Why I don't subscribe to the martyr mom persona

I fell in love with English literature at the age of fifteen. Two years later, I fell in love with the guy who was to become my best friend and partner for life. I would have been extremely happy with these two loves. Looking around at the lives that I see now, I am extremely grateful that I still have these two  in my life. But time had kept aside a truly wonderful gift for me. At the age of twenty nine, I fell in love again. It was the moment that I became a mother.

Growing up, I was not a very maternal person. I didn't subscribe to all the mushiness associated with marriage and bearing children. I loved my siblings, of course, but I seldom had any affinity for children as such. I would tilt my head and look on curiously when female relatives of my generation played house and found great joy in pretending their ragamuffin dolls were their kids. I'd rather climb trees and dream away in their high branches or immerse myself in a book.

But all that changed when I became a mother. I was brought up to be a career woman, there was no other option available at the time. It was what I was expected to be even after getting married. But it flipped the exact moment that I became a mother. As my babies started expressing their unique personalities, I understood that I could not ever leave them and go to work. I couldn't bear to think of getting to know about all their antics secondhand. I couldn't miss their smiles or tears. I couldn't not be the person to take care of them when they were ill. That is how I came to be a stay-at-home mother (SAHM) despite all the flak that I had to take from my well-wishers.

Yesterday, I watched a video on YouTube: Feminism, Mom and the Game of Chess . The speaker in the video describes his mother in the stereotypical Indian mom way - the mother who cooks four different types of breakfast a day to suit all tastes, the lynch-pin of the house without whom the family has to subsist on Quaker Oats all the time and without whom the house became a pig sty. The woman who gives up playing chess because her husband doesn't allow her to participate in the nationals. Ultimately when the father orders the mother to give up her promotion and get back home, she immediately obeys. It is heartening to see that the son cares for his mother's dreams and wishes, but never once does he say that he offered to help her in her chores, nor did he or his brother learn to cook and clean the house so that his mother could pursue her career and get what recognition was due to her.

Although my decision to become a SAHM was partly unconscious, I was sure of one thing - I would not be a martyr mother. That was a decision I took long ago. I was determined not to become a door mat. So I make one kind of breakfast each day - according to the thing I've made, it might be thoroughly disliked by at least one person in my family. E.g., Kunjunni hates upma, DH dislikes wheat dosa, they both don't like pancakes and Ani hates all vegetables in general. If anyone doesn't like the particular dish of the day, they are free to fix themselves something that they do like. And of course, I make my own favorites sometimes even if nobody else likes them in particular.

When Karthi was being built, the thing I most wanted to get right was the kitchen. I wanted it to be an open-plan kitchen near the living room. DH hated the idea. But I was adamant about that one point. Because I knew that if the kitchen was relegated to an invisible corner of the house, I would be the only one working in it while the menfolk lolled around on sofas watching TV. This was one valuable piece of knowledge I had gained from living in seven different rentals during our marriage of which two had open-plan kitchens. DH and I compromised by having the option of closing off the view of the kitchen from the living room with curtains if required.

So our boys have grown up watching me cook and helping me as part of their daily lives. I have made sure that my kids know the rudiments of taking care of the home. With two boys, it is easier to do all the chores by myself instead of having to direct them constantly. We don't do chore charts and such, but I ask them to clean their rooms, fold their clothes and occasionally do their laundry. Kunjunni has a knack for doing things and a genuine liking for learning how to cook. When I went to the Attukal Ponkala last week, he astonished me by making iddlis by himself without step-by-step instructions from me. He also told me where he had erred slightly, but all of them had a jolly time at breakfast. 

One of the things I love observing while visiting people is the family dynamics, especially in relation to women. Some women are genuinely generous and derive the greatest pleasure from giving away the best of their food to others. Conversely there are also some women who make it a point to choose the burnt, underdone or otherwise imperfect parts of food for themselves and then look about for approval and appreciation from their audience. They make me gag with their piety and their naked approval-seeking attitude. In my family, we share and share alike. Occasionally, if I am feeling very generous, I might give up a portion of dessert. But that is it.

With all the recent interest in mind-body medicine, I have been going through Deepak Chopra's and Louise L. Hay's works on the subject. In the book You Can Heal Yourself, Hay outlines the emotional states that cause different diseases to manifest in different parts of the body. She attributes cancer to resentments, secret grief and hatreds. She attributes menstrual problems to rejection of one's femininity, guilt and fear. Breast problems are directly linked to motherhood issues. Taking everything into consideration, it seems to me that it is important for a woman to make self-loving choices or end up having dire health problems. And from what I have seen of some women succumbing to such diseases in old age, they will be further criticized for being inconsiderate because they never cared for their own health while toiling away for others.

