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:

1. I sounded like a sanctimonious twat (excuses for same here and here)
2. 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 fighting as she perceived it in her preschool. A place I now realise I sent her to too early.

In my hurry to become a productive member of the workforce and all my anguish at being a sham sahm, I handed the child I laboriously birthed and raised to organised nannies peddling quality early childhood care. She was three years old and I was now, a working mother - juggling a home, child, and career. I was close to “having it all”.

Quitting the "rat race" meant that I could no longer see myself as a rat, incentivised and electrocuted into taking certain paths through the circuit maze. What it now means is that it’s still a race, just not with rats. Sometimes, I think it’s a race against time. 

In 10 years, E will be 18 and responsible for herself. I need to help her thrive, not just keep her alive, until then. That is the task I set for myself when I had her. That is the standard I hold myself to by chronicling this journey of my parenting. It is true what has been said about parenting - that doing it for a child, initiates the same process within you.

I stopped writing my blog as I believed I could no longer tell other people how to be good parents. Because of my conditioning, I believed that divorce automatically excluded me from ever becoming a good parent. I also believed that divorce was something that happened to people too cowardly to bear the realities of lifelong monogamy. I still believe these things, to a certain extent, but I am kinder to myself because it is now evident to me that my acting in panic 4 years ago, ending my marriage, quitting my job, moving to a fairly isolated farm, was a prescient panic. The survival of my daughter and myself depended on me acting out that panic.

E is now 7. She has a wicked sense of humour and loves to laugh. Her voice is clear like spring water trickling down little bells. She is sensitive and empathetic. She is kind and generous. She is sassy and has an admirable (enviable?) way with words. She is boisterous but also keeps her room neat. She can also keep herself clean. She can whistle and the chickens trust her enough to follow her into their coops. She reads, adds, subtracts and has figured out multiplication and division. She writes clever stories about our animals. She is funny and we both confess that our favourite thing to do is to make the other laugh. Every day I feel blessed and privileged to be her mother. Every day I reap the rewards of good early childhood parenting.

That said, it must also be said that early childhood parenting is, arguably, the easiest. Baby is a cute, forgiving lump with simple needs. While it’s sublime watching that lump turn into a mini human being capable of complex thought and emotion, it calls upon reserves of patience and forgiveness. It brings to surface suppressed memories of one’s own parenting because one has memories of being 7. 

It’s hard to pick up a defiant but dirty 7-year old and give her a bath if she doesn’t want to do it. “I don’t want to...” is something I’m hearing more of these days and I wonder where my securely attached, compliant child went. 

 

I find that she hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s the same child, just a bit taller, just a bit further. To find her, I need to find my inner 7-year old, the one who did things under threat of being beat up or ignored for days. I need to parent that kid before I parent my kid. In a world where disease and destruction are the norm, I am beginning to observe things more keenly, which I now feel deserve their own separate space.

This will be my last post on this blog. I first began Headbath in 2014, a little before the birth of my daughter, as a harried first-time mother boggled at the consumerism that permeates modern parenting. 

 

The idea of ‘headbath’ is my Indian answer to hygge - it’s the idea of feeling cool, fresh, and relaxed on a hot day. It’s buckets of warm water and scented coconut oil massaged into the scalp. It’s a green bar of soap and sachets of shampoo. It’s the hot breeze that cools in the droplets of water on your skin. It’s the tingling of your skin after you scrub dry with your deceptively absorbent thorthu.

I cherish this feeling for nowhere else will you feel as grateful for a headbath as you do in this sunbathed country of ours. I endeavour to nurture this feeling with mine.

 

I live on a wild piece of land at the edge of one of the last reserved forests of South India with my daughter, my partner, our dogs and chickens, and a cat. 

 

We are rescues, learning and growing together.  

 

Notes on such learning and growth may be found at some later date on headbath.substack.com.

 

 

All information on this blog is subjective and while intended to be advice, ought not to be taken as such because it has been tested with some success on a small sample size of one really sweet kid.