton University, who feel that the world, as it exists today, does not have room for women who want success at both, the workplace and the home. These arguments are a little more nuanced in India. Childcare is cheap and readily available but not necessarily trustworthy and definitely under-regulated. The threat of prosecution isn't real enough for a daycare centre or maid to do their jobs well. Meanwhile, the invasion of modern technology in our professional lives ensure that we s
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