I have really come to love the art of homemaking over the past few years even if I was brought up to look on it as drudgery. I also don't think that my home or garden needs to be immaculate showpieces to show how industrious a homemaker I am. I am not what one calls "house-proud" at all. A decent level of cleanliness, a lot of comfort and personal touches are the things I go for. And of course, I love cooking things that my family loves. I would never have taken up baking if my kids hadn't pushed me into it.

One thing I have come to notice in life is that if you keep constantly giving up the things you like for the convenience of others, they will just take it for granted. So if I feel like going away for a meditation retreat, I inform my family in advance, take moderate steps to ensure their well being in my absence and I go. I don't cook and freeze meals for their use all through my absence. If a literary festival comes to town, I see how I can accommodate it into my schedule without disrupting anything absolutely important, and I go. DH used to see me crocheting and criticize it as a time-wasting activity. But I still do it because I love it.  Being a homemaker is a 24/7 job the whole year through. It doesn't change even on vacations with family. So I deserve such small breaks. 

The martyr thing? Not for me, no sirree!

Hello 2020!!!

Aah, it feels good to be back in blogland! First, let me wish you all a happy new year and decade! Something about 2020, the symmetry of the number may be, gives it a special verve and meaning. It makes me feel that this year will be special! This year will see momentous events! This will be a year of accomplishments and great surprises of the best kind! Talk about being a Pollyanna! 😃

Although 2019 started off for me with a series of health issues and quitting a job, it went on to be one of the best years for me personally. This is the year that marked my return to Art of Living. Today I have completed 250 continuous days of Sudarshan Kriya practice - the longest I've ever done! But the way it came about was truly remarkable.

Having been a stay at home mother for several years, I was totally out of touch with the younger generation. What I encountered in my short-lived job of 5 months was a shocking eye-opener for me. Granted that the 18-year-old young adults I had to teach were among the lowest scorers, the barest scrape-throughs in the current academic arena, their attitude to life was what actually shocked me. They had no respect for teachers, barely stood up or greeted me when I went to class and preferred talking to each other or playing PUBG after bunking classes, grew aggressive and got into fights at the drop of a hat, turned out very poor academic work and were not at all interested in studies. This was the majority section. Then there was another set that was very docile in class - because they were stoned out of their minds! And all these were students whose parents were not well off and had to pay hefty semester fees to get them a degree. Only a handful of girls and one or two boys showed any interest, sense of responsibility or academic promise.

The breaking point for me was when one of the better students took a long period of absence and then came back for her semester exam. Her normally smiling face was swollen and she seemed very subdued. A tearful mother told us that when classes started, she had asked for a smart phone since "all my friends have one". But soon, the use of the phone escalated to extremely long periods of time till she was not sleeping and started showing signs of emotional disturbance. The distraught parents confiscated the phone and it triggered an uncontrollably violent reaction that resulted in her trashing half of their house. She had to be admitted in hospital and treated for withdrawal symptoms! 

I thought about my own kids. We have been doing our best to inculcate good values and keep them away from online games and screen time. Our elder is 15 and younger one not far behind. Within a couple of years, they too will have to go out in the world among such people and technology. How can we help them have a solid base that would stand them in good stead when we are not around to protect them? That is when I talked to my colleague Janu who is an active participant in Art of Living activities. She told me about a course called Prajna Yoga that seemed to fulfill my requirement of a good daily spiritual practice for kids to follow. Little did I know the full scope of the course then - but that is matter enough for another post.

To cut a long story short, I got my kids to do Prajna Yoga, which in turn kindled my desire to rejoin Art of Living. I had done the Basic Course back in 1999. In April 2019, I did its current version, the Happiness Program and started doing Sudarshan Kriya on a daily basis. It was my greatest regret that I had not been able to do an Advanced Course when I first joined AOL and I was able to attend it in August this year in residence at the Ashram at Thiruvananthapuram. I was also lucky enough to attend the Sahaj Samadhi program in November and have been meditating daily since!

