Halfway Updates

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Come Saturday and I'd have completed 20 weeks. Phew. Another 20 weeks to go before this tiny person decides to make an entry. Probably, after the baby is born, I'd wish I could stuff it back inside just so I can sleep like a buffalo in a swamp the way I do now. What a lovely mummy I am.

But right now, I just want the rest of the 20 weeks to fly by quickly. Currently, I'm in that state when astute ladies are able to figure out I'm pregnant and the mean ones wonder if I'm just fat or if that's a baby bump. I'm not dressed in some Cannes-like gown, so it's not all that obvious yet. There was one woman who was staring at my stomach so pointedly when I was on my walk that I breathed out completely and gave her what she wanted to see. Yes, I'm round. Thank you very much.

One of my neighbours gave me her home BP monitoring device and it turns out that there is nothing wrong with my BP at all. Possibly, I need to have my head examined, but that's about it. It's usually around 110/70, which is ideal for the 2nd trimester. I also made M check his BP on that to make sure that it wasn't giving me false readings. Yippie.

I now sleep with pillows all around me like a zamindar. I've also eaten so many dry fruits and nuts by now that I feel like I'm from Sowcarpet.

I have my 20 weeks scan scheduled for this Thursday. Obviously, they won't tell you if the baby is a boy or a girl, but maybe I can make out from the screen, eh? I've been talking to this baby all along under the assumption that it's a girl. What if it ends up being a boy? I hope he doesn't feel bad about it later in his subconscious mind and all :|

That's all for now. I'm going to be conscientious and reply to comments on the previous posts. Bye!

Moi and Ma Doc during ma Dialysis

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Everybody on my Facebook friends list is getting engaged or married these days. Which makes me wonder how appallingly similar all our lives are. I mean, here we are thinking we're each unique and what not but we're all doing the same thing at the same time, aren't we? What a moment of epiphany, children.

On M's friends list, everyone's putting up baby or grihapravesham pictures. I go to the profile pages of my younger cousins and they are all putting up pyjama party pictures where everyone is making faces. With captions like "Sakshi, Bhakshi, Mokshi, and moi"...or "Madness!". Or some pictures at a pizza place that a poor waiter snapped while everyone was grinning consciously and touching their hair. On the profile pages of people my parents' age, I find tonnes of spam that the poor aunties and uncles invited upon themselves by clicking on Facebook viruses.

I wonder what my Facebook page will be like forty years from now. Since we're the generation that logged in before we had children of our own, our friends list will hopefully not have only sons and daughters. Maybe forty years from now people will be posting pictures of their new knee caps. Ma sparklin fake teeth. Baldness! and so on. And instead of pictures with spanking new spouses, we'd all have pictures with our doctors. It's funny to imagine how many old people are going to be there on my friends list. All these nattily-dressed dudes and dudettes....how shall you grey and wrinkle with every new profile picture? Of course, I'd be old too and I'd be embarrassing my children with pictures of myself in frilled frocks and hats. Maybe they'd block me and I'd start a community, the equivalent of an on ground Old Age Home, on Facebook. Maybe I'd then meet a tall dark thaatha there and have a scandalous online affair.

Life is full of possibilities.

Sloth Bear

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I went to Mahabaleshwar for two days and then to the zoo the next day. We saw a pair of sloth bears that I really liked. One of them was slumped against a wall and the other sort of got up but then slumped back again as if it had asked itself, "What's the point?" M and I spent the rest of the day pretending to be sloth bears (like you pick up the newspaper but don't read it because everything has already happened and so on. Very grown-up we are that way). There were leopards, tigers, a balled-up porcupine, and a fancy peacock, but my favourites by far were the bears. I felt a bit sorry about the deer though. Nobody really wants to see them.

It rained and rained and rained in Mahabaleshwar and I was so happy I could finally sit in a car for three hours straight without having the urge to throw up. The only room available in MTDC was an economy one. It had a tin roof and the rain chattered through the night like an annoying maami. I pretended I was a poor soul in a Tinkle story with a leaking roof and all and rubbed Axe balm all over my nose to stop the slightly suspect blankets from grossing me out with their musty smell. There were some hundred gymnastic monkeys around and it was a joy watching them.

My BP shot up for some strange reason the last time I was at the gynec's (maybe because I also got a Tetanus injection!) and she sent me to take three more readings the same week. Which of course, was not good for my BP since I spent the whole week Googling for everything horrible that could happen to me. I'm now the world's most informed person on Hypertension. The readings kept fluctuating and finally, my gynec made me lie down and said she'd call me in after a while. I sort of dozed off because it was all cool and dark. Then she suddenly came out of nowhere and checked my BP and it was perfectly fine. I think I should exchange my head for a new one and stop being such a paranoid parimala. I've promised M that the next time I have my BP reading taken, I'll pretend to be a sloth bear and just hang my arm out like I couldn't care less. I'll be all slumped up and my BP would be a dreamboat.

The Importance of Baby

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I was reading this post on IHM's blog. Of course, I'm now well past that stage when people are advising me to get pregnant. I have delivered the Good News at long last, much to the relief of my neighbour in Chennai who was apparently doing japam to make sure that I got pregnant. If only she'd been born in the days of Dasaratha, there would have been no need for silly yagnas and mango divisions. The NCERT should seriously consider including her pious face in the chapter about reproduction in their Biology textbook.

But my neighbour is, of course, just one person. Even if we assume generously that something is mentally very wrong with her, there are so many others for whom other people's pregnancy is of great interest. I've had arguments about this with my mum many times. According to her, in India, it's not impolite to take an interest in other people's lives. So somebody being interested in why you are not yet pregnant is merely an extension of that interest. I asked her if people would have had the same concern if say, I suffered from Piles. Would my neighbour do japam for my Piles problem or ask my mum about the status of my Piles every time she met her?

People also take great delight in discussing the inability of somebody to have a child. In fact, this whole baby-making process is seen as some sort of achievement and if you fail in this department, you have failed your life's purpose. On the other hand, if you are some 90-year-old man who got his 70-year-old wife pregnant, you can come on the news turban and all and tell us that drinking camel milk every day is what made you achieve this brilliance.

Why are we so baby-crazy as a nation? Surely, it's not because we love children. I mean, a baby in India has it pretty hard. As soon as it's born, it inherits a bunch of mean relatives who will make an inventory of all that's wrong with it. Then the baby has to be pierced, head-shaved, fed leghyams and subjected to drishti-pottus and such like till it's old enough to attend Pre-kg tuition classes. After that, of course, the baby becomes disillusioned in life and no amount of moral stories it was forced to listen to will come to its aid. Baby's flat and out, y'all. Flat and out on a big fat book on Mathematics by RD Sharma.

I suppose this baby-obsession comes from the fact that most married people don't know what else to talk about other than their children. Since the majority of marriages in India take place with the bride and groom not exchanging a word before the wise elders have solemnized everything, it is not difficult to see why this is so. The baby becomes a common point of interest and the marriage itself hinges on it, more or less. For the rest of their lives, parents can discuss what needs to be done for the baby and what the baby needs to do. Baby, do engineering. Baby, get married. Baby, have a baby. Etc.

So no baby means, marriage falling apart for most people. Now you see why a Piles problem cannot be treated on the same sacred platform? I suppose this is why every time I arrived in Chennai minus M and minus a pregnant tummy, people assumed I was getting divorced. The baby is like an insurance in your marriage. Even if everything crashes on a couple's head, they can always stay together for the sake of the baby.

Phew. And to think my No.1 reason for having a baby was that babies are funny.