A new name for an age-old job

I think we’ve found Baby A’s new nanny. Her name is Carol. Guess what our old nanny’s name was? Carol. Neat huh? And we didn’t even deign or design it that way.

Years and years ago when my sister and I were little kids and we lived in Vizag, my dad worked for a British company—I gather the pay wasn’t as much as it ought to have been (vide my parents), but because it was a socially prominent position the job came with a huge house on five acres, and a household of servants, including a butler and a cook. At some point the offices of the butler and the cook conflated into the same person—albeit still with differently accessorized personae. When we moved in, an aproned and hatted Raju would cook in the kitchen and wear a poly-silk vest to wait on us at the table as a butler.

But Raju had another persona too—a secret one that kept him absent while he got drunk off company liquor. Consequently he was fired. His family who’d lived in one of the outhouses on the property had to leave too. And I remember being sad about that because I used to play with his kids a fair bit when my mom was too busy to catch me.

I’ll say this here: My mother is mellower now. Kinder, more generous, more charitable, very humanitarian. Back then she was a fresh twenty-something who suddenly had to learn to socialize with the extremely wealthy and big name royalty and foreign visitors. In old-fashioned middle-class families like that of both my grandmothers’ the domestic help were addressed with relationship tags like “bai,” or “akka,” or “amma.” But details like that must have been difficult to remember in a new milieu where no one lived with their in laws and everyone seemed impossibly sophisticated. So my sister and I were taught to call the domestic help by name. “Baldly” as some of the older ones would complain to us when we were older.

But that week, I was still five, my sister still two, and my parents were interviewing other candidates for Raju’s job—it was openly just one slash job by now. And they liked this man whose name happened to be something rather long. Something like Panduranga or Pentalayya. And their final question to him was this: Would he be willing to have us call him Raju? Because, you understand, the kids are used to calling for Raju and your name is so long?

The new "Raju" took the job. But he was quite bitter. Whether because of the mandated name change or for more secret reasons, I don’t know. He taught me a couple of snide things to say to my parents when I was six (I remember telling them that money comes and goes at God’s will—a lesson we sure learned later if not right then) and tutored me to pretend that I was having a past-life memory (I had to pretend that my doll was a baby I had lost in a previous life—the scenario came from a Telugu movie). My parents breezed by both of those incidents without paying them any attention. I was relieved about the snide thing but quite crushed about the possession thing--I was kind of looking forward to seeing them shocked and scared. But I guess my line delivery and acting skills have always been consistent: abysmal.

Anyway… hopefully, we won’t have to deal with all of that with the new Carol. For one, her parents already had named her Carol. And for another, she's way more propertied than we are :).

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HD Resolutions

Work with my new advisor towards the earliest completion of my dissertation and defense. And in the meantime write more and send out more submissions.

Take a multivitamin and eat an apple a day.

Meditate more, do yoga more.

Make the kids giggle more.

Stretch before running. Run longer distances.

Go outside more. Even when it’s cold outside.

Grow more plants—may be non tropical ones for a change.

Give more. Monthly instead of occasionally for starters.

Choose to cook new rather than tried dishes; feed more people.

Help Big A with the laundry.

Get more kids in the house. Hurry the adoptions; take in exchange students, something.

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Goodbye to all that

There's too much i've been holding on to from the past year. Too many fears, too many unhappinesses, too much imbalance, too much holding back.

And though we had a wonderful time at new year's road tripping and partying all day and all night (with me quaffing halfsies of champagne at lunchtime), i didn't get a chance to say goodbye to 2008.

We got home and it was same old Baby A daycare where she has been getting sick every week since we put her there, same old Li'l A school where he's in all the gifted programs but trying to drink Ensure instead of eating real food, same old me wondering where all the daytime goes and why i haven't published more.

Thankfully, being South Indian, i get another chance at a new start for 2009. Tomorrow is Pongal, the start of Thai, the most auspicious month in the Tamizh calendar. And today is Bhogi, the pre-Pongal bonfire of the the past year's dross. So i've made a metaphorical little bonfire of my fears and my regrets and let them go. I'll post my resolutions here tomorrow. But in the meantime, we're saying goodbye to daycare and have started interviewing nannies, we've made an appointment for the poor eater to get food counseling/therapy at the Children's Hospital and i'm going to write and submit more.

