In love with a married man...

is what it feels like with my relationship with my birth father. I have to hide it from family and friends, when I do mention it, I am met with shock or preachy sermons of "If I were in your place, I wouldnt do it". Really! With everything that is going on in this world, with earthquakes shattering the lives of thousands and kids killing other kids and what not, does a daughter reaching out to her birth father still figure on the top ten list of awful things to happen?

My parents were supportive initially and then freaked out big time with the prospect of my birth mother exploding when she finds out about this. I am frankly tired of having to be careful and think about her feelings. Her divorce was 34 years ago, when will she stop carrying that baggage around!

The whole situation is just a complex mess. My mother loves me and thinks of me as her daughter but the sister in her wants to protect and appease, so she pushes me in the direction of my birth mother and expects me to share the same "mother daughter" relationship with her. My birth mother is forever wronged and all her life everyone have only thought of ways to hurt her, of course, I am also included. So she looks at me with extreme sorrow on how sad it is that her first born wont bond with her. And me? I am rapidly approaching the point of massive irritation. I hope to God that in my next life, I am born to parents who love each other and who will stay with each other and I have a boring normal childhood.

And my birth father, I get along amazingly well with this man. We share an amazing rapport and he has been so frank with his answers without worrying about whether I will misunderstand and stop loving him. We agreed that I should call him Dad and he tells me he loves me in every email. I got way more than what I had expected when I first reached out to him.

Now once again I am at crossroads, because my parents were so worried, I asked Dad if he had also talked to his family and that I wanted to make sure that we were on the same page in terms of emotional investment and expectations from each other. Bottom line is that he says that lets not hurt our families who have stood with us for so many years, lets give them time to come around, lets be patient and wait and watch and one day we can go beyond our emails and meet and talk.

I cried when I read his email, however it is reality and I have to accept it, just wish it weren't so hard. So now I just need to trust his love and hope that he doesnt lose interest in me and keeps in touch and we can strenghten our bond over the years. I really have no hope for his family coming around, they have no incentive to do so, it would be so easy to shrug and go on with their lives. Why would they go out of their way to accomodate and accept me in their lives?

Well I tried and I have one less regret in my life - I reached out to my Dad and we got an opportunity to get closer - albeit on emails. I can keep in touch with him and lets see what the future holds for us. And maybe one day I can actually meet him in person and hug him.

In the meanwhile, I need to figure out how to make my heart feel light again...I smile outwardly and inwardly its weighed down with sad thoughts :(

Blue skies are here again...

Seriously I need to learn how to sustain depression and self pity. I cant seem to go beyond a day, somehow I find my way back to smiling!

Have you ever seen a dog take a bath? He shakes shakes shakes his hair out as if to make sure every drop of water has left his body. I did a mental shake shake for myself yesterday to shake out all the self pity and sadness. Plus it also helped to have P come back home and tell me how I make his life complete and all romantic things which he says only once every thousand years. Its like the "Who wants to be a millionaire game"; I have only so many lifelines and so many occasions on which he will be super romantic with words :) My strong and silent loving husband!

Plus it helped to have friends who sternly scolded me over how I could possibly think it would have been better to not have been born at all and have I forgotten my incredible family who loves me, friends who think of me as family and so on...Thank god for friends who say the things which are right for you and not just the right things..

And venting out in the virtual world helps too - I need to pay myself for my blog - save so much money on therapy definitely!

Plus doing fun things with unsuspecting babies like not brushing baby S's hair after bath with the result that she has the cutest Mohawk right now! God, I have beautiful babies!!

Well all in all, I am back to normal now. I did write an email asking hard questions to my birth father. I am fair that way, if my side of the family is sleepless and worrying, I want to make sure yours is too. I feel like I am having an affair with a married man. His wife knows or doesnt, his kids dont know, wonder when he will tell them etc...its one thing to say "You are my daughter and I love you so much" in the safety of your own home over emails and another to step out of the virtual world and actually say it aloud to family and friends. I will not continue to hurt my family if I dont really have a committed relationship from his end.

And finally I cannot cannot allow this to distract me from my priorities in life. I was snapping at R for no reason and thats not allowed. So refocus on my babies, my husband, my job search, my exercise and let other things take a back seat...

In other news, I am going to run the half marathon again this year! Hopefully my dreams and reality will collide and I will be running past the finish line come August..

Thanks for all of you who thought of me and said a prayer, commented, emailed and called. I am truly blessed!

Rewind

I don't know at what point a miscarriage takes place but I have experienced the end - when the ultrasound technician says to you "Sorry no heart beat" and you feel like your heart might cease beating too. When the doctor examines you and the blood flows and doesn't stop and the doctor says "Sorry the baby is gone". Or when you return home and feel empty inside. I don't know but I wish my mother would have experienced this 34 years ago. I wish I could rewind the past and be in the womb and pray to god, take me away now, let me not live.

My mother wouldn't be a divorcee with a child, she would merely be a divorcee. My brother might have gone to stay with our parents, they could have been their own nuclear family. My mother wouldn't be reminded of her divorce everytime she saw me. Maybe she might have moved on easier. My birth father wouldn't have felt guilty of this fault - not inquiring of his own flesh and blood and would be more at peace and pleased with himself and his achievements today.

