fatherhood – Page 3 – Pertinent Observations

Songs for sleeping

As I write this, Berry is fast asleep next to me. It took a long time, and a fair amount of effort, to get her to sleep, as has become the routine everyday. Finally, she fell asleep as Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb was playing. This was no coincidence. This is part of a careful sleeping routine I’ve developed over the last month.

It started with a bit of what I can describe as “reinforcement learning”. We were on the way to the airport sometime last month and Berry was getting cranky in the cab, so I started singing to her. On a whim I started singing Pink Floyd songs (maybe because I know the lyrics of a lot of them). She passed out halfway through Wish You Were Here. A couple of hours later on the flight, she felt drowsy during the same song, and then slept when I started singing Comfortably Numb.

So every time I found that she would sleep to a particular song, I started singing that the next time I was putting her to sleep. Obviously it didn’t work like that – her falling asleep was a random event, which I chose to infer was a cause of my singing. And I’m someone who gives lectures on not mistaking correlation for causation.

Singing got tiring, so soon enough I had created a playlist. The playlist to which she invariably falls asleep every day nowadays is called “lullabies“.

Here is what it looks like.

Now, you might just think that it’s a random list of Pink Floyd songs, with one LedZep song thrown in. It’s not. The songs have all been carefully selected.

The first set of songs have been chosen because they are heavy on lyrics, don’t have long instrumentals and are easy to sing along to. These are songs that play when Berry is about to fall asleep, and I sing them while patting her. And invariably she falls asleep during this time.

The next few songs are long soothing songs, that will keep her asleep until she gets into deep sleep. As I write this, Atom Heart Mother is playing.

But getting Berry to sleep is not easy. I don’t start the evening with these lullabies – they come in only when I know that Berry is sufficiently sleepy and will sleep in the next 10-15 minutes (like the closer in Baseball). When she comes into the bedroom, I start with this playlist that I created a couple of months back, and which I had then named as “Berry’s Education“.

As you can see, Black Sabbath’s Iron Man heads this list. It is Berry’s favourite song. In fact, when she gets on to the bed, she says “has he lost his mind, appa”.

This playlist is not intended for sleeping, and I randomly choose a few songs to play. When Berry gets into the next stage of her slumber, where she is now ready to sleep, but not sleepy enough, she needs some lullabies. And it’s the time for Iron Man again, except this time it’s the version by RockaBye Baby.

This is the song she used to fall asleep to when she was a baby, from the time when she was barely a couple of days old. And from there I let the album play for a while until she is really ready to sleep. Which is when the lullabies playlist takes over.

As you might imagine, having multiple playlists is a pain. I normally use the kinda old iPad4 to play, and changing playlists means entering my passcode, going up one folder and then going into another playlist. You might wonder why I haven’t created one integrated playlist.

The reason is randomness, on two counts. The amount of time Berry takes to pass each stage of sleepiness is variable. So I don’t know how long I will have to play each kind of music. Also, she is moody and the way she reacts to each kind of music is a bit random. So I need to switch back and forth between the kinds of music, and so having multiple playlists is better.

On good days, I will have my phone with me, which makes it easier to switch playlists (one hand operation, touch ID to login etc) – though it’s invariably the iPad that plays the music.

So as you might have figured out, putting babies to sleep is not an easy task, which is why I’m sharing my method with you, in the hope that it might help you. What do you do to make your baby sleep?

Mini me

Two years back when we were expecting, relatives would wonder if it would be a “mini Priyanka” or “mini Karthik”. This was their way of wondering whether it would be a girl or a boy. Having spent the first half of the pregnancy in Spain, we knew that it would be a girl, but in most cases refused to answer this “mini Priyanka/Karthik” question.

In hindsight, it’s a bit annoying – to assume that the kid is the mini version of the parent she shares her gender (or should I be saying “sex”, as a Brooklyn-based friend recently remarked) with. What makes people simply assume that a girl should be like her mother and a boy should be like his father, when it is clear that irrespective of sex (take that Brooklyn, I got it right) the kid receives the same number of chromosomes from each parent.

And as it happens, our specimen is a clear exhibit of being like the parent of the opposite sex. She might be a mini Priyanka in that she is a girl, but that and her Bambi eyes apart, she is uncannily like me in pretty much everything else. In fact, upon seeing her as a baby, her godmother remarked that “Karthik could have married an old shoe and still produced a child that looks exactly like this”.

Save for her eyes, she looks nearly exactly the same way as I did at her age. Just like me, she’s outgoing, and likes to go aimlessly wandering (to go “on beat” as we would say in Kannada). For the large part, she likes the same kind of foods that I like (a notable exception is her affinity for Maggi). Just like me, she looks out for cashewnuts or peanuts in whatever food she is having.

