குழல்இனிது யாழ்இனிது என்பதம் மக்கள்
After a span of time that seemed unfathomably long enough that we had very nearly forgotten how we used to feel during our carefree pre-pregnancy days, your mother and I arrived at Kaiser Permanente, Santa Clara on the evening of 6th of November 2018. We had packed a suitcase with clothes and essentials for ourselves and a little diaper bag for you with teeny tiny things that we thought may serve you well in the hospital. Your mother had been planning and buying essentials for you weeks ahead of time - bottles, onesies, drying rack, boppy pillow - oh the list is endless. Your mother was a planner. She delved in the details. And she was in perennial battle with time itself as she'd anticipate things in her mind. If there was bliss coming, or pain, or blizzard or sunshine, she liked to know things days ahead of time. She wished for omniscience. It was a little trick - her very own way of defeating the perpetuity and enormity of the universe while carrying the burden of a trivial life in all its fragile mortality and powerlessness. She'd vividly imagine, virtually orchestrate and live through fears of many a dreadful thing in her head much earlier and longer than the actual thing itself would last, if at all it would even occur.
Pregnancy was full of feats, dear one, some of them little by no measure. Evolution so has it that a mother's physique is pushed to its very limits to pave the path to further life. More often than it would seem, the older life form is rendered moot with the arrival of the new. A parent is disposed to irrelevance once it creates and serves the new life form up till a point where it can carry on its own. It is a story of birth, pain, irrelevance and even death, all intertwined in an intricate act of nature that is also often without mercy by its very design (Did you know that the female Enteroctopus dofleini starves itself for months and dies in an ultimate act of sacrifice guarding the eggs until they hatch?). The gene happens to be the mastermind, ruthlessly selfish and mindlessly progressive and our bodies, merely tools - constantly churned out, reconstructed and obsoleted. A mother is physiologically and psychologically stressed as her muscular, skeletal, circulatory, digestive, respiratory, excretory, hormonal systems and varied bodily functions are all tossed around creating imbalance. Pregnancy is nothing less than a war in the womb. You'd do well, little one, to know that your mother braved some of the relatively worse physical changes pregnancy brings in a woman. Her arduous journey with pregnancy end to end is well worth an account of its own. I'd spare you the details of how we landed in the United States after a full 30 hours of stabbing round ligament pain, not to mention the added anxiety of being in a 15 hour flight not being able to comprehend the severity of the situation and the uncertainty of establishing our medical support base in the new country over the next few weeks to come. While she was still carrying you, your mother sifted through a hundred listings to zero in on a rented house, bought and even shifted furniture, transitioned into her new role at work, made a hundred rotis each week, vacuumed the house, decorated it laboriously and in a final act of irony, also worked hard to celebrate your upcoming arrival in a baby shower which really should have been her time to feel pampered. Up until she became your super mom, she was a super woman. I served by her side, lending a hand in cooking, driving, relocating and handling loads of paperwork. During this phase, I was mostly consumed by my own emotions dealing with the immensity of changes that relocating countries had brought in. In some sense, your mother braved her pregnancy emotionally by herself too.
In a confusing mess of a system overload that lasted for months together, a notable positive physical change you effected on her was as to how she grew the kind of gorgeous hair that would make many a woman burn with envy, thanks to all the hormones you had her pump. In her third trimester, she looked like the perfect portrait of a mother descended from God's very own heavens. She was nothing less than a masterpiece of creation, carved and perfected over millions of years of evolution in the most delicate entropy-defying act of all that exists. Time had worked immensely patiently as a most endowed artist - painting, erasing and repainting every tiny bit in its uncountably infinite attempts of trial and error over eons with mind blowing precision, ingenuity and extreme resourcefulness. And your mother was an outcome of one such evolutionary path of gloriously elaborate and perfected design. She glowed in utter feminine beauty while you were curled into a fateful breech position in her absolutely round pregnant belly. All our faculty and stretch of imagination are to no avail to assimilate the magnificence and complexity of all the beauty that had materialized. It couldn't have been a mutation that created your mother. It must have been a miracle. You may want to dismiss these as words of a man smitten in love, but see her for yourself and I'm sure you'd concur.
If this weren't the beauty of a mother in all its glorious form and function, what is?
