Vocal Mama

I like watching Bollywood movies and the typical rom-com which depicts that you find just the perfect guy/girl, get married, and then live happily ever after. But well, is that true? I guess not. Based on my experience, finding the seemingly perfect guy/girl is only the first step of the relationship, dating and getting married would be second and third but the saga does not end here, the happily ever after takes a LOT of efforts from both sides. When I met my husband for the first time, I loved everything about him. When I started dating him, I still loved most things about him and then when we got married and were on our own, I realized that I like some things about him, and I hate some of his habits to the core but knowing the things that I did not like about him did not really affect my love for him. Love is and should be irrational, crazy, and unconditional otherwise its whole idea is defeated. The maximum arguments that we had in our marriage were within the first year. Even thou...

Birthdays have always been a huge deal to me. I will tell you why. As far as I remember, starting from my third or fourth birthday, in the morning, I used to get up to birthday music getting played in the background. My papa had made a customized audio tape to play on my birthdays. I remember that tape being played each year on my birthday till I turned around 15 and moved out of the home. Later I used to get dressed in brand new clothes to go to school and in the evening, we used to have a party at home. My mom used to cook all the delicious food and my papa used to decorate the room for party. He even used to craft a crown for me to wear sometimes. My parents raised me to treat birthday like festivals. I remember asking papa why we celebrate birthdays with such zest; he said, “it’s a way to be thankful for all you have achieved last year and to enthusiastically welcome the next year of your life.” Once I grew up, the method of celebration changed but celebrating birthday in full swin...

When Yuvaan (Y) was small, he used to love wearing clothes with footballs printed over it. With time, his choice of clothes kept changing. Since last 2 months or so, he has been obsessed with the spiderman. He loves how spiderman dresses, jumps, and talks. He likes other avengers too, but he insists to dress-up with something spiderman-ly (spiderman or his web printed over it) only every day. Well, this spiderman saga was found cute by us initially. We bought everything spiderman-ly for him; be it clothes or shoes; this story is not about how we are spoiling our little son (haha) but is about him pulling through something truly unexpected. Midst of the spiderman saga, I bought Y a new water bottle and since Spiderman print was not available, I got him a blue color water bottle which had a small boy wearing Captain America shield printed over it. When the bottle arrived, Y was elated to receive it. As I said, he adores all kind of avengers. He took it to school for a week or so and insi...

I moved to Mumbai at the age of 21 for work. After settling down in the rented apartment and basic sightseeing I started mingling up with my flat mates. As I am an extrovert, making new friends was fun. Within a couple of weeks, I grew close with a couple of my flat mates. One day while cooking I cracked a joke; a new friend of mine (P) laughed and said that my jokes are exactly like one of her friends who also happens to be a Punjabi like me. I jokingly asked if she is talking about a boy. She said Yes and I said, “I think I should meet him then”. P took this conversation seriously. Coming weekend, she went out with her set of friends, came back home, and asked me if she can give my phone number to the Punjabi guy. I smiled and said I am not sure. I really do not remember why but I asked her if I can share my sametime ID instead. People who do not know, sametime was an internal portal of TCS where people could chat/share stuff; it was basically like MS teams. She said okay! This Punja...

After facing the global pandemic in 2020-2021, 2022 was a breath of fresh air for most of us.  January  2022 started with my whole family getting infected by the omicron variant of COVID. We combinedly took a week to recover. January ended with me consulting a therapist for the first time ever after struggling around the fact of my dad’s demise for 8 months and also while celebrating my mom’s first birthday after my dad’s passing.  February  began with S and I celebrating our 8 th  meeting anniversary and us celebrating my mom-dad’s 31 st  wedding anniversary (again a first after dad’s passing) and ended with a refreshing trip to Rishikesh.  March  brought a little joy through Holi. Last week of March 2022, I started going to the gym and consciously trying to heal/get over my grief.  April  as always was one of the best months of the year. I celebrated my 30 th  birthday and then our 6 th  wedding anniversary. Also took a short...

 Do you know that there are 5 stages of grief? I only knew about it when my papa passed away and I could not feel better even after months. The stages are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They say depression is the longest stage and I have lived through it so I will agree. After 9 months of my dad’s passing when I did not feel better and met a psychologist, she confirmed that I am going through the longest stage of grief and there is no other way to get out of it than feeling my deepest sadness. She gave various advices which she said would help; crying out as much as I want was the top most. Since I was in a bad state, it was easy to follow her topmost advice.  After a month or so, I decided to give working out a chance. I had read that its good for mental health. I thought if nothing than I will at least have a better body and thinking that I started working out in March.  Initial days were okay. I used to think about my dad all the time while wor...

Sometimes, we gotta understand that some of us are naturally the givers. It normal for us to keep giving. Giving makes us happy and content way more than the receiving does. We are the ones to drive and thrive the relationships. We are the cool ones. The live and let live ones. The ones who cut a lot of slack. The ones who get energy from making someone happy.  Needless to say that a lot of times, we get very little in return and although we should not but we feel bad about it. We (of course) can’t expect people to treat us the way we treat them; not everyone has the same heart so inspite of getting hurt at times and again; we keep giving, cutting the slack, forgiving, and forgetting because we are the givers and we know no other way.