This list is a long one, with the list of her similarities with her mother being much much shorter.

And on top of all this, she is also attached to me. She doesn’t let me get out of home without insisting that I take her along (I clearly remember doing this a lot to my father as well), while she happily says “bye” to her mother. When she wakes up, she starts screaming “appa” and “ka” (short for “kara” which is short for “Karthik”. it’s a nickname used mainly by my wife and one of my cousins). She calls out to me from the other end of the house in a way she’s never called out to her mother. And she doesn’t trouble me like she troubles her mother!

I had been told by several people that fatherhood can change you, but one thing I hadn’t bargained for was that it would make me more emotional. But then I guess having a little version of you who you can totally empathise with around can do that to you!

How children change your lives

Over the years I’ve developed this fairly elaborate process of eating curd rice. First I serve myself the rice, and then allow it to cool. Then I pour over curds, and then mix it with the rice. I then serve myself pickles, which should be served on TOP of the curd-rice mixture, and then mix it in. Then I serve myself a fried snack (such as spiced groundnuts or bhujia or a mixture) on the side, and vary the quantity of it I take with each spoon.

So I’m at home with Berry today and decided to have curd rice for lunch. I’d just served myself the rice and curd and mixed it when she decided to wake up from her late-morning nap. Realising she was hungry I decided to feed her first, and first fed her rice mixed with a dal I’d made for her. The normal course of action would have been to then feed her curd rice, and then get on with my meal.

But then I was hungry and feeding her curd rice before I ate it would have made me impatient. In any case, I figured that since we were both going to eat the same thing, I might as well feed her off my plate (I’m quite used to sharing utensils with her, though I haven’t been able to ask her what she thinks of it – she doesn’t speak yet). The only problem was that I could mix in the pickle, since that would have made the mixture too spicy for Berry.

So for the first time in I don’t know how long, I mixed my curd and rice and moved it to one side of the plate. At the other end (our rice plates are elliptical), I served myself a little pickle on one side and mixture on the other. As soon as I started eating, Berry made her way to my knees, and we started eating alternate spoons – I’d add pickle and mixture separately to each spoon of mine, and feed her the curd-rice mixture alone when it was her turn.

She ate well enough for me to get myself a second helping! The only downside of this process (feeding her off my plate) was that I couldn’t measure how much she ate, but I’m not too obsessed with that.

When they tell you that you never know the ways in which kids can change you, I’m not sure people were talking about the way they eat curd-rice!

2/13: Motherhood statements

It was a casual chat we had sometime during Pinky’s first year of MBA. We were talking about making babies, and started wondering how it would be to make one right around the time she graduated. “Imagine going up to receive my degree with a big belly”, she’d laughed.

Incredibly, it happened. When she came to Bangalore for an extended break after her exchange term at U. Michigan, we gave it a little go. And on New Year’s Eve 2015-16, if my calculations are correct, the artist first known as Larvesh came to be conceived.

Larvesh became Pupesh a month later when the pregnancy app told us that the embryo had got attached to the walls of the uterus. Three months later, when we found out it was a girl, Pupesh became Pupeshwari. And she came out as Berry in September.

IESE is situated in the hilly Barcelona suburb of Pedralbes, and unless you have your own vehicle, you need to climb a steep slope to get there. Pregnancy during the last term of school was hard for Pinky since it meant climbing the hill from the bus stop each day. Having to frequently use the restroom didn’t make matters any easier. Yet Pinky didn’t give up.

She actually took extra credits during that term of MBA, since there was a course she really wanted to do. She remained active as ever in extra curricular activities, organising two mini conferences. Given that Pupu was a tiny baby, nobody at IESE had an idea of her existence!

Pinky got her post-MBA job offer deferred so that she could have the baby (effectively getting unpaid maternity leave), but was determined to work in the gap between her MBA and job start. And so Marriage Broker Auntie happened.

The day before Berry was born, Pinky was taking calls on her hospital bed, advising clients on blading strategies. After Berry was born, Pinky refused to go to her parents’ (the standard practice in Karnataka), arguing she wouldn’t be able to work from there. Indiscretion on my part meant Pinky had to take care of Berry alone for long periods, and she did that without complaining, while running Marriage Broker Auntie on the side (it was only recently when I started looking after Berry by myself that I realised how exhausting taking care of a baby can be – my respect for Pinky shot up on that first day of house-husbanding).