On the outset, your mother and I were not the 'baby-obsessed' people. We couldn't stand children that threw tantrums. We couldn't empathize with parents that celebrated babies incessantly and shared their love effusively in public. We judged a few to be over-protective and spoiling. Since the earliest days of my youth, I'd plan elaborately for every flight travel to shield myself off crying babies in the aircraft. I'd pick seats away from the bassinet area, pick airlines where I knew fewer new parents traveled and obsessively check my earphones while I packed for travel. The last thing I'd do before departing to an airport is to disconnect the charger from my iPod. I'd strive to keep it fully charged and play it all through the journey to shut off crying sounds from nearby zones. I made the most inhuman baby jokes that would throw your maama off his chair. I detested the NRI married youth in the US who had their parents shuttle across the globe against all odds to play nanny for their younglings. In more abstract younger days, I had theories on how it was inhuman to bring another life into this planet at a time when 7 billion human lives were eroding its resources at an exponential rate. In my mind, it only added to negative contributing bits in the overall equation of earth's intricate ecological balance. Even at a personal level, we were acutely aware of how our individual lives were to end as a new life starts. You'd be born and we'd start becoming irrelevant.
Given our pessimistic start and bleak view of things as such, it was needless to say we were anxious about losing sleep and getting sucked into parenthood. To be fair, we had definitely wanted to have a child for a long enough time and had even imagined you in the abstract in all its cliched romanticism. We had named you, visually daydreamed moments with you in all vividness and pictured you holding our fingers and walking towards a fading horizon thinly veiled by hazily colored distant skies against a most romantic sunset. You were our heart's darling, a symbol of our love. It was just that all the elements of negative pressure surrounding parenthood were in truth overwhelming and they constantly hung like an invisible dagger above our heads. We were worried about post-partum blues, our own marital health while we'd rear you and started gearing ourselves up for what seemed would be the biggest hardship of our lives. The anxiety was truly epic in proportions. To make matters worse, no new parents around served to be a 100% inspirational. Sparse positive notes were always lost amongst intimidating statements they'd tell us about child rearing. It was clear to us. The change was universal and absolute. It was to be permanent, immense, irreversible and demanding to a degree that we could never prepare ourselves for.
It was under such more or less dreary circumstances that we stumbled our way into the November of 2018. This post, however is the strange account of how our very psychological state of joy transformed with your birth in a manner completely unexpected. For, until you were curled up in the abstract insides of the womb, unseen and unheard, we were wrapped up in our own self-conceived loosely founded ideas of fear. From a cell to embryo to fetus to newborn, you had been going through your own magical transformation starting from division and differentiation of your little microscopic cells to developing the most complex organs and bodily functions, a heart that seldom paced below 150 beats a minute and most importantly, a journey of your own survival struggle while we had been all anxious on the outside. This month has mysteriously brought out emotions that we never knew existed in us and has trumped our expectations on what was supposed to be difficult and what would be easy. The first month that was supposed to be one of the toughest phases post birth of a newborn for parents has turned out to be rewarding and memorable in strange and surprising ways. We seem to have been tossed into a journey of self discovery that something tells, has only just began. We have worked really really hard, but strangely, it does not feel so. I often watch things as they unfold and catch myself in surprise as I see the kind of things I have started doing with you around.
So, fear not, Arya. From what may seem like a drab and difficult start from your confused sounding parents, we are about to jump into a most magical tale - the story of your birth and an account of the days that immediately followed when you were a tiny little newborn on this planet, and how you grew on to inhabit our home and our adult hearts in the shortest moment of time. I'll strive to stick to facts and objectively portray this journey with less sentimentalism (in efforts to not sound obsessed like I had judged a few others parents to be), but I can't promise I won't be smitten by your absolute innocence in parts at least. Of late, I have started fearing that time would run out and I'd fail to capture this most precious memory well enough while we just continue being sleepless and madly busy. Hence, I resorted to writing it down after literally having stopped writing for years. The memory of your arrival and first days is just too beautiful for me to lose and I want to pen things down while they are still fresh and vivid in my head.
And so, here it goes, Arya - the story of your birth. And we pick this narrative up from a few months before you arrived.
