Sleep is a funny thing

 

Its normal for you, natural, easy, thoughtless

For me its like a two headed dragon wolfing down my Hans Im Gluck burger

Ok, I kid

It’s like a two headed dragon with 5 feet fangs breathing Extra Hot Nando’s sauce down my throat

I sweat buckets

My pounding heart sounds louder than Metallica at an indoor concert

And sometimes I feel like I have a protest rally going on in my mind

All this while lying on my cushiony mattress, on silken sheets

Ah, the sarcasm of the half empty glass in a glass half full world

Pills, therapies, Internet articles, mirror mirror on the wall

All served a limited self on a limited time stamp

  Waking nightmares imagined, not real

Stress the driver of an imagined freight-train of worry and sleeplessness

And the two-headed dragon grows evermore on wings of imagined realities

Feeding and slurping away on my beauty sleep

Are they that fictitious- my nightmares?

Or do they tell me a tale I dare not heed during the day?

A tale of unfulfilled dreams and out of reach desires

Of purposes undiscovered and of friends who abandoned

But that’s the story of every life

We are all Shakespearan comedies and tragedies

On stage today and off tomorrow

The peace I seek in sleep is to be found in my heart and my soul

In knowing that shutting my heart isn’t avoiding pain, its avoiding love

And that the two headed dragon isn’t the enemy of my sleep

If I could get past the fire, its only telling me a hard truth

Life isn’t about sleep, sleep follows life

As I pat the two-headed dragon into the pillow, we decide to make peace for just this one night

Tomorrow is another day, another hope for dreamlike living.

Mothers of the world- kudos!

Mothers Day is a manufactured concept but the concept of mothers is far from that.  There is no one uniform way of describing them because they are all different and they are all human.  I could not fathom being one as I thought it was the hardest job in the world and I am too selfish to care about someone that much.  Now I have to change the 'they' to 'we' as I am elevated to that position in life.  And it is true - it is one of the hardest jobs in the world and it is never-ending.  But controversially enough, I dont think being a mother means you are selfless.  Selfless would be taking care of other people's babies without any remuneration but for yours, it is a biological drive to take care of them (you think babies evolved into mini war-crying machines by chance?).  That doesnt mean mothers arent super-heroes - they truly are, we truly are (yep humble pie!) for our children.  That love cannot be replicated.  Ever.

So I sit here today, missing my mother and hugging my baby reflecting on everything that has happened in the last 14 months.  Pregnancy was a breeze and depicted above (the question mark is pre-pregnancy test) and the last month was punctuated by baby's arrival a bit early so no photos that month except of cutie.  The whirlwind of breastfeeding, sleeping (and not sleeping), crash course in diaper changing and bathing babies and the feeling of having two brains in one head which is permanent but gets more synergistic as months roll on.  So whether hypnobirthing, lamazing, c-sectioning, breastfeeding, bottle feeding, latching, sleep training, not sleep training, co-sleeping, day-caring, nanny-using, pre-schooling, homeschooling etc etc - you are the only and the best for your baby.  Happy Mothers Day, wonder women! 

Heartbreak broke my Writer's Block

Imagine...the ordinary: 

                A day spent hugging mom,

                A day spent on the streets amidst maskless merries,

                An evening spent dancing away on a beach at sundown; but

                The ordinary is impossible, the ordinary is dead. 

I am not a prisoner but I am bonded: 

                Bonded to my happy memories, please erase them for me,

                Bonded to my hopes, which dont come true anymore,

                Memories hurt, but hope is a dream made of gossamer wings,

                Beautiful, delicate and easily destroyed.

I live with perfect imperfections but sometimes the imperfections are too perfect: 

                   Flitting from day to day, hiding behind meals and smiles,

                   I am trying positive, but the collective pain of billions tears up the most positive of us,

                   I stopped reading the news, but it just finds me wherever I run,

                   Survival is fine-tuned to the ignorant now.  

The only way to live is to imagine the extraordinary now:

            A day watching my grand-mother hugging my son,

            A day spent without worrying tomorrow will bring tragedy,

            An evening spent under the stars in a rainy forest ground,           

            A day when positivity seems easy...