Vein in Vanity

I was still in high school when my sister had her first baby. As cliché as it sounds I was over the moon. Consequently I played mother very enthusiastically and believed I was doing much better than her biological mother. Ergo the idea that I was great with kids took root. Now about 20 years later, it turns out I was right. I am great with kids. Just not with my own kids.     Your children are essentially you. My children are a smaller but truer version of me. And no I am not proud. When I see my daughter handling a tense situation the way I would (which is lose my mind and wring my hands) I do exactly that - lose my mind and wring my hands. Because why would I want her to inherit the “bad traits”? As parents aren’t we trying to raise children who are well rounded and happy? (Read don’t mess up as much as we did.) But children learn essentially through imitation. What they see they reproduce till they are grown enough to have an opinion of their own.  Now th...

What’s it with women and adjustment? Maybe its the way we are made. But frankly I think a lot of us overdo it. Most of us have internalised the idea that to live well we need to be accepted. To gain this acceptance we conform, adjust, alter and accommodate. It is only natural to seek approval for the things you do, from your family and friends but the transition from approval to acceptance is often quick and uncalled for as it is unpleasant.  This is what happens with women in marriage. A perfectly independent and confident woman,  when living with a new family, suddenly remembers too well, the chalk talk she has been given by her mother, grandmothers, sisters, aunts and everything with the double x chromosome in her body. Then she is transformed into this docile and gullible pup ( for want of a better word) that can fetch, sit, stand and OBEY as required. After a while, when what is new becomes old the curtain drops, realisation dawns and we wonder- why? what for?  ...