After 250 days of practice, when I turned back to look at 2019, the sight truly staggered me. Why? Remember how much I struggle with perfectionism, procrastination and lack of productivity? I was constantly given to just accomplishing whatever was just required for the day and left it at that. Craft projects just stayed in my head and on my computer while my supplies languished indefinitely. I had a plan to update the tired curtains at Karthi and in 2018, bought enough material to sew curtains for the living and two bedrooms. I stopped after making curtains for the living room. And all those bundles of curtain material sat undisturbed for a whole year. And now...

For this Onam, I had a brainwave to sew an apron using the tired and overused apron that I had been using at the time as a template and bought some material for it. To my own surprise, I put my plan to work within just 2 months of buying the material!!!😀 It took me just two hours to complete from start to finish!

And talking about crafts... Here goes my 2019 parade. First, another Anchor long stitch project, now proudly adorning our living room...

Then, a crocheted birthday shawl for a friend (I had planned it for her birthday in 2018)...

An infinity scarf for a young friend in Delhi...

And all this in the midst of handling all the daily jobs at home, getting the kids to do Prajna Yoga twice a day without break, helping out three clients with language correction in their doctoral theses and reading around 140 books. The only thing I didn't do regularly was updating my blog!

Besides this jump in productivity, I have also experienced more joy and fewer black moods in general as well as quicker recovery from colds and fevers. I have also become much more laid-back in general because this academic year my elder is going to face his first board exams and normally I should have been stressed out. But I am not. And people don't push my buttons as easily as they used to. The greatest surprise of all has been the way I've stuck to something good for me for 250 days in a row!

So yes, 2019 has been a great year and I am so looking forward to accomplishing more in 2020! I hope all of you are beginning the new year with great hope and anticipation! See y'all next week!

Yaay! She finished it!!!!

We interrupt the regularly scheduled program to bring you a story of triumph that is likely to get your heart to speed up and your eyes to tear up! 

At the heart of the story is a crafter who loves all craft and hoards supplies, but has a massive case of nonstartitis and procrastination. This May, she overhauled her craft room and in the process, unearthed an Anchor needlework kit that she had bought around... oh just 4 years ago? The autumnal colors had piqued her interest, but the kit had soon been interred in the pile that was in one of her craft cupboards. 

The crafter is inordinately fond of small projects that can be finished in a day or two. She had never been successful with a long haul that would need patient, incremental work day after day. "This time I'm gonna change that," she vowed as she had done several times before. I don't think she believed it herself because somewhere in her mother-in-law's house is a half-finished little doggie that was way more simple to stitch.

Anyway, she brought it down to her writing table and put it in a drawer, adding a pair of scissors to the kit. And as the room painting wound up, she tore open the box, and ignoring the recommended order of completing different colors, started with her favorite color red.

That was it for the first day. She found that it was easier to mark off the areas to be filled by a particular color with a pen so that she knew where to start the next day. She also, not very hopefully, decided to take a picture of each day's progress so that she could look back at it with pride one day - however far in future that would be... perhaps in the company of grandkids?

And then slowly the picture began to grow...

She set a goal of using up a particular length of thread that she was using that day, which took her roughly an hour. She tried to do it five days a week. Sometimes she succeeded, sometimes she didn't. But as a couple of months passed, she found the canvas buckling a bit - no doubt due to uneven thread tension.

Our crafty crafter checked YouTube for a solution because she couldn't put the whole work into an embroidery hoop. After a weekend visit to the local hardware shop for supplies she made this in half an hour! 

Yes, a lap frame! From PVC pipe! And she didn't let her usual process of finding a hundred obstacles in her head to make such a thing stop her. She did all the measuring, sawing and fixing herself! Making snap-on PVC attachments daunted her, so she decided to attach the project to the frame with thread. She also found black cobbler's thread a better option than ordinary sewing thread. Don't ask how she happened to have cobbler's thread in her stash...just take it for granted!

Housework, travel, fatigue and illness interfered with the progress of the project. But she left it in sight on the unused end of the dining table, shrouded in an old towel to keep away the dust. Her eyes fell on it each time she passed through and it even drew her eyes to it when she curled up with a book on the sofa.

Even though she was still taking daily photos, the work left to do often overwhelmed her. In the little places it was difficult to make out where the markings for one color ended. Sometimes the patches in the picture didn't match those on the canvas. Sometimes the colors seemed too garish for her taste - perhaps she would have liked an autumn scene in pastels? She gritted her teeth and went on...

Uh oh! She ran out of dark blue thread for the water! No doubt it was because she was ignoring the instruction to finish each patch of color, snip the thread and then start in the next patch. She just dragged the thread on to the next patch. When she looked at the thread list, she saw that she had completed more than half the colors... That was good! 

