After telling the whole world that I want to take a break from driving and how I want to be driven around for at least two months, here I am, driving. (Oh, which implies that we bought a car, a subcompact automatic. )In a way this is okay because if I had stayed away from the wheel longer, the road fear would have gotten to me.

Driving in India is a two people job. One person to drive and one person to honk. The hands at ‘ten-and-two’ position has been rapidly altered to ‘hands-at-center-of-the-circle-and-two’.

Remember the saying ‘innocent until proven guilty’? Along those lines, people who drive in India believe that they have the ‘right of way until some one else honks and reprimands them’.

The honking can mean multiple things depending on the driver’s mood and the size of the vehicle the person drives. Some of my interpretations are – Excuse me; Move it and move it now; FYI:I am right behind you; What the hell are you doing?; I am privileged and deserve royal treatment; I am huge and need more clearance; I am young and reckless; #$$%^%$#

People are extremely optimistic and they are not quitters. Just because I think my subcompact car will not have enough clearance to go in a two feet space between two pillars does not stop a Innova driver or a lorry/bus driver from trying.

People believe in progressive crossing. The four way intersection and how people navigate this intersection is nothing short of a miracle.

The job of traffic police who works busy intersection is same as the job of a preschool teacher left alone to handle way more kids than she can handle AND she does not speak the same language as the kids AND all her kids are having a bad day. Poor guy.

One can’t even begin to imagine how many heart attacks a left-right challenged person like me gets. As is I have to think twice before I figure out left from right. Then I have to consciously curb my instinct to go right and keep left. Then I find all these people driving on the opposite side of the road. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

When my child is eating, all by herself, without any fuss what so ever is the time I feel like putting her on my lap and feeding her.

For all the talk about how I want them to be independent, I equally agonize that they have to go and come back by school bus. And if I am late by even a minute to pick them up when they are dropped off from the school bus I imagine that they are lonely and vulnerable and get stressed.

For all the encouragement I give Chula about reading and take pride in the fact that she reads with passion, I also tell her that she need not read every single print she sets her eyes on, especially my emails and blog posts!

After agonizing over the bed time, battling them and after putting in so much effort in making the children sleep, I feel the most love for them when they are finally asleep and can’t wait for them to get up.

When they need me most to engage them is the time I am hard pressed to finish something and expect them to play by themselves.

Ideally I want the children to dream, dream big, imagine and fantasize. But when Chula is elbow deep in her dream, completely lost in a world of her own, which unfortunately coincides with strict time lines like school bus leaving in another five minutes is when I have to shake her out of her dream and point out the usefulness of being practical.

After harping a lot about being kind and every one doing their bit to help other people, one is forced to give their children a big lecture about how giving money to every single person begging on the road is not possible, does not help them, does not eradicate poverty.

I made a resolution to not stress on the birth order, mainly because the older one is only 18 months older. But am now forced to tell the younger one not to compare herself with her sister and agonize over the things she cannot do as well as her sister because….well her sister is 18 months older than her.

I am forced to tell Chula that she does not have to sign a bond of friendship in blood with every child she ever sets her eyes on and expect the same level of commitment from the other child. Right after this I have to tell Meija that she needs to be more open, let people close to her otherwise she cannot make friends.

I have to stress time and again that they have to give their 100% in every single thing they do, that is all that matters and be in the position to eat my words and tell them to finish certain things ASAP as it is not worth this much of their time, patience and energy.

I have told them to be wary of strangers and also be courteous to strangers, sometimes these sentences are back to back.

I tell them that they can help me in household work and when I find that at times I have to help them to help me, I take it back.

Again it was R who said, ‘Well…Meija is leaving school too. She needs to be recognized and it needs to be a separate ceremony. This child cannot be in her sister’s shadow all the time.’ We were never expecting this and were super thrilled, most of all Mieja was very excited. She chirped to all who cared to listen that she was going to have a circle goodbye ceremony. We decided on a small ceremony in circle where the children sang a small song, the teachers talked about the significance of the song and the children shared their views on friendship.

Getting to say proper goodbye, however painful it is, is an absolute necessity, especially for children. They learn that their old friends did not just vanish, but are still there and it gives them the confidence to make new friends in the new environment.

Here is to the (g)old and new.

Make new new friends
But keep the old
One is silver
But the other is gold.
A circle is round
It has no end
Thats for how long I want to be your friend.

