Tanu Shree Singh Dahiya - Keep Calm and Mommy On

You are doing such a wonderful job with the boys! You are a Supermom!

Every time I hear that, I glance over my shoulder to make sure that I am the one being referred to. I usually brush it aside with a nervous smile. I do not have to think deeply to figure out whether or not they are wrong; I know they are. Whats worse, I seem to be misleading people. I feel it is time I set the record straight: I am not a perfectly balanced, calm mother, who knows the perfect technique to make sure her kids turn out well.

There is a faint hope that my kids will turn out wellyes. But there is also a real possibility that they will not develop that halo of goodness around them.

There are days when all such hope seems lost; days that start with grunts and growls, and end in tears. The older one, Ishaan, towers over me, and the younger one, Vivaan, is steadily getting there. So it is slowly transforming into a battle of wits. And in a battle, the odds arent exactly in your favour when the opposition gangs up. There are tears, sometimes. And elaborate rants to the man who treads with extreme caution at such times. I am not at my best then. I do not have a ready checklist of things to do in order to turn the situation around. At times, I hide out on the balcony, and let my dogs sit in my lap. At others, there are the unfortunate friends who get their heads chewed up over cups of coffee.

The issues vary:

• Grunts for a good morning
• Sibling wars. More like annihilation bids.
• Aversion to homework or anything remotely academic.
• First reading rights for books. Bloodshed is narrowly averted every time.
• Spikes in levels of the teenage rudeness hormones.
• Food preferencesone hates peas, the other loves them, and many more such lovely conflicts.
• Losing interest in paid-for classes the moment the receipt is received. Always.

This list can go on endlessly.

When I was a kid, my friend and I would collect velvet bugs, which were found in abundance every time it rained. We would take a jar and put in as many of these bugs as we could see. One day, we had collected over a hundred bugs. We carried the jar to a friends house, and started walking up the stairs to her room. As fate would have it, the jar slipped from my hands and shattered with a loud crash. There were bugs on every step. The two of us tried very hard to catch them and put them back in another jar, but it was impossible. As soon as one was returned to the jar, wed find another five taking off. Ten minutes later, we were sitting on the steps and crying, bugs scurrying off in all directions possible, and a horrified mother glaring at us from the bottom of the stairs.

That is exactly what motherhood seems like sometimesvelvet bugs scattering from a broken jar.

At such points, I question my mothering skills, doubt everything there is to doubt, and ponder every negative aspect of the cosmos.

See? Not perfect. Not a Supermom.

Once I am done wallowing in self-doubt, I start working on a comeback plan. It takes work, patience, chocolate, and sometimes days of immense focus. Ammunition is carefully selected and deployed. Sometimes peace talks work. Sometimes negotiations. And sometimes, it is war. There is only one ground ruleno violence.

But your writings reflect complete control! a friend I was having coffee with said.

They do? Damn! I nearly choked on my coffee.

I am a lot of things, but in control has seldom been a part of the list. When I am writing, it is after the last wisp of battle smoke has been blown away. Then analysis helps to figure out what helped. It is not as if I saunter into the war zone carrying a clipboard with a ready to-do list.

Does having a PhD in Positive Psychology (that is a real subject, not me trying to make myself sound cheerful) give me extra advantage? Not really. The theories we learn are mercilessly twisted by each child that we bear. No research report works. Anger doesnt work. Inner-cheek-gnawing, teeth-clenching patience, however, does. And there is no cape. I wish there was.

The next time you see a doting mother talking softly to her children, who look like tiny angels, know thisshe has her bad moments too, and the angels can easily sprout horns like the devil. If she seems Supermom-like, then her kids teenage hormones have not kicked in, or she is great at putting up a faade, or they are all just recovering from a battle.

The next time you see a dishevelled woman downing an extra-strong coffee, with two kids staring at her, their faces set in a scowl, pat yourself on the back and feel better. You are not her today. For now, youre a Supermom.

I try to learn as much as I can, and mostly try not to lose it. And if I succeed in not getting reduced to a bundle of nerves, in not planting a slap across the two teenaged faces, and in containing my self-doubt, thats not a bad day. I am a mum, a human one, not a Supermom with a solution to every problem. The experiences I share are in the hope that some mum somewhere would find them useful.

My life revolves around two boys, but this book is for parents of both, girls and boys. I dislike using they when referring to children because being a good parent is all about reacting to each child as an individual. I have therefore used he and she fairly indiscriminately in the book, though I have tried not to change the childs gender in the course of a paragraph.

WE AND
THE WORLD

Dealing with Diversity

Some years ago, Vivaan alighted from the school bus with a horrified look on his face. He dived right in.

Did you know that Indians are shot the moment they land in Pakistan?

WHAT? Who the he! Who told you that?

My friend. He said his father told him. I am never ever going there.

After the 2014 massacre in a school in Peshawar, Vivaan came back looking shattered. Some kids were discussing the gory images they saw, Ma. They say that they dont care, because it was in Pakistan. All of ten years and already prejudiced.

Prejudice starts colouring childrens vision much earlier than we as parents would like. If it is not based on nationality, it could be religion, colour of skin, economic conditions, or simply whether or not one wears glasses. The boys have come home in tears because they got called four-eyed or nerds because of their glasses. They constantly tell me about kids being nasty for the most trivial reasonsfrom grades to the braces they have to wear. Childhood is an age of innocent cruelty. Spend a day at school and youd hear the nastiest words being hurled around without the children even knowing what they mean.