Too old for this!

Too Old To Change My Stripes #AmWriting 

Sorry for the late entry… I came across this blog prompt this afternoon and decided to ignore it. But then it sat in my head and refused to let go. Of course, I’m flawed. Yes. And I am not ashamed to admit it. Let’s face it, no one is perfect. We all have those unique character traits that make us so easy to despise, whether as a mother, a daughter, a lover, a wife or colleague or whatever.

But unlike the blog prompt, I am not one of those who thinks my flaws make me awesome: they just make me that much more crabby and difficult to live with. My spouse and girls will surely vouch for this as they have been the longest sufferers!

Before you turn away, let me tell you why. And since I love making lists (you can call that a flaw too) here’s a list of things you can hate me for.

1.     I lie. Oh yes, I do. There are times when I do not have the answer but do not want to say, “I don’t know”. So I wing it. Picture this: I was a new bride and the husband and I were shopping for light fittings and boring stuff like that at an old crowded part of the city where my father’s office used to be many years ago. Obviously, there were no parking spaces and loads of traffic so we told the driver to go around the corner and come back. My husband, thinking I was familiar with the area, looked at me and asked, “how long will it take him to return?” Promptly I replied: “8 minutes”. Half an hour later, when there was still no sign of the car, he looked at me questioningly. I shrugged, “I lied!” 23 years later, my husband still complains about it! And that is just one tiny example. Like any good liar, I’m good at making up stories too, like the time I convinced my tiny girls that the Taj Palace was really a palace and they were going to dine with the king himself and got the best behavior out of them. Or the time I told them if they ate sunflower seeds they would have sunflowers growing in their tummies and got them to run up to me, open their mouths wide and ask if I could see the flowers. Yup, how cute it was and how I saw flowers … every time! Or the zillion times I told them that if they did not study I would buy them sickles so they could go cut grass … or the “what comes out goes back in” rule while eating! Every mother is guilty of these little tales, I guess. We make up these stories that make monsters and evil witches out of us… for a long time my daughters seriously believed I had eyes at the back of my head! Raising children is no walk in the park and if a little bending of the truth will help, so be it!

2.     I look like something the cat dragged in: Among a sea of well-dressed, well-groomed mothers, I was invariably the one that turned up in a crushed kurta or jeans and a well-worn tee. It’s not that I didn’t have clothes, it’s just that I’ve never really cared about what I looked like as long as I have been comfortable. I remember that one time in the afternoon when I went to a child’s fifth birthday party (when the kids are small you have to do that a lot) in my usual grunge top which I had also visited the bazaar in and looked around and found myself worse dressed than the maids around me! That day I went home and told my husband for the first time that I thought I needed some new clothes! How he laughed when I described my predicament! At parent-teacher meetings my daughters used to be embarrassed that I invariably turned up in court clothes while the other mothers were immaculately dressed. I was always grateful that I had an uniform at my place of work, if I had to wake each morning and co-ordinate my slippers with my sari with my bindi with my lipstick, I would go completely mad!

3.     I’m mad: Trust me on this. Once day my teenage daughter looked at me thoughtfully after one of our fights and told me I was going mad. I looked her in the eye, “you must get one thing straight,” I said, “I am not GOING anywhere. I AM mad!” That child has been a little wary of me from that day onwards! I not only talk to myself, I actually have arguments with myself and hate it when I’m disturbed by tiny voices that ask, “Ma, are you ok?” I am the one who will happily go swimming in the middle of the night or sit on top of a hill all night to watch the full moon track its way across the sky. I’m the one who wakes my daughters at the crack of dawn to watch a sunrise because it’s gorgeous. I’m the one who, in a Darjeeling winter, opens the window of our warm, cosy bedroom room to take pictures of the Kanchenjungha as the sun rises! It used to drive my husband nuts, now he just turns the other way and pulls the blanket closer!

4.     I’m a bully: As a child I was quite the tomboy. I could wrestle my older cousins to the floor and climbed a tree a mite faster than the other kids. I would dig for earthworms and use them as bait to fish, I would scale walls, venture into graveyards after dark on a challenge, play for hours with mud and clay, sneak around the garden long after the adults thought we were in bed fast asleep and generally lead all my cousins and friends who listened to me into trouble. And I was quite the bully, there was hell to pay if anyone dared disobey me! That bullying has left me in good stead because if there is one thing I have learnt it’s that after marriage one has to be a bit of a bully to get things done. Specially with kids. They require so much poking and prodding and general reminders to move along that often I am left feeling like a shepherd having to move all my little sheep along. And yes, that includes the biggest baby of them all, the spouse! Of yes, you have to be able to wield that stick!

5.     I tell it like it is: I don’t hedge, I don’t hum, I don’t haw. If you asked for my opinion you will get it, whether you like it or not. Sometimes you will get it even if you did not ask for it. It gets me into trouble, it gets people angry with me, I’m the queen of faux pas, the one with her foot constantly in her mouth. To me, there is no topic that is taboo. As my girls have grown, I have told my girls everything they have wanted to know, including how many boyfriends I might have had before I met their dad! They get an honest opinion, whether they like it or not. This openness has held us in good stead with each other. While they were growing up my famous hits included “because I said so”, “I told you so”, “I was born mean”, the especially traumatic, “I have failed as a mother” and the perrenial "you won't like it if I have to get up" (which I still use with the dogs) so go figure. Having said that, there are times when I do not speak and that I believe is my biggest flaw: the times when I am silent. For that happens when people use me as a doormat. Yes, I guess it happens to the best of us. The husband tells me I have to stand up for myself at times like these. But the moment passes and I am still struggling for the words. If I do say something the words come out all wrong. I have always been this way and I tell myself that those people do not matter, but I guess for all my bravado, I’m just a ninny at heart.

These are the flaws that come to mind just now. There must be more… and no my flaws do not make me awesome but they make me exactly who I am. If that is what flawsome means, I guess I am flawsome too!

 

What do you think?