Chula was in a mixed age classroom setting with preschool – kindergarten children in the same room. The California cut off for kinder is Dec 2nd, which means that Chula, being born a few days after Dec 2nd was still in pre-school and her friends born few days before Dec 2nd were in kinder. She was really looking forward to 2010-2011 school year because she starts the much awaited kinder, where she gets to do the special parts, she gets to graduate, walk the aisle with the graduation hat…basically the whole nine yards. But with every situation there are pros and cons, this Chula didn’t expect.

Sept 1st 2010, saw Chula start kindergarten, some of her best friends from kindergarten move on to a different building to start lower elementary and her best(est-est-est) friend move to a different school to start public school kindergarten. Chula went skipping to school and came back crying. The whole of 2010-2011, I had to give her pep talks, multiple times, about being open to make new friends, recognize the people who want to be friends with her and give them a fair chance instead of agonizing over what is not there etc. From my part, I arranged play dates with her old and new friends to show her that she did not loose her old friends and that at times we have to move on. I prided myself on doing the right things at the right time.

But little did I realize that somethings are easier said than done. It is slowly dawning on me that none of the advice I gave Chula makes any sense what so ever, when I apply it to myself, as I sit in India, 8700 miles away from my best(est-est-est) friend of 18 years, typing this post. The UTBT family has R2Ied. I am missing a part of me, the children are missing their godparents and it feels like a big void that nothing can fill. There is a lot to be said about this friendship, but I am leaving you all with what Yaadayaada said, ‘We have been with each other for more time we have been with our parents.’

Since this is a mommy blog, I have to write about the kids, even if it is once in four months.

Chula, all of a sudden looks so grown up. She is all of her 6.5 years and a little more, if you ask me. The danger in this is, I start thinking of her as an adult and start developing adult level expectations and she has to grow up, even more than she is currently, in order to catch up! Constantly reevaluating every scenario and breaking this cycle has been my prominent job for the past one year.

She has certainly departed from the ‘child’ category, but yet to arrive as a ‘girl’. In this journey, she is opening her mind and assimilating the world, thanks to the zillion-gazillion books she is devouring, eyes that are constantly observing and ears that are always listening.

Parents have been aware of the phenomenon of adolescence for ages now. Even terrible twos get noticed by parents, thanks to the child. But the flux children get caught while moving from what Dr.Montessori would call the ‘absorbent mind’ to ‘concrete thinking’ does not get the attention it deserves. From the parents point of view, first comes the monumental process of child birth. You don’t even get time to count all the toes and fingers and feel confident about the health of the offspring, you have to jump head first in to understanding a newborn’s needs and establishing a pattern that works. You take a breather and terrible twos is staring you in your face, which quite frankly is a misnomer, because we all know that terrible twos starts before two and drags on till four! Through out this phase we input values, family and personal, observe the outcome and keep tweaking the limits till we have a self propagating control system. By the time the child is six we start thinking about curriculum, extra-curricular activities, schedules, the poor second born, if any and such. So the transition  from child to girl/boy gets least notice, even if the parent notices it, since this transition is mostly inward, they pretend that it does not exist and do not want to deal with it.

I get some clues to what Chula is thinking. Of her most recent fascinations – namely poverty, pain, meanness, good and bad, kindness etc, the top priority goes to jail. Do children even go to jail? Why? Why would some one want to punish children? Are there even children capable of committing punishable offenses? Baby girl, I will tell you the truth and promise to answer your questions, but when you ask me, ‘But….amma…..if I don’t put my seat belt on, YOU are the one going to jail. Right???’, it scares me a little.

By now it is clear to me that she has a very broad sense of time. I think this is it. It is not going to change and I can either deal with it or try and make her perfect. While I understand that she gets it from me, it is annoying to have two such people living under the same roof. Half the battles between me and Chula is because of the clock. She is constantly taking her own sweet time to do things and I am constantly micromanaging her. It is chaos and friends will vouch to that!

Her clarity of thoughts amazes me at times. The other day she told me, ‘Not because I like you amma, because I love you amma.’ One of the drives back home, she requested for Enthiran songs and I replied, ‘The iPod is in shuffle mode and one of these songs will be an Enthiran song. I cannot drive and DJ.’ The reply she gave me for that, ‘Amma, there are 7 songs in Enthiran. There are 273 songs in your iPod. So 7 out of 273 will be from Enthiran’. I did not make a squeak after that.