Making a note of the shade she would need to finish the dark blue patches, she left them bare and went on with the other colors...

She even became bold enough to use long and short stitch when the kit admonished her to use only long stitches... Take a close look at the light yellow in the sky...

Meanwhile she bought a new skein of the dark blue. But nearing the end she kept finding tiny little patches she had missed out on when using another color. So each day before threading the usual length of thread for the next day, she snipped off little lengths of other colors to fill in those patches.

And last week she suddenly realized that she was down to the last color - white! Energized by the finding, she put in unheard-of double sessions for a day or two until day before yesterday, the last white stitch was made and a frantic search for any more bare patches of canvas ensued.... Then our crafter, forgetting her advanced years and the fact that she had only recently recovered from a bout of dengue, executed a few war whoops and danced around the dining table.

It had taken her just 3 days short of six months to complete! 

She asked me not to show you the next picture, but I think it will be good for her perfectionism. As I told her repeatedly, her work is not going to be submitted for a needlework competition to need an immaculate backside...

Readers, she is cringing with embarrassment. You will be happy to know that she was so chuffed by her accomplishment that she went straight to her craft stash and pulled out a quarter-finished project that she has had... oh only since 2006...

She started on the yellow flowers and realized why she had put it away years ago - the motifs are tiny and the stitches proportionately so. It makes her go cross-eyed even in  broad daylight. So she has decided to complete the current bird, and save the rest of the Aida cloth for some other freehand project.

But true to form, she has her sights trained on some drool-worthy counted cross stitch on Amazon since Anchor doesn't make them...

and this...

Happily what with exchange rates and import duties, they are currently out of her budget. So, with a sigh she has dismantled her PVC frame and put it away for the next project. Let us look forward to the framed Perfect Paradise and the two completed birds in their own gilded frames.

The crafter's name has not been mentioned because she wishes to remain anonymous...

Happy New 2013!!!

Yup, yup, yup, I've been having perfection issues again at notsoperfectkarthi as in, "What would be the perfect xmas/year-end/new year post???"  Result? A no-show at Xmas, year-end and New Year. I know so many of you might have been looking forward to those ever so humorous and witty posts from moi, sorry I couldn't oblige! :-) (A little confidence goes quite a loooonggg way, huh?)

But first of all, let me wish you all,  my dearest wonderful readers, a very happy new year! May all your days hide twinkling gems of immense value that will reveal themselves to you through the course of the day, making you gasp with wonder and prompt you to send up prayers of thankfulness. I wish that for one and all of you and for the whole world! So go find that particular gem/s for the day and make a note of them each day so that when 2014 comes by, you will have a bowlful of those lovelies to marvel at.

In case you are wondering whether I have gone bonkers, I have been looking back at 2012 with my treasure-seeker's eyes and have come up with quite a lot to feel thankful for. I did this because the month of December and even New Year's day have brought us some not-so-good news. I have been thinking of how to react as positively as I can to each.

To the Nirbhaya case: probably suggest legalizing prostitution (not my idea, Swami Vivekananda's actually) or to suggest importing women from other countries to improve the sex-ratio (why should innocent girls be penalized for rampant female foeticides?). To my Mom's cancer diagnosis: forgive her for  having known about a lump and not paid much attention to it for six years and get her as much help as early as possible. To the death of a neighboring young man in a bike accident right after the birth of the new year: send up prayers for the safe return to home of each  youngster who speeds by me.

One of the first things I did on New Year's day was to take down all our Xmas decorations and stow them away safely. I did it although I will miss the riot of twinkling lights that greeted me each December morning as I came into my dark living room. It made me smile each time I looked at them. Bye bye Xmas tree, see you in 11 months!

Could there BE any more tinsel up there? :-)

I also put away my old diary after a cursory look-through. There are several blank pages as usual, the sick days, the so-so days, but not a red-letter day was missed even if I had to sit down and write it several days later!

Which brings us to my new diary and day book:

Isn't it so appropriate that the diary I chose back in November (looking as usual for just the features like month-at-a-glance and full page for Sunday) should say Think Positive and Be Positive on the cover - the universe has sign-posts everywhere!!! As I had told you, last year's theme was gratitude! And each page of that new diary will be divvied up like this:

As you can guess, it's my next step in increasing my productivity and not forgetting anything essential each day. I started the habit in November when I saw the idea for some day planner pages with similar categories in a website. I thought, "Why print out those pages when I don't even fill up half my diary pages each day?" So I started writing out a simplified version in my diary. It's been very effective! All my planning and day's summing up in one place as well as my expenses!

