Headbath

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

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

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

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

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

This post is part 2 of a three part series exploring the conundrum of modern motherhood. Read part 1 . Am I a SAHM? While the "housewife" just makes sure her family is clothed and fed, the SAHM clothes hers in hand spun, vegetable-dyed, Cottage Emporium cotton and feeds them organic quinoa salads everyday. Rather than spending her day phoning her friends about her domestic accomplishments, the SAHM will flood her social media with lomo filter applied photographs of health food and responsibly-sourced clothing, and happy baby smiles.  And maybe blog about it. SAHMs, in this brave new post-housewife world, now feel the need to justify their choice to stay at home because they don't have a fat pay check to show for their domestic accomplishments. They occupy the other end of the spectrum, treating their home life with the kind of zeal most of us would reserve for monetary remuneration only. In raising E, I find myself wanting to hone my domesticity - cook great mea

When I was growing up, our mothers either worked outside the home or were "housewives". Regardless of what else they did with their time, the general expectation was that mothers were the main caretakers of their household and by inclusion, children while fathers played featuring roles as either chief disciplinarian just wait till your father gets home , chief maker of fun because he was driven mad by guilt for being away from his family , or that guy who hogs the TV when he is at home. Over the years there has been growing discomfort about the term, 'housewife'. We've seen variations like home manager, homemaker, and more recently, the exceedingly annoying 'stay-at-home-mom' or SAHM. If I were your mom, I'd be your mother . It's not like these women are distributing business cards. Why bother with a designation? As more mothers started participating in the corporate workforce hurrah for liberalisation and globalisation , suddenly, there was a

There's a fair bit of hand-wringing on the Internet over how impossible it is to buy anything for your child without reducing it to a binary decision of kittens or buses, pastels or dark colours, Spiderman or Barbie. Two-year old E doesn't know the difference between a girl and a boy. Although she has, internally, decided that women wear kaajal and men don't. The kohl-lined eyes of our AC repairman widened at being called 'auntie' by a little girl. She knows that, visually, men and women are different and she can tell the difference between an 'uncle' and an 'auntie'. But to her, all kids are just babies and she can't really differentiate boys from girls. So it frustrates me when I go to a kids' clothes shop or toy shop and there's a clear demarcation between Those Things That Are Meant For Boys generally housed in areas of the store painted in solid red or blue  and Those Things That Are Meant For Girls delicately arranged in areas