After Chula was born, I learnt the art of giving choices. If I put my mind to it, I can give a child choices and still get the exact results I want. But now Chula is in a stage where she wants a role in coming up with the choices. She wants to be more involved in me parenting her. My choices are to either try figuring out how a child can parent herself or learn this new art without any manual what so ever. Sigh.

Her sense of humor is developing really well 🙂

Mieja…..

Her current thing is to yell, ‘Don’t talk about me’, on the occasions I narrate something adorable she did/said. So here I am, writing about her.

She is still asking cyclic questions. Now her cyclic questions are scientific. Need I say that I have completely lost my hair?

We watched The Oscars and the poor child sat patiently asking, ‘Is this Oscar?’ for every human being she set her eyes on.

She likes school and she hates school. When ever she whines to me that she does not like school, I insist that she has to go to school to learn things and she makes it in to another of her famous cyclic conversations. On a particular day she went on a walk with YaadaaYaadaa, picked a dandelion and made a wish, ‘I do not want to go to school. Ever, never, never, ever in my life again. I want to stay home all days. All 8 days of the week.’ See! Case in point for me.

We were going for R’s colleague’s son’s birthday party. YaadaaYaadaa asked her, if she knows the child from school/dance class/tamil class/swim class. The answer was, ‘YY aunty, you don’t come to my school. You are not my teacher. You don’t come to my tamil class or my swim class. But I know you right? That same way, I know this child.’ People, I have to say there are V.E.R.Y few occasions in which YY has been rendered speechless, any one who has know her will vouch for that. This was one such occasion.

Her favorite thing to do while riding in the car is to play games with me. So far name, place, animal thing; find the odd man out are super hits.

This 5 year old is forced to constantly catch up with her 6.5 year old sister. Sometimes I have to physically stop her from doing that.

The MPDs….how can I forget this? She has 3 different personalities. Bawawdi the cat – she licks you, holds your leg, meows and pretends she cannot talk English. Gaggiga the baby elephant – she hits you with her trunk and crawls on the floor. Diggie the dog – she barks and bites. Her big sister is her owner.

Finally a joke from Mieja, of course she got it from a book, but I was surprised she understood it.
WHAT IS A MUMMY’s FAVORITE MUSIC?
Wrap music.

Until later….

Fun.          Jungle.       Fun in the Jungle.       Monkeying around.

The Fungle is all this and a little more. It is a complete story telling environment designed for 5 – 10 year old children. Our family has been having fun with the demo version of The Fungle for the past two weeks and we have found a groove that interests us all. Chula – strictly the stories, Mieja – the changing room and popping bubbles, moi(even though I do not fall in the 5-10 years category) – the concept, how the whole environment is presented and how the different components are weaved together.

I could go on and on and tell you how each story is tied together with activities and hence the child gets to re-experience the story in another form……but that will take the fun of exploration away from you and your children right?

You can have fun too:
-Visit The Fungle
-Register as a parent. The demo version allows you to create up to two child profiles.
-Explore using the child profile.
-For more information, click here.

When I heard about The Fungle, as a parent I had a few questions. Narayanan Vaidyanathan, the CEO of Gamaya Inc, was nice to answer these questions for me.

How did The Fungle come about?
We created The Fungle to be a safe, fun & interactive world where kids can learn about the various cultures in the World.

My grandmother is a great storyteller – an endless stream of stories and an amazing amount of patience! Now, as a parent, I appreciate that more than ever! We are too busy & far away from extended family and our kids are stuck to the couch with their game consoles and TV but I wanted my kid to hear all those stories. So we needed a tireless storyteller who can keep todays kids engaged! That’s how The Fungle came about.

Explain more about online safety in The Fungle.
The safety of kids in The Fungle has been very important to us from the start. We ensure the following –

1. We strictly adhere to the COPPA guidelines.  (http://www.coppa.org/)

2. We do not ask for any personally identifiable information about the kids.

3. There is no way for kids to share personal information or pictures with others in The Fungle.

4. Our chat system will be based on pre-made phrases and sentences, so kids (or adults) in the site cannot say anything inappropriate to other users.

5. We understand kids will want to communicate freely with their friends within The Fungle through our internal mailing system (BeeMail) – for this we plan to make parents responsible for picking and approving friends they know in real life, to also be friends in The Fungle. This way, the child has no way to befriend someone their parents don’t know or approve.

6. We don’t have any external links to pages outside The Fungle or advertisements that can lead a child out of our website.

