I was into the fourth year of my marriage and for the past year, I so wanted my life to expand and my family to have a new member. I had been trying to conceive and had undergone treatment for PCODs - and conception. All the injections and pills I was taking were not only making me fat, but also making me depressed and my sole purpose seemed to be to have a baby. I was unemployed and the repeated patterns of waiting every month to miss my period and then finding a red spot signaling the beginning of another month of waiting depressed me even further. My relationship with C was deteriorating as he felt helpless and was himself tired of giving samples every month at the infertility clinic.
All this went on and on until one day I woke up with a realization that I didn't want to live my life like this and I had to do something about it. I resolved to get my life back. I quit treatment, applied for a job, applied for a course in management, joined a gym, adopted a dog and started living life in the present. Within a few months, I was happy and had moved on. My extra busy routine - early morning gym, day job, evening college and lovely romantic week nights and weekends ensured that I didn't waste anytime thinking of having a baby. I made new friends and was feeling on top of the world.
And one fine day I felt giddy and nauseous. I hadn't even realized that I had missed my period by ten days. A home pregnancy test and a visit to my aunt (a gynecologist) confirmed that I was pregnant. My Aditya was on his way to fulfill my wish to be a mother.
After a fairly smooth nine months, Aditya came into our life on 15th June. If born 35 minutes later, we would be celebrating his birthday on 16th June. The doctor who delivered him called him the 'precious baby'. His birth brought so much joy in our family- my parents and in-laws and Cs grandmother were the happiest. We faced a small hiccup when I fell sick about six weeks after he was born...probably an infection I got from the worst deluge that Mumbai had faced in the year 2005.
Aditya has been the most effective teacher in my life. He taught me to be a mother. He has been a major participant in all my trials and errors. Has witnessed my frustrations and triumphs, my love and sadness, my continuous fight with the system for a better learning system. He has seen all my vulnerabilities and has borne the impact of all my mistakes and yet 'I mean the world to him'. And today, he rejoices in my happiness, feels concerned when I am having a bad time and is super patient with me. He has struggled with his agency, his identity and his understanding about himself and the world around him. He too has faced tough times - especially when he has had to share me with his siblings, when I pushed him to do things he didn't want to and when I couldn't empathize with him and truly understand everything he was going through.
He was four years old when we had shifted to Mysore and had enrolled him for kindergarten program with one these preschool chains. Three months of school and I had realized the mistake we had made by enrolling him in a chain school with a highly rigid and overtly standardized curriculum. I remember defending him during a meeting when the teachers complained that he had all his alphabet formations wrong and always disturbed the class by walking around in between sessions and not wanting to do what the teacher had planned. I had then learnt that he needed customized learning.
His next stint was at a international school and later in a new initiative started by a friend. He was the youngest in class and yet was way ahead of what his classmates were learning. He was skinny and frail and soon his heftier classmates started using their size to bully him and play pranks on him. For a long time, I didn't understand and always blamed my little boy for letting his classmates get to him. I had also joined his school as a teacher and often took the side of his classmates - in the fear of seeming partial - one of the biggest errors in my life.
As he grew older, I shifted to Bangalore along with my two boys and pets as I wanted to learn and educate myself on 'learning and education' and joined a program at Azim Premji University and enrolled both my children at a chain school. This decision was based on convenience more than my children's needs. However, we were lucky as both my boys had really sensitive and caring class teachers. Aditya did well in academics and slowly gained confidence in extra curricular activities too. Being a bright child, his teachers pushed him into various competitions including Olympiads. I was also taken by these exams. Looking back, I feel, it was me who found the Olympiads interesting and I took it for granted that my son would love them too. However, he didn't care. He did like solving practice questions, but wasn't happy about the exams especially when the examination center was an unknown space. Now when I reflect back - I realize that he didn't feel the need to demonstrate his intelligence. It was my need to see him achieve and get rewarded - this was my second biggest mistake.
My boys attended this school for only one academic year. C got transferred to Pune and I got pregnant with my third and we both took a decision to shift to Pune. The third pregnancy was a tough one. C too had received a raw hand at work and was constantly on tours or working late hours and once again my convenience took precedence and we enrolled the boys at the Pune branch of this school. The boys spent two years there - Aditya completed grade 4 and 5 while Siddhu completed grade 1 and 2. Both did well academically, had friends, had lots of fun with them and we lived in a lovely garden flat. While my new baby (Tara) took most of my time, Aditya struggled to keep his connection with me intact. He did have his moments of fights with other children and difficulty with expression of anger. My third biggest mistake was to justify why I couldn't spend more time with him and expect him to understand.
As I slowly recovered from the stress of having a third baby and all the postpartum depression and the emotional chaos in me - I started finding my hold over my life - I started day care for my baby for a couple of hours everyday - just so that I could get some me time, I started exercising and planning for my career. At this time we found a new initiative that promised 'joyful learning' and self directed learning. Aditya immediately wanted to be part of this initiative. I experimented and failed at teaching at a regular mainstream school and as a family we felt that this new initiative was a good choice.
The following two years were a lot of fun at this initiative. I joined them as a part time facilitator and we all were in a happy space. However as the initiative became popular - it changed to accommodate the needs and fears of many parents and brought in a curriculum and became more like a school. As it changed more and more into a school like system - Aditya started having problems. He lost interest in academics - got bored and wanted his freedom. He also started keeping to himself and spent most of his time in his room and I felt a loss of connection with him and became very anxious about his well-being. At the same time I was finding it difficult to adjust to using textbooks to facilitate learning and to constantly monitor children on the standardized learning outcomes.
Our life took a 360 degree turn when we came across a poster announcing a camp for unschooler, homeschoolers and self directed learners. Aditya attended the camp as a self directed learner along with his friend and our journey into unschooling began. We all took our time to understand and completely surrender ourselves to the new found path. We initially experimented with starting a learning center, only to learn that the learning center and its demands were actually taking me away from what my children wanted and their need to just be and heal from everything that a controlled environment had done to them so far. We soon closed down our experiment and decided to give ourselves completely to the freedom and autonomy of our children, see them as alive individuals and not mere beings who had to be told and molded into the system.
Its been three years into this journey and never once has it occurred to us to go back to our earlier life choices. Today Aditya is 15 years old. He has grown to be a mature individual who loves his own company and space. He treasures his privacy. He is loving and caring toward his siblings and is now giving some thought to his future in the sense he is thinking about what would he like to do when he grows up. He enjoys cooking and he loves digital character sketching. He games for fun. He does have his moments when anger takes over and is learning to use safer ways of expressing his frustration.
He usually doesn't like having his pictures taken and today he willingly posed and happily gave me permission to post a picture of him and me on Facebook. He stayed awake the entire night as he knew we were planning a surprise for him and had a big smile when he saw his surprise - a drums theme cake and his favourite sushi and momos.
I look back at all those 15 years and recall so many fun and lively moments with him - his obsessions with his learning, his curiosity and the way he never gave up until he felt satisfied with whatever he was engrossed in at the time. It was such a joy watching him spend time with snails, draw spiderman faces over a hundred time, make me read certain books over and over again and watch reruns of movies such as Lion King, Cars, Dolphin Tales, Spiderman. His interest in volcanoes, dinosaurs, snakes, wildlife, beyblades was unbound and kept him occupied for hours and days together.
It has taken sometime for both of us to recover from the damage of our earlier notions about parenting and all my earlier mistakes. And today on his 15th birthday, I feel super proud and completely in love with my boy. I wish him all the strength and patience and love to experience things as they occur in his life and I wish that he emerges through all his life experiences as a happy and satisfied individual.
This is the boy who taught me to be a mother !