A lot of people wonder how we’ve managed to move continents when Berry is so small, especially when Pinky has started such a demanding job. However, Pinky has managed the whole process so well that I scarcely imagine that we’ve done something people find so challenging – it all seems so normal to me (my part in the move and settling here has been minor – I continue to be a lazy bum and put NED)!

Back at the IIMB reunion in December, which Pinky and Berry attended for one evening, one of my friends commented how she found Pinky to be “so sorted” (in terms of motherhood). Coming to think of it, that’s an excellent summary of how Pinky has handled motherhood.

1/13: Leaving home

Letters to my Berry #6

So you turn half today. And I’ll let you write this letter yourself, since over the last week or two you’ve been trying to get to the computer and operate it.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BRLXXXSDbdp/?taken-by=skthewimp

OK I gave you two minutes, but unlike what you’ve been doing over the last one week, you didn’t try to get to the computer today, so I’ll write this myself.

This last month has been one of big change, as you made your first forin trip. It was a mostly peaceful flight from Bangalore to London, via Dubai. You hardly cried, though you kept screaming in excitement through the flight, and through the layover in Dubai. Whenever someone smiled at you, you’d attempt to talk to them. And it would get a bit embarrassing at times!

Anyway, we got to London, and we had to put you in day care. The first day when I left you at the day care for a one-hour settling in session, I cried. Amma was fine, but I had tears in my eyes, and I don’t know why! And after two settling-in sessions, you started “real day care”, and on the first day it seems you were rather upset, and refused to eat.

So I had to bring you home midway through the day and feed you Cerelac. It was a similar story on the second day – you weren’t upset, but you still wouldn’t eat, so I had to get you home and give you Cerelac. It was only on the third day, that is today, that you finally at ate at the nursery!

The biggest challenge for us after bringing you to London has been to keep you warm, since you refuse to get the concept of warm clothes, and refuse to wear them. And so for the last 10 days you’ve not only got a cold and cough for yourself, but you’ve also transmitted it to both Amma and me 🙁

London has also meant that you’ve started travelling by pram regularly, though after one attempt we stopped taking it on the Underground since it was difficult to negotiate steps. When we have to take the train, I thus carry you in your baby carrier, like a baby Kangaroo!

In the last one month, you’ve also made significant motor improvements. You still can’t sit, but you try to stand now! It seems like you’ve taken after Amma and me in terms of wanting to take the easy way out – you want to stand without working hard for it, and sometimes scream until we hold you up in a standing position.

Your babbles have also increased this month, and we think you said “Appa” a few times in the last one week in the course of the last one week! Maybe I like to imagine that you say it, and maybe you actually call me that! It’s too early to say!

Finally, one note of disappointment – on Monday when you were all crying and upset and refusing to eat at the nursery, I rushed to pick you up, and hoped to see you be very happy when you saw me. As it turned out, you gave me a “K dear, you are here” kind of expression and just came home! Yesterday you actually cried when I came to pick you up!

It seems like you’re becoming a teenager already! And you’re just half!!

Letters to my Berry #5

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQjvvFkF9sa/

Your biggest milestone in your fifth month is that you started to eat. Beyond the milk that Amma directly provided you, and the formula milk that we had started you on after the doctor’s advice, the fifth month was when we started giving you what I called as “real food”.

You started with this thing called “ragi cherry” which I personally didn’t like too much – it was made out of a flour made by mixing ragi and other cereals with some nuts, etc. We would make a porridge out of this with some sweet element, and the first time I ate it, I said it tasted like soapnut powder.

Initially you made a fuss eating the ragi cherry, but to my utmost happiness, you seem to be yet another banana lover. After only two or three times of my feeding you bananas, all I had to do was to take your silver bowl and spoon and make mashing noises – and you’d immediately start salivating.

This was also the month where you started implementing Amma’s old company’s slogan “moving forward”. Given the size of your head you had trouble holding it up, but you invented your own way of moving forward while still keeping your head to the ground. I tried without success to draw an animal analogy – sometimes it seemed like you were like an ostrich with its head buried in the sand. Ranga said you were like an Aardvark, moving forward with your head on the ground.

One night I’d left you on the carpet with my house slippers at the other end of the carpet. I hadn’t been gone for a couple of minutes when I saw that you’d somehow traversed the length of the carpet and was about to eat my slippers! Yet another day, we had left you in your bouncer and gone somewhere, and you were trying to slide down. Amma stopped you, but the next time you attempted it, we let you slide. And we were amazed with the poise with which you got down to the carpet, never once worrying us that you would hurt yourself!

This was also the month when you attended your first wedding – your aunt Barbie’s. You were such a centre of attraction during some of the pre-wedding festivities that you were tired and slept through most of the wedding. Halfway through both the wedding ceremony and the reception, we sent you home so you didn’t tire further. So apart from the photos taken at the beginning of each session, you unfortunately don’t appear in any photos!