The Fungle does not support advertisements. How does it work?
We felt having advertisements (banners with links to the advertisers website), while a decent source of revenue, is not safe for the age group we are targeting – a kid could click on an ad, be taken out of our site and then they are out in the open web. As a parent, that is a very scary thought! The world you can see and play in now will be our free trial area. Anyone can register for free and play in it with no time restrictions. We will offer expansion packs for parents to buy for their kids. Each expansion pack will contain 5 or so storybooks and access to a new location in the world & some games. We will also offer seasonal expansion packs with stories relevant to the season like Diwali or Christmas or Chinese New Year that parents can buy. Once a parent buys an expansion pack, the child will be able to access it the next time they log in. Pricing of these expansion packs is still being worked out and will vary based on content, but it is likely to be around $7 each. Kids like getting surprise gifts! So we will offer parents special virtual items to purchase and send to their kids in The Fungle. These gifts will be costumes and items for their avatar and will be priced at $1 or less. We believe most parents will prefer to pay something reasonable for safe high quality content and cultural enrichment, rather than a free portal with ads.

There is a fine line between being very interested in something and being obsessed. Does The Fungle have any check points to make sure that the child does not spend too much time playing?
Yes, we have plans to allow a parent to limit the time they can spend in The Fungle. We also have a way for parents to know when their child played last and how much time they spent in The Fungle. We will also remind kids after an hour or so of continuous play to stop playing and take a break.

How much parental support is required to play the game?
A child who can read & comprehend simple english, likely 5 or 6 years and older, will not require any parental support. We have designed the product to be intuitive to young children and have been doing periodic focus tests with kids to ensure new features stay intuitive. Kids younger than 5 will have more fun playing with their parent. We have got feedback from some of our parents that they enjoyed our stories too and reading along with their kids was a nice way to spend some time together!

Please feel free to email/contact me for further clarifications. (feedback@thefungle.com)

All the ruckus in the virtual world about one woman’s parenting style, made me think of the sitcoms I used to watch, the sitcom mommies and how they dealt with their kids.

Bewitched, Cheers, The Cosby show, Dharma and Greg, Family Matters, Frasier, Friends, Fresh prince of Bel-Air, Fullhouse, Family Matters The golden girls, I love Lucy, Matlock, Home Improvement, I dream of Jeannie, Seinfeld, Sister Sister….

These were my staple sitcoms during my pre-baby-non-career-woman days. Family Matters was the first sitcom I watched in the US. YaadaYaada having arrived in the US a year earlier than I, was my TV guide. She sang praises on the sitcom about the African American family, the doctor husband, the lawyer wife, their five children. She meant the Cosby Show. I channel surfed and ended up watching Family Matters. It took me a good three episodes to figure out that it was not the Cosby Show! But when I did watch the Cosby Show, the one person who captured my heart, the one and only Claire Huxtable. I knew I wanted to be a mother like her – loving, accommodating but no nonsense, poised and sensible. I am still working on poise people, but doing good over all, if I may say so myself.

So here is a fun survey. Choose from the list ( Claire Huxtable, Jill Taylor, Rosanne and Mrs.Beaver ) your favorite. It will be open till Jan 24, 4.00AM PST. Have a good one folks.

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Edited to add: Reults of survey here.

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Yesterday was Chula and Mieja’s first day taking swim lessons. I posted in the school’s parent yahoo groups, made couple of phone calls and registered them in a highly recommended swim school. They have classes once a week for 30 min. So I was fully aware that the money spent is for them to monkey around in water, which they did and had lots of fun. Well, I can dream that they freestyle across the Suez canal after these ten, once a week, thirty min classes, but again it will be just a dream.

Now I have to mention that of my M.A.N.Y pet peeves, one that will rank number one is my obsession towards maintaining a schedule and the other one that will be in the top ten is public water facilities.

My schedule goes like this:

– Swim class at 5.30PM = We have to leave home at 5.00PM.
-Leave home at 5.00PM = we must be ready dressed + kids’ back packs packed + their after swim snack ready + boots on + jackets on + customary potty round etc done by 4.55PM.
-Back pack ready at 4.55PM = start packing back pack at 4.30PM.
-They need to have a substantial snack before swim and it must be at least 90 min before the swim. So biggish snack/light early dinner at 4.00PM.
-Eat at 4.00PM = dinner, snack all done by 2.00PM. So I can go pick them up at 3.00PM. (Now if some one points out to me that we live exactly 1.8 miles away from school and it takes exactly 6 minutes one way even if all the four traffic lights are on, I will have to ask you to shut up and refer you to my pet peeve # 1. It has to be like this only.)
-I can hear the clock ticking, every second passes with an ominous thud, I am moving at warp speed, but the rest of family is not. So I feel this enormous pressure of carrying every one through my schedule in order to achieve the deliverable. Working on that folks…. might take a life time though.