The best sight I had on New Year's Day was this:

- all three guys in my life snuggling happily two hours after I was up and pottering about. This is another sight that is guaranteed to turn my heart to mush each time I see it. And how blessed am I to be able to see it almost every day!!

Happy New Year once again!

All my glamour is gone!!!

One of the high points of my day is waiting at our gate to receive our kindergartner. I absolutely love the way he shyly smiles and holds me tight for a moment as he steps off the bus into my arms. I also have to say hi to his friend Kashi, a bright little boy with lots of curly hair and a very infectious smile. He makes it a point to greet me every afternoon when the bus stops in front of our gate and I reply in the same enthusiastic tone that he uses. These days, he considers himself obliged to make some chitchat too. For example, one day he said, "Sorry, innu ithiri late aayi"(Sorry, I am a little late today). Yesterday, as the bus stopped, Kashi shouted "Haaaayiii!!!"

Me: Haaayiiii!!!

Kashi: Ente glamour ellam poyi!!! (All my glamour is gone!!!)

Me: Meh?!?! (Imagine a cow interrupted mid-moo and you will get the sound)

Ayah: Yeah, he did say glamour...

And the bus went off, but I was left thinking...

DH and I were recently looking through our old photos spurred on by him wanting to find his high school class photo etc. This led us to checking out a lot of old photos and reminiscing about how wonderful we looked "in those days". There was certainly much lesser of us and more hair evident on our heads. DH even started estimating the ages of our elders in those old photos to see how he fared in hair loss compared with them! 

My thinking went in quite a different direction. I started thinking of what my reaction to my own pictures have been over the years. I don't remember much about my first few years, but I used to hate my pictures taken around the age of 8. That's about the time I started wearing glasses and was teased a lot about my looks. The teasers couldn't have helped it, my glasses were total granny ones - with black, tip-tilted oval frames!! I certainly didn't look very happy in the pictures I have of that time.  I think I didn't start liking my photos again till I was almost 20 years old and started wearing contact lenses.

Fast forward a few years and starting with my first pregnancy in 2004, there aren't a lot of single pictures of me and I look happy only in those in which I am clutching one or both of our kiddos. I guess I've turned critical of my looks once again because of the burgeoning weight. With that has come the tendency to stay behind the camera more than in front of it. Although it has meant an improvement in photography skills with the amount of practice I'm getting, it is also a place I don't want to be in: being overcritical of myself. I am sure when I am 60, even my ballooned figure will look pretty to me! I don't want to wait that long though. Therefore, note to self: Love yourself for what you are, not some ideal of what you should be!!!

Meanwhile I am still wondering where Kashi got his statement from!!!!

Back again!

Yes, I know that it has been a long hiatus since my last post. But hey, I have a good reason! So here is the big news... We are back at Karthi! Yes, our poor abandoned home is not abandoned any more! It's now alive with the sounds of its prodigal owners...

Our move was somewhat smooth with just a few mishaps which we managed to survive. The whole of last month were filled with packing, selling, sending, unpacking etc. and I have not seen the end of it yet. But at least everyone has enough to eat, wear and play with for the time being and we are happy. The rest will fall in place eventually...

Which is why I am typing this now - in the past I would have been frantically organizing and cleaning till everything was absolutely perfect before I even considered writing this post. Almost all our moves in the past saw me laid up for at least a week soon after we reached our destination with a bad cold/flu or a back ache. This time, in sync with my new resolve to chuck perfectionism, I timed myself and did no more than 15 minutes of heavy work at a time and took plenty of rest and water - result? Our family is blessed with a happy homemaker who hasn't had a twinge - touch wood!

Well, enough of that. Obviously, I have not had the opportunity to break out my crafting supplies as yet. So let me leave you this week with something that tells you why I love this place so much. Our son has joined school and we have a daily trek of almost a kilometer to the bus stop each way. This is what I get to see on my walks.

Now, do you envy me???

Not so perfect crafting

Phew, didn't that week pass so quickly? And there's something in the pipeline that I am very excited and busy about... but more about that later!

