I thought I was not the maternal type. I thought I was hardboiled. Kids were always going to be something I had in the future, not me-now. For the first several days after my eldest was born, I didn’t feel that gush of love and protectiveness everyone talks about. And I worried about not being mom-material, even after having become a mom. The biological act of giving birth isn’t enough to turn you into a mom. My three-weeks-early, underweight, spindly looking baby reminded me of a lizard with its limbs splayed out.
I don’t quite recall when I went from biological mom to emotional mom, the transition just crept up on me in the act of taking care of that little lizard and helping it thrive, grinning back inadvertently to its toothless gas-smile, speaking babygibberish, singing family cradle songs as old as my grandmother to lull the creature to sleep.
Once that switch turned on, it was hard to bear the many transitions that sent the baby further and further from me. It took me six months to be ready to relinquish the precious bundle to a caregiver and get back to work. Even then, I worked halfdays for three years so I could spend more time with my son. This was completely unexpected for the career-driven women I thought of myself as.
The baby first slept in a cradle that we hung over the bed – a tradition that goes back centuries to our villages – in a sling fashioned out of a soft old saree. It protected the baby from draughts and dust and snuggled him as easily as the womb. It also assuaged my fears about crib death, though several nights I’d get up with a start worried whether the baby was still breathing. I’d put my head in one side of the sling and our dog Jacky in the other, to check whether the baby was fine.
Living in a duplex with our bedrooms on the upper floor meant that many nights when we were downstairs watching a late night movie, we’d rock him to sleep in the living room rocking chair and then put him to bed in a squishy beanbag until we were ready to go upstairs – baby monitors didn’t work that well across multiple floors.
As the baby grew older, we needed to transition him to a bed of his own. We bought a crib from an embassy sale, because I was very concerned about the possibility of toxic paint in local furniture. It was superbly designed and adjustable with the growing length of the baby. My son lay in his crib within arm’s reach and I often slept holding his tiny hand through the bars of the crib – my security blanket. As he outgrew the bed, I still wasn’t ready for him to move to a separate room. We made a bed for him on the floor of our bedroom, surrounded by baby gates I had bought at an embassy sale, to ensure he couldn’t crawl off and go under the bed. Often, as my husband was putting the baby to sleep, he’d fall asleep himself, imprisoned in the baby gates.
By the time we had a second baby coming along, we realised that the kids would have to sleep in a separate room. My son doesn’t take to change easy so we had to explain the reason for the change to him multiple times over the months leading up to the baby’s arrival. In order to make it easier, I told him we’d turn it into a Jungle room. Pregnant, tired, weighed down by the baby, I spent days wielding paintbrushes across the walls of the bedroom, painting motifs he’d enjoy. At times I was so exhausted I could barely lift my arm up, but it was something I just had to do. Now I wonder whether that was my way of easing the transition for myself, easing the pangs of separation I was feeling in advance by creating happy pictures of the result. We named each and every one of the animals – Proudy the peacock, Sher Khan, Babar the elephant, Bambi the deer, Baloo the bear and Kapi the monkey.
My daughter slept in the crib from the time she was three months old, in a room she shared with my son. My son had a full-sized bed of his own by now, but early morning he’d climb into the crib to chat with his infant sister, his face soft with love for her or hide there to jump out and surprise me. I still spent many nights wandering over to the kids’ room to check if they were ok. We could hear the kids if they called, and call they did, often.
My three kids spent years in that bedroom, outgrowing their cribs and getting into full-sized beds. My eldest fell out of bed one morning and managed to break his arm – a green bone fracture, the doctor called it. The two older ones would crawl into the youngest’s crib every morning and the three would party together till we woke up. We brought in and outgrew many rituals, including bedtime stories, bedtime lullabies and Gunkahs (good night kiss and hugs). We celebrated many birthdays with early morning singing of the family birthday song and family bear hugs. Gradually the room started to overflow with their bedtime books, stuffed toys and other memorabilia.
Last year we decided that the kids were outgrowing the room. We began a renovation process that stretched like a rubber band, outsourcing our sleep to my parents’ house, where the three kids still shared one room. Three days ago, we moved into the new rooms. My daughter has her own room and eagerly moved in to sleep on her own for the first time in her life, and my sons share a separate room. I wander through their rooms at night, checking if they are fine, checking if the room is too hot or too cold, pulling a cover over them, checking if the outside doors are locked.
Though it’s the same house, and our rooms are all on the same floor, adjoining each others, somehow this feels like a big transition, a big break. Their stuffed toys are relegated to the old kids room, and I don’t know if they’ll make their way back. The animals on the wall have been abandoned on another floor…
