Ma, Baba and the Juggler

Striking the work-home balance! First written with friends in the Ochre Sky writing community.

Photo by Zak Neilson on Unsplash

At first, I started out to be my father. Wide-eyed, I watched him – larger than life, always moving, always surging ahead, chewing up and spitting out any challenges that life dared to throw at him. We would brush our teeth together sometimes – little me standing in front of him at the sink, looking up at the mirror, incredulous at how much foam he could work up with his brush. He controlled everything and everybody unapologetically. In return, he doled out generosity and warmth and took people on long drives or filled the car with kids and drove them to a circus or a picnic. He told children how to study for their exams. He told adults how to run their businesses. I thought I would grow up and be like him – the big boss at the office and at home. Calling all the shots and telling everybody what to do. Hot meals would appear magically on the table and I would devour them with gusto and get on with the next important job at hand.

But Being Baba proved to be difficult with a house to run and a baby to bring up. There seemed to be too many ‘little’ things to get done all the time - the more I did, the more there was to do. And when my parents-in-law came to spend their sunset years with us, I had to up my game. I had to be motherwifedaughterinlawandsuperwoman all at the same time. Every day. Day after day after day. Being Baba turned slowly around and shuffled away with his head down - Being Ma would come in MUCH more handy, I thought! How foolish I had been! It was Ma I should have shadowed as a child. I should have stood and watched her cook, the pallu of her saree tucked in at the waist, the bangles on her wrist pushed back on her arm, rolling out rotis. I should have stood and watched how she stocked the fridge. How she ironed our school uniforms. How she packed our tiffin boxes. What had I been thinking?! She had tried to teach me sometimes, but I had told her that my sights were elsewhere – that her dreams were not my dreams – that I would do grander things with my life. Now, it was her that I called to ask how to quiet a crying baby, how to know when the rice is cooked, how long to soak the rajma, how to clean the windows. And she never brought up the grand dreams I had once seen. She only praised and encouraged and motivated me endlessly. And both my parents opened their hearts and their home to my child.

But once I had learnt how to quiet a crying baby, how to know when the rice is cooked, how long to soak the rajma and how to clean the windows, I was beginning to get seriously bored. My brain needed to chew on some of the world’s problems. And so I worked part-time. I dusted down the lessons I had learnt in my Being Baba days, and worked hard. So I took the best of my Ma and the best of my Baba, and I learnt to juggle! Office timings and family meals. School concerts and team meetings. Weddings and Word documents. Pest control and Excel sheets. I flung all these balls and a thousand more up in the air and kept them up as well as I could. And when, every once in a while, a couple of them crashed unceremoniously to the ground, I just flung them back up in the air again if I could catch them before they rolled away!