JOIN USBeing a mother might feel a lot like fighting a never-ending battle. But laughter can give you some much-needed respite and courage to face another day, shares Shruthi Harikrishna.
Towards the end of my pregnancy, I remember thinking my days of discomfort and pain were over, and that I had years of unadulterated joy waiting for me. Little did I realise what was in store for me!
“The pain of labour is like a hundred elephants sitting on you,” some said to me, ahead of D-day. Some others likened the pain to various other teeth-gritting forms of pain. I remember thinking about those comparisons when I was at the labour table. But the only thing that alleviated the pain for me was the fact that the woman at the next table was screaming louder than me! It dawned on me then that the only way I was going to stay sane through the motherhood experience was if I was able to see the humour in every situation.
Like the time when my husband was explaining various feeding positions to help me nurse the baby better. We were heatedly debating the pros and cons of each method and deciding which one was best suited for the occasion, while my daughter patiently waited for someone to give her some food.
We were discussing the football hold when my mother told us, hotly, “I can hear the poor little football’s stomach rumbling all the way in the drawing room. If you could both please stop dissecting every hold and just feed the football, I’m sure she’ll be grateful for it.” We burst out laughing and I swear the unresearched hold, we finally settled on, worked like magic.
We moved from breastfeeding to bottle to plate, but the worry that my child has not had enough to eat never seems to leave me. I try feeding my daughter a balanced diet, but getting her to put even a morsel inside is quite a task. I’ve tried creating artificial scarcity by loudly telling my unwilling-to-participate-in-this-farce husband how that was the last piece of healthy food available on Earth.
I do this without so much as looking in the direction of my child. I silently pat myself on my back for being such a clever woman and pretend to lunge for the last bite. When I realise the trick has no impact whatsoever on my daughter, I move to my next technique – bringing out the green-eyed monster. I tell my now-irritated husband how the child, who won a running race at school just the previous day, eats up her food in two minutes and that’s where she gets all her strength from.
My daughter remains nonchalant and refuses to touch what’s put in front of her. That’s when I usually bring out my third trick – acting like the expert. I throw a few nutritional facts that I know my daughter has just learnt at school about the food in a bid to get her to eat it. When I meet with failure at this step, I turn to the final one that has always given me peace – developing a thick skin to rival a Rhino’s. I decide that the cake has just as many “good” ingredients and give it to my daughter. My daughter’s untouched food finds its way onto my grumpy husband’s plate, as usual.
This four-step approach of first creating a sense of scarcity, then bringing out the green-eyed monster, pretending to act like the expert, and eventually, developing thick skin has found application in many areas of my life as a mother.
I use this approach every time I take my daughter out and she chooses what she wants to wear. She has a tendency to go in for combinations that I would only see at the circus. When I fail to change her mind, I walk around in the mall, oblivious to whispers of how “the lovely child is dressed in horrendous clothes” and how “the mother has no taste whatsoever”.
The other area that can potentially cause stress to a mother is when she takes her daughter to a shop. My daughter threw a tantrum at a shop the other day about wanting her 256th play doh set. There was only one piece of the cool bubble blower left in the shop and I would rather have pick that up, or any other toy in the same price range. Naturally, that failed to impress my daughter. The same whisperers continued to whisper about how I was “an uncaring mother” as I dragged my bawling daughter, bubble-blower in hand, out of the shop. But then, the empathetic shopkeeper finally made an appearance and offered the play doh set free of cost to my gleeful daughter (who always gets what she wants).
I always have a hearty laugh when I look back at moments such as these, even though it hardly seemed funny at the time. But, honestly, it’s that laughter, which gives me the courage to face each new day as a mother.