My Lady of the Lantern

All of them really. Between the last post and this one, there had to be several posts. I can see them mentally, but I haven't been able to find the calm to write anything down.  The last few days have just whizzed by...I wish I could prolong some of them, and I am glad to see some having passed by me. The operating keyword is - coping.  Figlia isn't stopping anywhere either. We have four teeth now. And I have some very sore body parts to show for it. How sharp are baby teeth really? I know the answer to that question. She clapped her hands spontaneously last evening.  I have managed a few nights of great sleep. To wake up only twice within a night, is great sleep. I can't wait for her to be a confident, independent walker. Between guests at home, and office and the Figliaization of my life, and marriage, and the race for deadlines, there is some secret lubricant that has kept me sliding off every day into the next.

Possibly inspired by this post , I am wearing funky earrings with a semi-dreary office outfit today.  I guess I could make efforts to get out of the unkempt, cavewoman garb that I seem to be in lately.  Somedays, I am just glad to have been able to run a comb though my luxurious mane. 

- She has finally figured sitting up on her own. She learnt standing (by pulling herself up) faster than this sitting part. But now she is done with both those things.  - She is definitely making me the winner in the first word category. She goes with twisted forms of "Emma, Umma, Mumma" when she is vying for my attention and desperate. She also has a seemingly fixed word that she repeats often.  - People come through doors. Papa comes through the door. Awesome. I call his name, and she fixes her gaze in that direction, knowing that's where the grand entry of the Dad will be from. - We are doing better with food now. September was hard because of all the snowballing things from her viral fever. We are again back to three feeds of solids in a day.  - DH and I continue to have communication issues, and we are surviving it. - She now has two shining bottom teeth, that are in different stages of eruption. And there is unexplained crankiness since yesterday,...

( This post is a rare one. Not because it is fantastic, but because it was composed a while back and not published, which is not the norm with me. It's not too stale already, I hope. ) I have been trying to articulate my thoughts over this for a while, but nothing seems very eloquent to me.  I was asking someone (of a previous generation) about how they managed with the lack of sleep, and how they coped with the general disruption of everything post-baby.  "We never thought about whether we will be able to cope or not. We just did what had to be done. The baby needed to be fed, changed, rocked to sleep. If it was hunger, there would be food. If it would be sleep, there would be a lullaby. There was no coping. There was only doing." ## One way of looking at this is thinking of how low one puts oneself in terms of personal space. The other way is that there is nothing but 'surrender', as the underlying emotion. There is involved detachment. The wo...

I have been under stress (surprise!), mostly mental and emotional because of my workplace. I have been in this place for a few years now. People have come and gone. I used to lunch with a group of women, and the composition has fluctuated almost all these years. Two of the women I was will-call-you-from-home close have now left and joined other places.  I was on leave, and then I came back. New faces, old faces; New equations, old equations; New interactions, old interactions. New rules of the game. In the old days, we gossiped but also had other topics to spend precious lunch minutes on. Now it's changed.  I kept sticking to the same group after I came back, but suddenly it is too many like-minded people together. Suddenly, the gossipers have been bolstered with new people who are eager members of the bitchf.est tribe.  I enjoy gossip. But I can't tolerate constant tearing down people. Especially when my perception of what people were like collided dir...

Upon visiting the hospital where CBub spent her last days, I couldn't help but get the feeling again to barge into the NICU, fully expecting her lying in the incubator. That image of seeing her on it, is pasted on my brain. The machine sounds are pasted on my brain. The impulse, and indecision about how I touched her are pasted on my brain. I still keep thinking over which finger was it. And then I realize that it does not matter because either way it belonged to one of my hands, and either way, I was never able to scoop her up, squeeze her or gaze into open eyes. I never saw the pupils of my child dilate. I never saw her eyes blinking. She never felt the warmth of my arms, and when Figlia squirms and tries to get free of that hold, I enter an alternate universe of how she never got to choose. My daughter never touched my breast. I did not get the chance to soothe her, or hear her scream her lungs off. Through poops and vomits and sleepless fidgeting, and crying and laughing...

My modesty is inspiring, I suppose. Anyways, some days I really dig deep into the dish of my weaknesses. Saturday morning, I ended a conversation with dear hubby with "Shut Up" and then snapped back on the phone when we were talking in the afternoon. Both the conversations were in different contexts, and the first one was specifically around Figlia. Somehow I am stacked against perceived inefficiency these days. If I want you to do something, you must drop everything you are doing instantly and scoot straight to the instruction I have given. If you don't, you will hear my lungs heaving and watch my ears giving out steam. I am turning that awful. I noticed what I was doing, and sort of controlled this tendency. Which means that the heaving and the steam still happen, but only  if reasonable time has passed and you are still singing in La La Land rather than doing what I want you to do. The other thing is that somehow, mentally the following statements in various s...