Now to my next pet peeve about public water facilities. My most traumatic life experience so far, is that I had to dip in sea at Rameshwaram in order to ward off the ill effect of some planet in my husband’s birth chart. I consider it atrocious that I had to do it with him just because we are married. The very fact that I was forced to do it, created many ill effects for the husband that were not in his birth chart. Pity-huh?!

I see in water, things that no one can possibly see with their normal eye. I imagine one person swallowing water and coughing it out and their germs coming to me/my children crawling in slow motion with Jaws music playing inside my head.  The funny thing is that I am not your typical Purell worshipper. Water just seems to enhance my out of the box thinking.

So after the swim class, I washed, dried, dressed, blow dried the girls’ hair once at the pool side. Brought them home, dumped them directly in to the tub, shampooed their hair, scrubbed the top layer of skin off, rinse, repeat, ditto at home. Then the usual smahan after hair bath, churanam to clear sinus, blow dry their hair, moisturize etc etc ritual followed. Of course, I have a target bed time, so all this scrubbing activities have to be reverse engineered and timed accordingly. You all get a fair idea of how things roll right?

By 8.00PM, I was a wreck. I felt like eating murukku….. chewing the crispy, fried, oily snack seems to be the perfect solution to get rid of all that stress. Unfortunately there was no murukku at home and so the husband was collateral damage to the process of de-stressing.

The bigger point to all this is……. (yes, however pointless all this seems there is a point peeps) taking the children to an activity that I am not comfortable in is ‘this’ hard for me. I usually stick to my comfort zone of art, dance and dabble a little bit in music. The rest is like pulling a huge stone uphill by tying it to my hair. So hats off to the parents, Chinese and others, who are very sure about their choices for their kids and go through the hassle of taking them to various classes and putting in the grueling hours of practice and such. Amy Chua might call me lazy, but it is like that only. I just want to choose my battles.

PS: My opinion about Amy Chua’s article:
I didn’t like the stereotyping. For example, Asian kids play video games, do sleep overs and have extra curricular activities that Amy Chua may not approve of. She just translated what she did at home to all Asians.

I admire her guts for telling out in the open what she believes in.

I agree that Asian parents have high expectations on their children, while some non-Asian parents might be afraid to have any kind of expectations on their children. It is not wrong to have expectations.

I also agree that children need to be presented the same activity many many times before they master it and are very comfortable in it. But every parent does ‘the presentation’ in different ways. Not all Asian parents yell and go on a war path.

God give me strength to not call my children garbage, however testing their behavior is.

Whatever you do, do it with conviction. Example, the worst will be a ‘typical’ Asian parent parenting the ‘typical’ western way and expecting the result of ‘typical’ Asian parenting and vice versa.

Some time in the past two years, in my Language and Literacy Development in Young Children class, the prof passed a Caldecott honor book and asked us to read it.

It was the story of the seven blind mice. The mice encounter something next to their pond and try figuring out what the object is. On Monday the red mouse touches a part of the object and says that it is nothing but a giant column of enormous girth. On Tuesday the next colored mouse touches a part of the object and says that it is just a fan. Monday through Saturday, the different colored mice touch only one part of the object and come to different conclusions. Finally on Sunday, the white mouse runs from one end of the object to the other end, pieces together the entire information and declares that the object in fact is an elephant.

This is a story we have all heard growing up. I love the moral behind the story, ‘by looking at just a part of the bigger picture, you distort the whole picture’. The reason this particular book was discussed in class is because the book was a controversial book and many classrooms do not use it.

Any guesses why? Well… I advice you to sit down while I give you the reason, because the mouse that comes out on Sunday and solves the riddle is a ‘white’ mouse. If you read between the lines, ignore the moral of the story, focus on a singular detail and decide based on one snippet of the whole big picture…. the books claims that white is superior to other colors, which can be further extended to people with white skin are superior. Ironic indeed.