And of course, the biggest event in your fifth month was that you got named. While you had been named even before you were born, and your official name had been submitted to the municipality when you were a day old, we did a small naming ceremony for you. There, the family priest Nagabhushana Sharma made us give you several names.

So there was the maasa naama (month name) which the priest himself decided. You were “Shachi”. Then there was the nakshatra naama (star name), which we had to come up with on the spot with the given starting letter. The starting letter for you was “Go” and Amma quickly came up with “Goda”, which she later elongated to “Godavari”.

And there was the vyavahara naama (trade name) which was supposed to represent one of your ancestors. The day I first met Amma in 2009, she had told me that she wanted to name her daughter Rukmini, after her grandmother. So there was no doubt about this one.

And then there was the nija naama (real name), which of course had to be Abheri. I had to shout it loud three times, and I did that with my mouth close to your ear. Thankfully you didn’t get startled – suggesting you like your name, and you won’t hate us later in life for it!

This is a monthly series that ordinarily runs on my wife’s blog, but since I wrote it this time (for the first time), I’m putting it here.

Earlier editions:

Letters to my Berry – Month#1

Letters to my Berry – Month#2

Letters to my Berry – Prelogue

Letters to my Berry#4

Distance between Indian fathers and kids

As a rule, Indian fathers are not terribly close to their kids (my father was a major exception to this rule), and I lay the blame on a “traditional practice” in Indian families.

This is the concept of “baaNantana” (don’t know words in other Indian languages) where the woman goes to her parents’ house for childbirth, and stays there till the child is a few months old, before returning to her own house. And this contributes to several reasons which contribute to distance between fathers and children.

For starters, the woman’s house and her parents’ house may not be in the same city or region, putting a physical distance between the father and the baby. Thus, for the first few months of the baby, there is little contact between them, and when the baby finally goes to live with its father, he is already a distant figure. And unless the father makes special efforts to bond with his child, this distance is only bound to grow.

Secondly, in India, childbirth and associated activities are generally seen as a primarily female pursuit. It is the mother’s parents (primarily mother’s mother) who accompany her to the hospital, and be there with her until childbirth. The father generally only makes a guest appearance where he appears, carries the baby for a bit, hands it back and disappears.

And then every subsequent activity of the mother is directed by her own female relatives, and the father has little to do in the process. Even if he is physically proximate to the baby (by virtue of living not too far from his in-laws), the “culture” of baby-related activities being female pursuits means that he is not a primary actor any more, and he generally prefers to hand over the baby to a “female elder” when it cries, rather than to learn to pacify it himself.

Given this background, I’m really impressed with the efforts of CloudNine, the hospital where my daughter was born, in involving the father in the delivery process and beyond. For starters, the hospital insists that the father be present at the time of delivery, and cut the baby’s cord. While this was always known, what I was pleasantly surprised was the process afterwards.

A couple of hours after my wife and daughter came to their room, a nurse materialised, offering to teach her how to breastfeed. I readied myself to be sent out for the process, but there was no such attempt. In fact, the nurse seemed encouraging of me watching on – the hospital has perhaps realised (maybe belatedly in the Indian context) that the wife’s boobs are unlikely to be a novelty to a man, and so there is absolutely no reason to send him out!

On the other hand, the joy in watching your child feed directly from your wife is totally unmitigated!

Then later in the evening on Thursday, another nurse materialised, to take my wife for bath. That time, both my motherinlaw and I were there in the room with her. The nurse presently put my motherinlaw in charge of looking after the baby, and asked me to accompany her to help give my wife a bath. When my motherinlaw gestured that she could help out with the bath, the nurse firmly said that she wants me to come.

Apart from the hospital’s efforts I’ve been doing my own efforts to make sure I bond with the baby. Rather than sending off my wife to her parents’ place for baaNantana, I’ve instead convinced them to come live with us for a month, to help us deal with the new baby. I’ve learnt to carry the baby in different ways and change diapers, and I’m trying to learn to calm the baby when she cries (lack of boobs is a big impediment in this process).

And I’ve found that the more involved I am with the baby, the more responsible I feel in taking care of her and looking after her. The more I’m sent to “do my thing” while others take care of the baby, the more I feel like handing her off to someone else when she cries, rather than pacifying her myself!

Thinking back, perhaps one reason my father was able to bond with me was that he lived fairly close to my maternal grandfather’s place when I was born, and even though my mother was away on “baaNantana”, he made sure to come see us for a few hours every day, and carry me. Hopefully I can propagate this process with my daughter!