மழலைச்சொல் கேளா தவர்
- திருவள்ளுவரின் திருக்குறள் /அறத்துப்பால் / மக்கட்பேறு / புதல்வரைப் பெறுதல்
Translation:
"The pipe is sweet, the lute is sweet," say those who have not heard the prattle of their own children
- Thirukural / The Wealth of Children
PREFACE
After a span of time that seemed unfathomably long enough that we had very nearly forgotten how we used to feel during our carefree pre-pregnancy days, your mother and I arrived at Kaiser Permanente, Santa Clara on the evening of 6th of November 2018. We had packed a suitcase with clothes and essentials for ourselves and a little diaper bag for you with teeny tiny things that we thought may serve you well in the hospital. Your mother had been planning and buying essentials for you weeks ahead of time - bottles, onesies, drying rack, boppy pillow - oh the list is endless. Your mother was a planner. She delved in the details. And she was in perennial battle with time itself as she'd anticipate things in her mind. If there was bliss coming, or pain, or blizzard or sunshine, she liked to know things days ahead of time. She wished for omniscience. It was a little trick - her very own way of defeating the perpetuity and enormity of the universe while carrying the burden of a trivial life in all its fragile mortality and powerlessness. She'd vividly imagine, virtually orchestrate and live through fears of many a dreadful thing in her head much earlier and longer than the actual thing itself would last, if at all it would even occur.
Pregnancy was full of feats, dear one, some of them little by no measure. Evolution so has it that a mother's physique is pushed to its very limits to pave the path to further life. More often than it would seem, the older life form is rendered moot with the arrival of the new. A parent is disposed to irrelevance once it creates and serves the new life form up till a point where it can carry on its own. It is a story of birth, pain, irrelevance and even death, all intertwined in an intricate act of nature that is also often without mercy by its very design (Did you know that the female Enteroctopus dofleini starves itself for months and dies in an ultimate act of sacrifice guarding the eggs until they hatch?). The gene happens to be the mastermind, ruthlessly selfish and mindlessly progressive and our bodies, merely tools - constantly churned out, reconstructed and obsoleted. A mother is physiologically and psychologically stressed as her muscular, skeletal, circulatory, digestive, respiratory, excretory, hormonal systems and varied bodily functions are all tossed around creating imbalance. Pregnancy is nothing less than a war in the womb. You'd do well, little one, to know that your mother braved some of the relatively worse physical changes pregnancy brings in a woman. Her arduous journey with pregnancy end to end is well worth an account of its own. I'd spare you the details of how we landed in the United States after a full 30 hours of stabbing round ligament pain, not to mention the added anxiety of being in a 15 hour flight not being able to comprehend the severity of the situation and the uncertainty of establishing our medical support base in the new country over the next few weeks to come. While she was still carrying you, your mother sifted through a hundred listings to zero in on a rented house, bought and even shifted furniture, transitioned into her new role at work, made a hundred rotis each week, vacuumed the house, decorated it laboriously and in a final act of irony, also worked hard to celebrate your upcoming arrival in a baby shower which really should have been her time to feel pampered. Up until she became your super mom, she was a super woman. I served by her side, lending a hand in cooking, driving, relocating and handling loads of paperwork. During this phase, I was mostly consumed by my own emotions dealing with the immensity of changes that relocating countries had brought in. In some sense, your mother braved her pregnancy emotionally by herself too.
In a confusing mess of a system overload that lasted for months together, a notable positive physical change you effected on her was as to how she grew the kind of gorgeous hair that would make many a woman burn with envy, thanks to all the hormones you had her pump. In her third trimester, she looked like the perfect portrait of a mother descended from God's very own heavens. She was nothing less than a masterpiece of creation, carved and perfected over millions of years of evolution in the most delicate entropy-defying act of all that exists. Time had worked immensely patiently as a most endowed artist - painting, erasing and repainting every tiny bit in its uncountably infinite attempts of trial and error over eons with mind blowing precision, ingenuity and extreme resourcefulness. And your mother was an outcome of one such evolutionary path of gloriously elaborate and perfected design. She glowed in utter feminine beauty while you were curled into a fateful breech position in her absolutely round pregnant belly. All our faculty and stretch of imagination are to no avail to assimilate the magnificence and complexity of all the beauty that had materialized. It couldn't have been a mutation that created your mother. It must have been a miracle. You may want to dismiss these as words of a man smitten in love, but see her for yourself and I'm sure you'd concur.