Well, this unfortunately is not the only example. The most recent person caught in controversy is Mark Twain. You ain’t free even if you are dead Mr.Twain. The future will come back to get you.  Just be thankful that it is not a Terminator coming back in time, but just a publishing company deciding to replace the word ‘nigger’ with the word ‘slave’.

The bigger questions are:

What exactly are people trying to accomplish here?

Does Mark Twain’s use of the word nigger make him a racist?

Should one look at the bigger picture, namely the story of friendship between Huck and Jim and the period the story was set in, or should be bogged down by just one word and shun away from the book?

If one word defines a book, the author, what about the fate of books like ‘To kill a mocking bird’, that have the same offensive word?

A book is the intellectual property of its author. In many ways, it the author’s baby. Can some one, without the author’s permission, decide to change the book, even if it is just one word?

By replacing one word, by rewriting old literature, can history be rewritten too?

Doesn’t the new generation deserve the actual history?  Or do we give them a politically correct, glossed over version because it is easy for us to deal with demons from past history, because it removes a certain level of awkwardness in our current social life?

What do you think peeps?

If there is one thing all my friends, relatives, colleagues and acquaintances know about me, it is that I fast every friday. Rain or shine, even when I am traveling, I fast without fail. Yet, I am not a religious person in the way my mother or my mother-in-law are. Lighting the lamp and offering prayers on a daily basis are not my strongest forte.

I started the fast on March 5th, 2004. At this age and stage, I have already started to classify all events, except for the girls’ birthday, by month and year, because the brain is becoming throughly incapable of remembering dates. Last year, I forgot R’s birthday and my birthday because I have already blurred over the date and have filed it in my head as ‘sometime in Oct’ and ‘sometime in Nov’. But I remember March 5th, 2004! Is it because one always remembers the days their life changed for ever?

The funny thing about days that change your life is that, many a times they are so irrelevant and hardly seem monumental when it is actually happening. In fact some time in middle of April 2004, I had to look up the calendar and think back to narrow the date to March 5th. Even then it did not seem so big. Over an extended period of time, one grows, develops associations and the before you know it something irrelevant has already been coined as ‘life changing’.

On March 5th, 2004, the friday I started the fast, to me, all was lost. The only request I had for the higher power I was calling out to was to help me find happiness. In some way, may be the time was right or may be because I stopped fighting or may be all I had was faith, it worked and I did find happiness.

The quest to bear a child was over. But I held on to the fast determined that I will stop fasting after I have a second one. Three years and two children later, I was still fasting and told myself that I will finish the fast when the children turn five…. or may be fifty five…. That is when the warning came from an unexpected source.

My amma, though we have different perspectives on many things, asked me, ‘What are you trying to do? Holding God on a bind? Is it a retainer of some sort? What are you demanding her to do? Fasts must have an ending, that way you stayed focused.When something goes on for indefinite period of time, it gets diluted and loses meaning’. That is when I realized how painful the Friday fasts have become for me. I was irritable, always craving for food, demanded special attention from R – because I was doing this sacrifice for his children, I wanted him to put me on a pedestal at least every Friday. Plus many get togethers, pot lucks at work, fancy lunches at work, corporate evenings out A.L.L happen on Fridays and obviously I haven’t been a part of it. As my amma pointed out there were days I accidentally did something that was not be a part of the fast. Those days I was not just miserable, I was in terror. I imagined that it was a sign that something was to go wrong with my children. Fear without any basis is probably the worst torture that the mind can come up with. I decided to reevaluate my fast.

I felt what had started as a quest for hope had changed direction so much that it was back firing. This was around the time Tharini recommended Eat, Pray, Love to me. Certain experiences Gilbert wrote about deeply resonated with me.

What did I do by fasting?

I was asking, like Elizabeth Gilbert would say, the universe for something.

Did I get it?

Yes.

When I started the fast, did I truly believe that the only thing that would bring me true happiness is to become a mother?

Yes.

So essentially I was asking for something and I got it. In fact I got more than what I asked for and I got it at the right time. I have a good thing going. May be I must celebrate that instead of being terrified by the future. After a lot of thought, I decided I must continue fasting every Friday, but not as a preventive mechanism, but as a celebration.

Today, as I tell any one who enquires, I fast because it is my thanks giving. As life goes on, there are new demands, expectations and disappointments. In this process I can possibly get thankless and greedy. Every Friday brings me back to reality, it grounds me to the very basic of my being, teaches me to be truly thankful, never to lose hope – no matter how tough things seem to be and to focus on what is truly important.