Metaphorical Hostages

 

Back in 2017, I got this book “Hostage at the Table” from IMD Business School, Lausanne with my admission confirmation.  It was my MBA application phase and I was trying out all my next level choices after getting a #rejection from my first choice school: INSEAD.  I was also dealing with major imposter syndrome to think I could really make something out of doing a full-time MBA with six years of law firm experience.  This was reinforced by conversations with recent #lawyer-MBAs or just MBA grads in general involving difficulties finding jobs in the UK during Brexit, procuring a visa in Europe for a Non-European, dealing with student debt and the prospect of having to start another career path at a junior position along with various personal considerations.  Looking back, I don’t think all of these were really valid objections in themselves as I can certainly refute each of them now with very carefully crafted arguments and examples learnt with the wisdom of age (and #Linkedinstalking) but sometimes gut instinct excels in creating so-called logical arguments. 

I digress. Going back to George Kohlrieser’s Hostage at the Table, invites from some top-notch business schools in UK and Europe and my head trapped in a “hostage situation” as per the classic explanation from the author: “any time you feel entrapped, powerless and helpless, you are, in fact a hostage”.  This #metaphorical hostage situation was only broken by applying and getting accepted to be a part-time MBA student at NUS Business School while continuing to work full-time.  I loved living in Singapore.  I was (and am) bullish on Asia.  On the other hand, it was nothing like I had ever imagined my MBA journey to be.  That is both a positive and a negative statement just as the best oxymorons tend to be. 

I completed in April 2020 and so much has happened since.  Not even counting the Covid Blip.  I am still working primarily as a lawyer so many people ask me what I “gained” out of the MBA? I always flip it back to say – what does anyone gain out of most things in life?  Just experiences, memories and certain unmeasurable intangible benefits.  I hate justifying life choices and I will not pretend that I have not questioned and examined myself tediously on the same question.  Do I regret declining IMD and the others who had graciously offered me a spot and a chance at a different life? Maybe.  But as I completed reading Kolhrieser’s (incidentally a professor at IMD I missed learning directly from) master-piece, one quote jumped out at me and still does: “you have the right to choose to do whatever you want”.  So simple yet so powerful.  And today as Singapore celebrates its 57^th Birthday, I celebrate my first as a permanent resident here.  Knowing that any other choice would have led me away from this exact moment which is perfect in its completeness and its incompleteness. Majulah Singapura.          

Mum, Uninterrupted.

 

Today I met a Perfect Mum.  Everything she does revolves around her children.  She is selflessly giving, she cooks perfectly nutritious meals for them, puts her rest and hobbies and friends aside to care for them and play with them.  She is genuinely happy when they are happy and sad when they are sad.  But somewhere inside she is silently screaming.  Where is the joie de vivre promised from motherhood, she asks?

 

I am not the right person to answer, I tell her.  I am an Imperfect Mum.  I question the long work hours spent away from my child but I know I do it because I value any skills I can bring to better this world and make a living at the same time. I do date nights and vacations with the man I love, even more so because he fathered my child and is my equal partner in bringing him up.  I meet new friends and chase old friends I still care about even though they sometimes seem too lost to remember me.  I go for massages when I am tired and aching from my workouts on a weekend which I should spend completely with my child.  I feel happy and guilty that we can afford good help but jealous of her that she spends more time with my child than me.  I compartmentalize the time I spend with my child everyday even (gasp!) scheduling it into my calendar. But when we are together, nothing else matters.  Time stops in his eyes and his smile and oh, how we dance, how we giggle.     

 

I never believed I could be a mum as the only mum I knew was a Perfect Mum, my own mum.  Just like you.  But as I grew up and reflected on some snippets of my childhood, I realized she wasn’t as Perfect.  In the constraints of her own middle class Indian life, she found time to learn and sell hand-made clothes, learn and take pottery classes and has slowly evolved to be a loved social and community leader.  She confessed she was jealous of my grandmother spending more time with me while she toiled away in the kitchen preparing meals for us or taking care of the home.  She longed to go out for movies with my father and when I was older, she did and they took vacations away from me too, just the two of them.   

 

She taught me to embrace being an Imperfect Mum and that is the only way I know to break free and enjoy Motherhood, not suffering alone but enjoying as part of a team.   I know many Imperfect Mums and this Mother’s Day I want to tell them how perfect they are, just as they are.  Let’s accept the guilt and look at finding our Joie de Vivre in the everyday.   

Frame of Mind

                                                                     

                                                                       Frame of Mind

                                I sit here, pearls of luxury dripping like tears of misery,

                                        She sits by a life-worn single bed, with her heart's delight;

                                I am all practicality, boring and poised,    

                                        She is all flimsy, silliness undestroyed;

                                My solace is my screen, pretending I am important,

                                        Alone but never lonely , giggles and snuggles;

                                 Money-making, me:    

                                           Everyone bows to me,

                                  Merry-making, her:

                                            Life bows to her.

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...

   

Top 5 benefits of a bed-ridden world (or read this the next time i lose Hope)

A friend suggested this title to me for my next blog entry after discovering that i hadnt written in my blog for more than a year. I dismissed it at that time because a) I was in the throes of maddening numbing pain after my ankle operation and b) ummm i was depressed because i was in the throes of maddening numbing pain after my ankle operation.  So even though i did vaguely think that i would like to write about this experience as it has been one of the most painful and difficult episodes of my life till date.  Especially as i tend to forget difficult periods and only moan about the problems that have befallen me at that exact period in time or get depressed about nothing at all. Short-sighted but thats how things have always worked out in my life. Coincidentally just before I fell and while I was still in Singapore I had borrowed a book called "making hope happen" by shane lopez who is a renowned gallup scientist.  A very inspiring book for sure and it was my companion through the screaming nights of pain in the hospital and sometimes depressing sometimes inspiring days and nights of my now 5 week recovery period (if your takeaway from that was that i am a slow reader, that was completely not the point and untrue to boot as i finished 2 other books in the same period...you need to absorb some books and not just rush through them).  One of the interesting parts of the book was how relevant the ancient greek text Odysseus is to modern day hopeful thinking and decision making.  He copes with the sirens i.e. Distractions by recruiting the help of others i.e. His canaries.  I am hoping that this post will act as one of my canaries in helping me on the path to progress towards my goals.

  So anyway without digressing further or providing more boring background, let me just plunge into the benefits (from the optimist's point of view) of a bed-ridden world:

1. You can order everyone around, dont need to do anything yourself and get pampered and pitied
even if the fall was the result of a drunken high heeled sojourn in a nightclub. Best. Result. Ever.

2.  5 weeks paid leave, great home food and tons of time with family.  Of course i was working from home and did have to work quite a bit for a week, but i realllyyy cant complain at all! The bonus was that i got to stay home during the holiday period and no one could really complain that i didnt do enough work as there wasnt too much work anyway.

3. My liver will thank me forever.  No or negligible alcohol for 6 weeks!  This hasnt happened since...2008 i think! Wow!

4. I knew acute pain for the first time in my life and as a corollary i know what it means to be pain-free - my usual state of affairs but which i never appreciated.  Have you ever had nightmares when you have been screaming and howling in pain and then suddenly you are woken up and its bright sunshine and the world is still a happy place? Thats how i feel nowadays...aah ok. Im not mary poppins yet but you know what i mean right?

5. When i finally walked with minimal support and then with no support, all the internet horror stories fled like ants drenched in water...it was freedom. It was wonderful and i am sure if i was that kind of girl or in an ekta kapoor serial, i would have had a few glycerine tears to shed.  Now looking forward to my first run...first dance...i think dr. Lopez, i have taken the first baby steps towards hope...