If this weren't the beauty of a mother in all its glorious form and function, what is?
On the outset, your mother and I were not the 'baby-obsessed' people. We couldn't stand children that threw tantrums. We couldn't empathize with parents that celebrated babies incessantly and shared their love effusively in public. We judged a few to be over-protective and spoiling. Since the earliest days of my youth, I'd plan elaborately for every flight travel to shield myself off crying babies in the aircraft. I'd pick seats away from the bassinet area, pick airlines where I knew fewer new parents traveled and obsessively check my earphones while I packed for travel. The last thing I'd do before departing to an airport is to disconnect the charger from my iPod. I'd strive to keep it fully charged and play it all through the journey to shut off crying sounds from nearby zones. I made the most inhuman baby jokes that would throw your maama off his chair. I detested the NRI married youth in the US who had their parents shuttle across the globe against all odds to play nanny for their younglings. In more abstract younger days, I had theories on how it was inhuman to bring another life into this planet at a time when 7 billion human lives were eroding its resources at an exponential rate. In my mind, it only added to negative contributing bits in the overall equation of earth's intricate ecological balance. Even at a personal level, we were acutely aware of how our individual lives were to end as a new life starts. You'd be born and we'd start becoming irrelevant.
Given our pessimistic start and bleak view of things as such, it was needless to say we were anxious about losing sleep and getting sucked into parenthood. To be fair, we had definitely wanted to have a child for a long enough time and had even imagined you in the abstract in all its cliched romanticism. We had named you, visually daydreamed moments with you in all vividness and pictured you holding our fingers and walking towards a fading horizon thinly veiled by hazily colored distant skies against a most romantic sunset. You were our heart's darling, a symbol of our love. It was just that all the elements of negative pressure surrounding parenthood were in truth overwhelming and they constantly hung like an invisible dagger above our heads. We were worried about post-partum blues, our own marital health while we'd rear you and started gearing ourselves up for what seemed would be the biggest hardship of our lives. The anxiety was truly epic in proportions. To make matters worse, no new parents around served to be a 100% inspirational. Sparse positive notes were always lost amongst intimidating statements they'd tell us about child rearing. It was clear to us. The change was universal and absolute. It was to be permanent, immense, irreversible and demanding to a degree that we could never prepare ourselves for.
It was under such more or less dreary circumstances that we stumbled our way into the November of 2018. This post, however is the strange account of how our very psychological state of joy transformed with your birth in a manner completely unexpected. For, until you were curled up in the abstract insides of the womb, unseen and unheard, we were wrapped up in our own self-conceived loosely founded ideas of fear. From a cell to embryo to fetus to newborn, you had been going through your own magical transformation starting from division and differentiation of your little microscopic cells to developing the most complex organs and bodily functions, a heart that seldom paced below 150 beats a minute and most importantly, a journey of your own survival struggle while we had been all anxious on the outside. This month has mysteriously brought out emotions that we never knew existed in us and has trumped our expectations on what was supposed to be difficult and what would be easy. The first month that was supposed to be one of the toughest phases post birth of a newborn for parents has turned out to be rewarding and memorable in strange and surprising ways. We seem to have been tossed into a journey of self discovery that something tells, has only just began. We have worked really really hard, but strangely, it does not feel so. I often watch things as they unfold and catch myself in surprise as I see the kind of things I have started doing with you around.
So, fear not, Arya. From what may seem like a drab and difficult start from your confused sounding parents, we are about to jump into a most magical tale - the story of your birth and an account of the days that immediately followed when you were a tiny little newborn on this planet, and how you grew on to inhabit our home and our adult hearts in the shortest moment of time. I'll strive to stick to facts and objectively portray this journey with less sentimentalism (in efforts to not sound obsessed like I had judged a few others parents to be), but I can't promise I won't be smitten by your absolute innocence in parts at least. Of late, I have started fearing that time would run out and I'd fail to capture this most precious memory well enough while we just continue being sleepless and madly busy. Hence, I resorted to writing it down after literally having stopped writing for years. The memory of your arrival and first days is just too beautiful for me to lose and I want to pen things down while they are still fresh and vivid in my head.
And so, here it goes, Arya - the story of your birth. And we pick this narrative up from a few months before you arrived.