My husband could have married someone better than me. Someone with straight hair and slight figure, someone who would be a bigger person and accomodate his parents. My in laws would be happy today living in the US with their son and his family.

Is there really any purpose to my life? Is it the result of some evil things that I did in my past life/lives that I was deemed to be born and be a third wheel and disrupt the happiness of so many? Do I even deserve to be a mother or will my daughters also be better off with someone else?

But I cant take a chance so live I must, and even though I am weary of carrying this load of obligation; obligations dumped on by me by everyone since birth, I have to pick myself up and carry on. For I cannot repeat the same mistakes others have done. I have given birth to my two beautiful babies and now I have to stand strong for their sake.

In my next life though, Good Lord, please take me from the womb if I am not wanted, it will just be so much easier on everyone.

My childhood - part I

My earliest memories are staying with my grandma and brother. My parents had my sister soon after I was born and they went back with her and left their son – who was the darling of my grandma and birth ma with them. I really cannot remember much about those early days. I can’t remember when my birth mom got married; I remember going to their wedding. A little while later I remember writing my name over and over - my new name. I guess it was a novelty for me to have a full name.

I went to stay with my parents at age 3-4 sometime and went to school with my sister, same division same school. Our brother stayed back with Grandma. My sister has inherited our father’s qualities of sincerity and she was a model student while I was the popular one who spent most of her time outside the class. Our parents never ever differentiated between us. Only when someone used to praise me to Mom, she would immediately say – But she is not mine, she is my sister’s. She would feel guilty accepting credit for me. It hurt me to no end and she has stopped doing that now :)

As soon as any vacation would start – summer, Diwali, Christmas, I would be shipped off to my Grandma and our brother would go home. Baba would drop one off and pick the other up. We would write letters to each other and all the three of us siblings are still very close. I struggle to write about my grandma and birth mom because they are good people, they always had my best interests at heart but somehow they ended up hurting me the most.

After my tenth standard exams, my grandma declared that I was to stay with her and attend college there. The night before when my mother and sister were going to leave, leaving me at Grandma's was the first time I spoke up against my Grandma. I said I didn’t want to stay and she never kind of forgave me for it after. Neither did my birthmom in a way.

I was living in two worlds sort of – a normal life when I went back home and when I came to my grandma's, I was expected to feel gratitude and sorry for my birth mom and all the sacrifices that she has done for me etc. For many years I had the tendency to feel lonely when I was tired or sad, I always thought my parents have their family, my birth mom has hers, my birth father has his and I have no one. I think it is the effect of many years of brainwashing by my grandma by telling me how I have no one in the world except God and my birth mom. But now I consciously push away those thoughts and focus on the positives in life – I was lucky to have such an awesome family, I have a good husband, our own children, a loving mother and grandmother and now I am so lucky to find my birth father in my life now.

Maybe because I spent half of my time at home and with my grandma's respectively, I got to see two sets of approaches and attitudes towards life, two sets of issues, I knew how a normal family functioned, I knew what it felt like to be the child of divorced parents...

To be continued

Are you over confident?

Then try looking for a job....its apply apply no reply and then because I have been saying that for a while, now I am getting replies everyday and they are all rejections!!! And yes, the well meaning aunties who keep saying - Take some years off, stay home with the children. Why is that you are automatically judged as a bad mother if you choose to want to work outside the home?

I think my kids will have a better mother if I am a better me and I am a better me if I have my self worth and identity which is (sadly maybe in the eyes of some, but I am not ashamed to admit) defined by my career for me. I love waking up in the morning and having this routine. If I stayed home, I would get nothing done. We would all lie around in bed till eleven. I am not disciplined like some people. I do think being a stay at home mom requires nerves of steel and great internal confidence and security and I dont possess both.

I like waking up, having my routine, getting dressed, sending my girl(s) to school where they can learn many things from trained professionals, having my own friends, enjoying the satisfaction of a job well done, being intellectually stimulated, putting all those years of studying and hard work to get my degrees to good use, earning my own money, coming back home to my family, enjoying my evenings with them, being able to take lavish vacations with them, being able to put something away for their future....Whether you are happier working or staying home is an extremely personal decision and no mother should be judged for choosing either way.

Of course I can do all this because R loves her school and wakes up every morning enthused to go to school. If she would wake up and cry everyday or get perpetually sick from the germs being passed around at school, I could have been singing a different tune.

I can do this because I have an awesome young nanny who devotes her time to baby S. I know baby S is looked after really really well.

I can do this because I have a husband who would love to see me work, who supports me and is happy in my accomplishments - at home and at work and outside.

And I can do this because we are in a country which allows for work life balance and understands the working mother's dilemma.

So Yes, thats why I am desperate to have a job soon...Now if only the rejects will turn into accepts miraculously overnight, I will be up and running on my way....but good things come to those who wait, so wait I will, and with a smile at that..

Someone give me a JOB NOW..