The Times of Amma
Honest Dispatches From the Trenches of Motherhood
Chapter 1 — Are we ready to be parents?
A few days ago, someone asked me when I knew I was ready to be a mother, and it got me thinking. I’ve been a mother for over a decade, and it has started to feel like I’ve always been one. When DID I feel like I was ready to be one? I think back to my childhood and the games we played — ‘Office-office’ or ‘Home-Home’ with the play kitchen and the playhouses, and I remember that I loved playing the Mother. Even in the office-office game, I was a working Mother, like my own. Was it society that conditioned me to want to be a mother? I wonder. But I don’t think that’s true. I’ve always loved young children. Being one of the older cousins in the family, I’ve done my share of babysitting at family gatherings, and it was not something I resented. I liked the idea of being responsible for these younger ones and reading them stories, and leading the play. Maybe it was the ‘big sister’ gene in me. But I know that no one told me that motherhood was a foregone conclusion for me by virtue of my gender. It was something that I genuinely wanted in my future. It was just the ‘When of it’ that was unclear.
Life sped off far away from those childhood games. Graduation, Post-graduation, my first job, my second job, fast forward to January 2009. I was newly married and based in Manila in the Philippines. I was unemployed for a bit and in the middle of switching gears to freelance writing. Sagar and I were travelling together and discovering what marriage was all about. All the families we knew in the Philippines had kids or were having kids, and we were the only ones who were dodging the issue. Our friends who didn’t want to have kids said they did not like children or the idea of raising them. Sagar and I were adults who genuinely liked children. When we attended dinner parties, we were the ones who ended up playing the games with the children or at the children’s table, gabbing away with them about books and animated movies. We were just not ready to be parents yet.
We had places to go to. Sagar still worked at night. My freelance writing was not bringing enough money. Our family was far away. We didn’t know the first thing about pregnancy or parenting. We had not even managed to keep a single plant alive in the first two years of our marriage. A million reasons to not be ready.
Armed with these practical reasons to postpone parenthood, we carried on with life. But life, as always, cares diddly squat about your plans.
I still remember where we were when we knew we were ready. We were in our car, the first major acquisition we had made as a couple. We were on our way to Greenbelt, a mall in Makati. The traffic in Manila was doing what traffic in Manila does. It had ground to a standstill. There were buses in front of us puffing noxious fumes of smoke. Brightly coloured jeepneys punctuating the grey, black and silver stream of traffic with their pops of colour. Cars with tinted screens and air conditioning in full blast even though it was January. Not like, the island sun of Manila cared that it was supposed to be sweater weather. My husband’s eyes were on the road, and hands were on the steering wheel, lightly drumming along to a song on the FM station. I had been looking out till I turned to him and said, ‘I think we should start trying for a baby.’
More than 10 years later, I remember the way he raised his eyebrows and turned to me with a smile.
‘What? What brought that on?’
You see, my husband had always been ready to bring a child into our life. His idea of having a child seems to have been from those idyllic Peter and Jane books.
In his parenting dreams, there were always two children and they were already somehow grown up enough to take to the beach, to parks on picnics, to learn ‘fishing’ (even though he had never gone fishing in his life.)
The newborn part, the toddler part, and the messy parts basically were something he had never thought about. And why would he? When do we ever really showcase the less-than-glorified part of parenting?
In any case, his rude awakening was a few months away. For now, he was happy that I was finally on board. I was ready. He asked me what made me change my mind.
‘Well, in my mind, I know this is something I want to do. It has always been a question of ‘when’. The more I think about it, the more I feel like it’s time. I know we have so many reasons to not be ready, but I wonder if I will ever have all the reasons to be ready. As in, how does one get ready for something that is going to unquestionably change one’s life? How does one get ready to jump into the ocean from a cliff? It’s an adventurous choice, and we will either sink or swim.’
And that’s when I knew I was ready. I felt a little less sure when I saw the two lines promptly appear on the pregnancy stick in April 2011. And judging by what lay ahead, the feeling of being unsure was totally warranted.
But that is a story for another time.
