Tag Archives: pregnancy

Life, People, sketchbook

Our labor story

Really, there’s no drama. Millions of women give birth everyday, and like everything else in my life, I just happened to document it, that’s all.

Mostly because I wanted to preserve the memory of my experience, and also to check that my drawing skills hadn’t flown out (along with all the unexpected amount of blood I’d lost)!

About a couple of weeks into motherhood, I groggily managed to draw this out while the pipsqueak was sleeping.

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01 Feb 2015 04:00 AM | My water broke and jerked me awake. Thanks to the internet I could easily figure out what was happening. The brown boy was ready to panic, but I calmed him down saying it was probably a false alarm. We called Dr. Rai and though she said we should go to the hospital, I decided to go back to sleep until a decent time, and by 07:00 AM, we were at Fortis with our overnight bag.

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At the hospital, everything was peaceful and organized. The nurses were sweet. They hooked me up to monitors to check the foetal heart beat and put me on a drip. The resident doctors examined me, and we were on our way to having this baby! In the morning I went around the room doing yoga poses, all geared up for a normal delivery. The brown boy giggled through a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory. The rest of the day passed slowly and nothing much happened. I ate chocolate and listened to the Emperor Waltz on loop. Later on in the day, the contractions started and we began monitoring them. I have a pretty high threshold for pain so it was just about bearable.

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06:00 PM | By the evening, there was no progress! We were all geared to spend the night in the labor room. Then the foetal heart rate dropped, and dropped again. A worried Dr. Rai suggested that we should do a C-section since it’s a “precious pregnancy” (another term for an elderly mom, i.e. me).

07:45 PM | They strapped me on to a stretcher and all that, like an usual surgery. Dr. Rai’s crew introduced themselves to me. Then Dr.Rai said, we’re going in! Lots of activity went on behind that green curtain. I had local anasthesia so it wasn’t painful (then) but I tried not to look. The brown boy needed to hold my hand, he was so stressed. But it was really the shortest 15 minutes of my life – within minutes they brought out this little squealing mini-me. Then I passed out.

When I woke up, this is what we had: little squealing baby Orin.

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Part 1 | Part 2

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Life, sketchbook

38 weeks/2015

Those nine months were of course transformational, and not just in body. Slowly I got used to the idea of giving up some control over myself. Here are some pages from the sketchbook at 8 weeks and 12 weeks. But as personal growth, I called it my year of spirituality.

These are some pages at 38 weeks, when I took out some time to document what I was thinking:

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Things that I will miss: People being nice.

“Are people being nice because they are, or because I’m pregnant?”

And that was practically the only thing I could think of! Here we are sitting in a Starbucks, only because they have decaf.

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“Did not think these days would ever come! The last few empty days of our lives…so much has changed, not least my waddling walk!”

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“But how did I keep my sanity through change? Being the sort of person who always fights against it, making transitions much harder than they have to be.”

“Well, I’m not proud of it…”

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“Well, mainly it was the demanding project that kept me super occupied. The Vedanta podcasts were the most calming element of these turbulent times. And also Kindle in it’s many formats.”

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“Of course there were surprises.

This amazing miraculous human body. Really I could bow down to the phenomena of it; if only I could bend.”

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What really helped: Friends and family. Even the most misogynist of people, i.e. me, who would avoid human contact if she could, had to concede to this. Prashant, Indira, the brown boy, my sister and my nephew, and family friends 2π and Snehasis.

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[Aside: I was reading Enchanted Objects by David Rose and thinking, we need new shapes for tangible technology. I really cannot keep drawing these “flat rectangular slabs of glass”.  A fabulous and inspiring book if you’re interested in technology and design.]

In retrospect:

Soo: “Even my (drawing) style is the same…you would think this transformation…”

The brown boy: “Hahaha…you have to work harder than that!”

And by the way, I went into labour less than 48 hours after drawing these pages!

Letters Home Part 1 | Letters Home Part 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Life, sketchbook

Letters Home

This is a series that begins from 2014, drawings that I wasn’t able to share until now, until I was able to grow a necessary sense of detachment from then.

01: Frontispiece

Looking back, I must have been terribly grumpy when I started this book! Was I not drawing the happy memories from that time? Was I only using the sketchbook to work out my darknesses?
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02: Wednesday

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“The whole day. It really wasn’t bad. I was doing my own idea and it was going well. But there’s this utter sense of discontinuation that is no one’s doing.

I guess I am always meant to be a loner among peers.

I miss a lot of people who are away. And wish we could go on a holiday.”

03: Feels like someone else’s life

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“That body I must take care of. At least I’ve lost this need to be cool. You must be so happy, and I a different person. Feels like it’s someone else. Oh this bloody heat!”

A little clue that I had just become pregnant then. And scared of children, scared of giving birth and scared of being a mother!

04: Another Sunday

Why was I making such a big deal about being pregnant? You know half the country can get pregnant, since they have the necessary apparatus. In my case, though I didn’t smoke in college (because I wanted to have a healthy baby when I was 25) I never really wanted to have children. I did not like them, I was scared by their non-verbal communication, and intimidated by the general unpredictability. However sometime around my thirties I started being more open to the possibility, probably because we started acquiring nieces and nephews, and the brown boy is a complete and utter baby person. Around 8 weeks, I finally started getting more used to the idea that I was growing a new human being!

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Another Sunday that I spent mostly in my own head. Thinking a lot about my 30-year-old relationship with my body. And my imagination reducing slowly but surely.

I should be happier, I know. So many good things are happening.

05: Monday

Friends are such a great support. Here’s Anitha:

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Anitha: Do things that make you happy.

Me: But what? So hard to find something like that…

Anteater: Or you’re already doing happy things, like me?

06: 8 weeks baby hungry little tadpole

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Helpful books, advice and food from 2pie and Snehasis.

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Life, sketchbook

Tomorrow is our permanent address

While going through my archives, I found these pages from a 2004 journal. The brown boy and I had just gotten married, and I was resisting all the extended family’s combined pressure on me to start propagating the species.

In this angry book it seems that while I did not want to have a baby, I knew all about the details of bearing one. What a know-it-all I was.

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