It's a girl
Because we came to the US only after your second trimester scan, we couldn't really find out your gender as such. One really couldn't do that in India (I know!), and people there make up their minds on finding out only on the day of birth. Mother and I had dearly wanted a girl child. We went to a gender scan center in Mountain View, secretly recorded your scan as it was showing on the big screen with this soulful music background they had. "It was a girl".
When we stepped out of the center, I lifted your pregnant mother in my arms and we went in circles in the parking lot. We were on cloud nine.
This was not the first time you turned out to be what our hearts desired.
Aloha Arya - A baby shower to remember
Having come far from our nearest and dearest ones, we wanted to throw a nice shower with our friends in the Bay area. Mother had made a bunch of interesting things by hand - a custom photo booth, a gloriously decorated center table with a cute little diaper cake and a whole lot of other things - table centerpieces, hanging decor items and many many other things. We chose a Hawaiian theme , so yes, there were garlands, green table skirts, hula dancer showpieces and so forth.
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| The photo booth that took a herculian effort to setup |
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| The gorgeous diaper cake |
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| How the center table looked |
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| Random capture of some decor on a tree |
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| Welcome board made by mommy |
We threw this party in Braly Park. It was a mildly sunny afternoon. There was a harsh breeze that was constantly threatening to storm into the setup and blow everything away. We had anticipated this and tried our best to set things up accordingly. Loads of friends helped us with arrangements on the day. Your maama had come from LA couple days earlier to join us behind the scenes. Long before the event, your aunt Megha had kicked off major logistics planning help for the event and took care of drinks, return gifts, ladder, decoration table, music and so on. Abhinav, Priyanka and Ranjana (despite her being pregnant herself then) came in early that day and jumped right into the action on the ground. They did loads of decorative stuff - climbing on trees, tying balloons, setting up tables and so on. They also took care of the event photography. Later, our other friends like BK and Walmart friends joined us to help. Udbhav took care of picking the cake from San Jose and ice for the drinks. Radhika took mother for her hairdo and makeup.
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| Your maama from Hawaii, sorry - LA |
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| Ranjana improvised a really fun decorative board |
The custom cake we ordered turned out to be fun. The bottom layer was to be a Hula skirt and the top one decorated pink. We had written 'Aloha - Arya' on it. Fun fact - We had already named you 'Arya' by then. Mother still wanted to be really sure - she always wanted the real best, you see! But I was smitten by your name by then so much that it just stuck. People would make fun of how I never let anyone change it. So, I even wrote a little poem as part of the evite we had sent out - a simple clue, that if cracked would lead to your name.
A girl has no name. Ain't no small deal.
Riddle this one. Reason, Rake and Reveal.
Yes it ain't too hard, Yet a tad bit clever.
A mother needs a blessing. And a little shower.
Riddle this one. Reason, Rake and Reveal.
Yes it ain't too hard, Yet a tad bit clever.
A mother needs a blessing. And a little shower.
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| Aloha Arya |
We had set up our instant cam and clicked some fun photos with hawaiian props.
It later turned out to be crazily windy (our main point of worry) that threatened to storm away most of our stuff but thankfully this was after the party had really died down. We came back home taking back a week's worth of left over food with us.
The baby shower was possibly the biggest event of our lives since we arrived at the US. We spent months planning and executing it. We had spent such amount of time exploring and buying stuff that we altogether abhorred the 'decorative art' section of various stores for a while to come. At the end of all the whirlwind, we started inching in closer to the big day.
-------
Your mother and I would often anticipate the key milestone days and imagine how we'd feel then. The day we saw the blue line in the pregnancy home test kit, the day of the HCG report, the first heartbeat, the day we'd see your face and fingers in the ultrasound, when we'd scan for your gender (we really really really wanted a girl child) and mostly when we'd actually see you the day you were born - what would we feel? Would we cry? Squeak in excitement?
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On the day you'd arrive, she had stayed hungry all day as instructed, which was a tiny feat in itself given how hungry she had gotten with you in the womb. Given her miniscule appetite prior to pregnancy, her bouts of pre-partum hunger are indeed worth noting.
At 1:45 pm that day, your mother gulped two little juice packs as permitted. She'd stay thirsty and hungry for the rest of that day, which was a bit of a pain but still nothing compared to what was to happen later that day.
