My Sweet Mummy

1. My mummy loves eating fruits.
2. She tells me a story every night.
3. My mummy is good at drawing.
4. She drops me to school everyday.
5. My mummy wears a lot of brown clothes.
6. She is thirty-seven years old.

As I read the above numbered summary of my daughter’s mummy, I have to admit that I felt overwhelmed. When your child starts exposing your age fairly accurately to all and sundry, she has really started leaving babyhood behind.

After years of molly-coddling, my daughter is now pretty firm with me when I go to attend a friend’s birthday party with her.

“Mama, please come to pick me up ONLY. And after I finish eating.”

I’m trying to remember the times when she would cling like a limpet to my skirt as I tried to make a getaway for an office meeting. The refrain those days were more to the tune of:
“Promise to come back in two minutes?”

Of course, she still clings similarly on other occasions but I can see those times coming soon when she will not and Mummy will become more a companion than a refuge for all joys and calamities. On that note of nostalgia, here are some memorable moments from the last 6 years when I really wanted to break-free. How wrong I was!!

1. Breast-feeding at 2 am and at all other times.
2. Cancelling on party plans with friend who I was meeting after several years, as daughter bawled loudly
3. Standing attendance in play area outside movie-hall while Shah Rukh cavorted to Mahi Ve inside
4. Waiting outside pre-school gates two weeks in a row, in case of “I want Mama” emergencies
5. Taking howling child back home from tennis lesson which she had volunteered to attend, never to go back again, as coach gave me killer-looks for being an over-pushy mom
6. Making appreciative noises at school annual performance when daughter pretty much impersonated a tree instead of dancing.
7. Attending two consecutive days of same performance, missing office.
8. Carrying 2 sets of clothes changes, 3 types of snacks, all possible medicines, 2 water bottles, a blanket, a story book and all favourite music whenever stepping out of home, and getting a permanent crick in the neck as a result.
9. Singing play-group anthems through gritted teeth as teacher urged all mamas and papas to sing louder and jump higher.
10. Resisting urge to whack with superhuman effort, while trying to put child to sleep, dressed in party-finery, while spouse was being publicly felicitated on his biggest project.


While all of these seem to be well and truly behind me, it’s surely a matter of time when I will regret their passing and when my daughter would rather go to movies with friends than stay at home and listen to my cock-and-bull stories?