One of my pet hobbies is saving crafting tutorials of all kinds from the internet - I already have a collection of craft projects that could last me at least two lifetimes. And I won't mention how I get craft supplies without really having a project lined up for it! If it was just yarn or painting supplies or embroidery supplies, it would have been ok. As far as I am concerned variety IS the spice of life, so I have many things stashed in several places including a 5-year-old box of Perler beads that hasn't even been opened. Since we have been on the move since I bought them, it is now in a suitcase in my mother-in-law's home. When I came to Pune, I brought my crochet hooks and a set of yarns that I have had since 2006. I wanted to do only crochet, but after getting here, I got myself some painting supplies and a sewing machine!!!

Looking back at this pattern during my reflections, I tried to understand why I didn't do any of the projects that I envisioned so brilliantly in my mind and brought supplies for, but finally were let to languish before even starting. It was again my perfectionist attitude rearing up. What if the project didn't turn out as I envisioned it? What if the thing I made was not usable? What if no one appreciates it? A whole lot of what ifs would queue up and the supplies would just resign themselves to the inevitable and heap dust upon themselves.

But not any more - this year I started off  by making something deliberately not perfect. Earrings are my favorite accessories and all of them lay tangled and mismatched in a box that I brought to Pune. For several months I had been wearing my mainstay gold studs just because it was easy to leave them in my ears and not have to search for appropriate ones. I checked online for some earring organizers, but most of them required some kind of frame and metallic mesh/ chicken wire etc. That is when I had this idea to make one of my own - a crocheted one! Since it was intended to be a prototype, I got out some of my cheap woollen yarn that I had bought from the Pimpri market and found unusable for apparel because it had a lot of impurities in it. Then I found a spare plastic hanger and made this:

I made it and started using it although it is not perfect. For instance, I had started off making a block of fabric that would be the width of the whole hanger, but got bored with making it too long, so I turned it on the side to attach it to the hanger. The stitch I chose was double crochet with stitches in the back loop only so that there would be loops to hang the earring in. When I turned the piece on the side, the loop ridges turned vertical instead of horizontal, but they still work! Here is a close up to show you what I mean.

I also don't like the plastic hanger or the white "trim" that was an after thought to "pretty up" the piece, and in spite of a frantic voice in my head screaming "Nooooooo!!!!", I hung it up and put up all my precious earrings on it. Do I cringe a little each time I see it? Yes. Did I have a super-cringe when I just uploaded the pictures now? YES! But hey, I will do it in a good cause. Here is a shout out to those people in the world who procrastinate on their dreams due to their perfectionism. Get rid of that monkey! If I can do it, any body can!!                                                                                                                                             

By the way, I do dream of making another one with the following:

But hey, that's another project altogether! See y'all next week!

Hello Blogland!

Dear reader,
Let me tell you who Karthi is... it's not me! Karthi is short for Karthika, my family's dream home in a village in Thiruvananthapuram. We got it built more than a year ago and spent one night in it. Then we moved to Pune, a 36-hour-long train ride away from our home because of a year-long assignment for my husband.

Karthi is the name of my blog because to me, our as-yet-uninhabited home is a metaphor for several things, most of all, my own life. In the past one year, in which I had a BIG 35th birthday, I have come to certain realizations. Many months after moving to this tiny apartment, I let all my homemaking slide because I was engrossed in thinking when I would be able to live in Karthika, making up and collecting ideas to decorate our dream home, and daydreaming about how life would be so perfect once we got back to living there. I was constantly finding fault with everything here, the heat in Pune, the black dust and cement dust that blackened my apartment's floors each day, the unfinished apartments sticking up like eyesores in all directions, and on and on and on.... (I'm a very good complainer!) Then I joined a reading group led by my elder son's Kindergarten director. That opened up vistas for me that I had never imagined possible...

I suddenly found that this "waiting for the perfect ... " has characterised all my life as in "Life will be perfect...
...when I grow up
...when I have job of my own
...when I become pencil thin
...when I have babies
...when the babies start sleeping all night
...when my book is published
...when the babies are potty-trained
...when I have a sewing machine
...when the babies are old enough to go to school
...when we have a house of our own
...when we finally start living in a house of our own

I think you get the idea. So around the beginning of 2010, (or mebbe half way into Feb!) I resolved, or rather made some vague and meandering moves towards not putting my life on hold any more in favor of a particular geographical, social, emotional or physical state. Today my motto is "Carpe Diem" (in that eerie Robin Williams whisper). And what have I done with the days I have seized? Stay tuned/ bookmark and follow to find out!!!