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Happy Stuff Day

(Offering me something wrapped in bathroom tissue as he exits his elementary school building.)

Li’l A:This is for you! It’s a present.

Me: (cautiously)

Oh, nice. What is it?

Li’l A: It’s a piece of ice! It has two ants and a worm frozen in it!

Me: Uhm. Really, you keep it, you’ll like it better.

Li’l A: You don’t want it?!? But why? Why don't you want it?

Anyone?
Anyone?

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What seems to be the problem, Officer?

First thing today, I was face to face with a suspicious policeman with a flashlight in the freezing darkness. Also, hopping from foot to foot because I was still in the tee and chuddies I’d worn to bed. The saving grace: I only had the top half of the Dutch door open, so hopefully he didn’t see the superman logo on my undies--my superhero identity is safe.

A few minutes earlier, the security alarm had gone off and I hadn’t responded promptly enough because I thought it was just Big A letting himself in after work.

A few months earlier, Big A started grumbling about how installing a security system in a college town where crime is non-existent “is a waste of resources.” He still occasionally grumbles. But little A’s bedroom is on the floor below us and the baby’s room has a large window, and I’m paranoid.

And the policeman--he was so disappointed when I told him it was a false alarm. A few minutes earlier, he'd looked as eager as Li’l A at three, who would describe how he would “pachack” the bad guys as i put him to bed.*

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* This was in Oxford, in the tiny little two-story flat the college had given the two of us. The sad, cold, cell-like, lonely flat that for some reason I just made myself really nostalgic about.

My daughter is a fighter not a lover

The first day, before i realized Baby A was sick, i was congratulating myself on having changed a squirmy baby most likely to push you away before you even got to the beginning of a satisfying hug into a champion snuggler. Because all she wanted to do that first day she was sick was collapse on my chest and sleep there like she hasn't done since she was a mewling infant a whole year ago.

And then the next day when Tylenol couldn't tamp down her fever of 105 and i rushed her to the Urgent Care Clinic, she still clung to me, but she was all, "I'll cut you, beyotch" to any nurse or doctor who even dared to look at her. And she fought them on everything. Not just intrusive stuff like droppers of medicine, or the temperature thing they stick in your ear, but everything. Even the stethoscope. I really never thought anyone would object to that. 

It took two nurses plus me to hold her down while another nurse... checked her ears. At the end of which, my daughter was still yelling curses in toddlerese and i was crying snottily, and the nurse said: Well, it's a good thing she's a fighter.

And i think i was crying not not just because my baby was sick and i had to hold her down while strangers did something she didn't want. It was also because my head is sick with the things i read and hear, and holding her scared, fighting body reminded me of all the terrible things that happen to babies and children and girls, because you can get three other people and hold them down.

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I thought i would dream about the dead bird

I didn't dream about the dead bird. 

But i kept on and on thinking about it. Because although i try not to believe in signs and portents, my attempts at rationality disappear when there's a very sick baby in the house. 

Long ago, before i had--or even thought about kids of my own--i knew a Tamizh teacher who told me that she got pregnant after/because a house sparrow built a nest inside her house. And a couple of years ago, i even blogged about how house sparrows were trying to nest in our home, but i didn't think about any connection until i was well and truly pregnant with Baby A. 

So now we are at the point where i have a very sick baby lying face down on my chest and a dead house sparrow lying on the window sill with its legs curling upwards pathetically. And i keep on returning to that equation and assuming the worst. Later on, my mother part coaxes, part bullies me past this image. 

My mom: Did Big A dispose of the bird?

Yes.

Oracle Mom: I think that means you've just rid yourself of any danger stalking Baby. 

I'll take it.

FTW Mom: Also, remember that your first house sparrow didn't actually nest or hatch in the house. It wanted to, you chased it away, and you still had a baby.

I love her. And i have to admire the way she can turn anything on its head with the best contemporary theorists.

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