When I was young, and asked to serve guests, I routinely forgot to stir the Rooh Afza, which meant that they had plain pink water till they reached the bottom of the glass and then finished with a very dense, sweet, rose-flavoured gulp. A guest once bemusedly showed me the extra flavouring I’d dropped in his glass of soft drink – the bottle cap.
Suffice to say, I’ve never been a natural at “khatir-daari” – or into housework or cooking as such. I was reminded of this by a somewhat forgotten fridge magnet that I’d given to my husband as a souvenir in our early-married days, proclaiming: “I understand the concepts of cooking and cleaning, just not how they apply to me”. And I couldn’t help thinking how different I am now. I bake, cook and, and…. I’m erm… well, I’m house-proud.
It seems that I’ve become obsessive about things that I was oblivious of in my child-free days. The kitchen needs to be cleaned and everything put away in a certain manner. The laundry needs to be done at specific temperatures, hung to dry and then folded and stored in a particular way. Marks on the walls, crumbs on the floor, bits around the dustbin, a watery soap dish, glass/mug rings on the table, etc. – stuff that I’d have little problem ignoring really piss me off now. This does not bode well for a mother who is going to have two young boys running wild in the next couple of years.
Recently, two incidents made me wonder if I was overdoing it and how aware my lovely Littloo is at the tender age of 18 months. Is my control-freakery palpable or am I feeding him the stereotype of a woman being in charge of tidiness and nourishment?
The other day he was standing with Darling Husband, unwrapping a KitKat. I was sitting nearby, but was on my laptop. He unwrapped the bar and extended the wrapper towards me, although his father was right next to him. DH sniggered. I took the wrapper and dismissed it as Littloo being a good boy for not throwing it on the floor.
But then, something else happened.
The boy was in his high chair drinking milk, DH was nearby with his cup of tea. DH said “Cheers”, and the little boy immediately understood and raised his cup towards his Papa. Delighted at this amazing feat by my son (kidding, alright!), I picked up my glass of water and said “Cheers baba!” and extended my glass towards the boy… He looked at me and then took a sip from the glass and turned back to his father. DH could barely suppress his snort of laughter as my expression curdled.
So, let’s get this right: while his father is the one to have fun with, is his mother’s sole purpose to serve him, cook for him and clean up after him?! Since I guess I’m mostly the one responsible for this, I did start to wonder when I had gone from doing literally eff-all all day to doing the laundry, baking bloody healthy veg muffins and cleaning scuff marks from walls in my spare time!
Motherhood does mean that some tasks cannot be postponed or ignored because you have young people dependent on you. But the way you execute them is under your control, right?
And perhaps it is because you lose so much of yourself in motherhood (temporarily, I hope!), that controlling mundane household chores is a means to assert yourself? Or maybe this is a case of motherhood dragging me into adulthood, into looking after not just myself but my family, living out the reality of the “me” becoming “we”.
It sounds intimidating, a bit like a life sentence, if I’m honest – but nothing that I’m sure a bit of perspective-tweaking can’t fix!
(The author is a former TV journo who stays in London. She became Mama to baby Leo in April 2015. She started this blog as an outlet for the intense, roller-coaster experience that pregnancy and motherhood entail. And for recording the journey with as much humour – black mostly – as she can cram in. Oh and dispensing free gyan as she ticks the been there, done that milestones.)
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)