"Don't forget your second wind. Wait in the corner till that breeze blows in."
Just heard the song "you're only human" by Billy Joel. Have y'all heard it? Its just my life right now to the t!
In my last post I mentioned a good news that was about to come, if we were lucky. Here it is.. We might be moving to Perth. Phew! there I said it. Just the first time its exited my system. Feels much lighter.
So, this post is going to be about how great I feel and I will appreciate myself to the hilt here, so please feel free to browse around if you don't want to read about how proud I am of myself. Of course, I wouldn't have been able to do it without my team - Chetan and Rewa.
But, we were thinking of emigration since last year October. Earlier it was Canada, but it just did not feel right within my system. Basically, the Canadian government had opened many applications for the PR process and many of our friends emigrated. But, the cold weather, the uncertainty of job along with an infant, just did not make sense to me. Although we had started the application process, contacted an agent, paid a first instalment, prepared most of the paperwork and even given the IELTS tests with excellent scores, we could not follow the process through, partly because we could not arrange the funds at the time and partly because Rewa came along the way, we had to pull through Chetan's mom and dad's property deal and so on.
But then, after Rewa, we knew, that we could not bring up our child in this country and wanted to move to a better place. Those days, I had just delivered Rewa. I had eight stitches near my vagina and perineum. Chetan's mother and Chetan were my care takers. I was naked most times. Mostly without underwear. And they used to tend to my postpartum wounds. Until, a week after Rewa, Chetan's mother got seemingly upset with something Chetan said and has not visited our house ever since. More on my delivery and the state of affairs with my parents and my in-laws later in the blog. So, a week after Rewa, I had to stand up and cook dinner, since Chetan was too stressed out.
Chetan was in the best of his health just days before the delivery. He wanted to be fit enough to be a role model for our upcoming baby. Little did we know about the shit that was about to hit the fan.
Rewa came and we were totally unprepared. Chetan had also paid up for a CFA exam which was within 2 months of Rewa's birth. At the same time, Chetan's parents withdrew any support that they could offer. Why? Because of the madness that prevails in that household. Chetan's younger brother Abhinav had always been insecure with his own abilities and had always put the blame of their dad's share of mistakes on Chetan. When I first met Abhinav, I vividly remember Chetan introducing him as his brother. But there was an air of invisibility around him. A niceness that one could just see past, as though he never mattered, in his own eyes, let alone in the eyes of his family. I suspect an ADHD syndrome, but thats just my theory. So we helped him as much as we could after our marriage. We made him take up martial arts classes to channelize his pent up rage, put him in a theatre training workshop so that he learns to express himself. At that age of 22, he talked like he was 9-10 years old. He could not even form full sentences in Hindi, let alone English, to articulate what he wanted to express. Now he works in HCL, and his journey, while no doubt to his credit, had its humble beginnings with our initiatives. I used to sit wit him everyday, making him read the newspaper out loud for him to be able to speak, without hesitation. I even styled him for his dates until before Rewa. Decided on his hairstyle and made him buy his first pair of spectacles. The optician was also shocked at how many years Abhinav went without wearing the spectacles with that kind of an impaired vision. It wasn't that he was not cared for by his parents, but there was a constant denial of the nature of his problems. Everything was always covered up to be 'alright'. After all, nothing could be wrong with him, he was their child.
But something about Rewa coming into our lives, sparked a feeling in him, that was beyond his comprehension. It was a feeling of joy, mixed with deep rooted jealousy and a sense of not being good enough. Every one's attention was focused on me, Chetan and Rewa and he could not take it anymore, so one day he snapped. On the pretext of playing with the little one, he wanted to wake her up. After a long session of putting her down, me and Chetan were finally asleep and Chetan yelled at him for trying to wake the baby up. That was it. He just could not bear the yelling, the apathy and that constant feeling of being invisible anymore. So he went back home and snapped. Blamed his parents, us, anyone under the sun for the failures that were bestowed on him because of everyone around him, except for himself. And from that day onwards, Abhinav, Chetan's father and Chetan's mother totally boycotted our household and that included Chetan, Rewa and me.
And we were left fending for ourselves. A bedridden new mother, a ten day old baby and an over stressed father who had to deal with financial vulnerabilities of an inflated hospital bill and vaccines, a property deal of his father's old dilapidated house, the vacuum created by the absence of his family when he wanted them the most, an impending CFA exam and of course a hole in his heart because of the virtual absence of the only friend he ever had - me. He did hold himself together and pulled us through the storm. Paid all the bills, sailed through the deal, pretended not to care about the desertion of his family and appeared for the exam, although he could not clear it. But that took a huge toll on him. He was so stressed through it all, that a rash broke out. That rash is still there with him. It becomes much more severe when Chetan worries about something. At the time, it was so bad that Chetan could not function in his daily life anymore. Everyday was laden with an antihistamine that would suck out all his energies, rendering him too tired to think straight. Yet I saw him fight it out. He fought the toughest of battles with the simplest of tools, sharpening their edges. He used to run. Eat healthy. Sleep right. I have seen him run his fastest on days when he was too tired to stand up, coming back energised for the next round. Only to repeat the whole process again, with no end in sight to the fight.
He is still doing it. "I didn't hear no bell. One more round" - Rocky Balboa.
So the responsibility of getting us out of here was on my shoulders. So, Rewa and me were left to ourselves, ten days after she was born. I had haemorrhoids from the delivery, used to constantly nurse her sitting on the bed, she was getting used to us and was constantly nursing, waking through the nights and even had a shuddering episode with jaundice in the NICU. Every time I would nurse her, she had to be burped, for at least fifteen minutes because or her reflux. We overcame all that. Me and her. She was two and a half months old when we decided to give Australia a shot. We took her to the Le Meridien hotel in Delhi to an education fair about the various universities in Australia and tried to figure out whether a PhD could be a possibility for me. And the response was very encouraging. All I had to do was write a research proposal, find a supervisor and take the IELTS, although some universities also required the GRE. It was an uphill climb at the time, but I had to give it a shot, since this seemed like our last arrow.
So, I started working on the proposal when Rewa was three months old and used to nurse her, put her to sleep and work on it through the day and then, Chetan would come back to take care of her when I used to the writing of the day during night-time when the baby was asleep. Then came the GRE. We booked the exam for a date that was nine days later. And those nine days I slept barely 4 hours a day, working as hard as I possibly could. Rewa and I used to sleep through the day till Chetan came home, after which he took care of her and I used to study through the nights. Three sections on Verbal ability, quantitative skills and writing ability were very diverse in the skillsets required to deal with them and almost impossible to acquire in nine days. But we gave it a shot and the score was a 320/340 and a 4/6 in analytical writing . An average score according to all standards, but we were very encouraged by it. Then came the IELTS, and it was a day after the GRE Test. I was five months postpartum. The IELTS score was an astounding 9/9 for three sections and 6.5/9 for writing (:-P), taking the overall score band to 8.5/9. We were unhappy with the writing score and submitted it for review to the British Council, but to no avail. However, we decided to take another shot at the GRE before I joined back work and give myself another 15 days of preparation. But by that time, I was so exhausted, hormones out of whack, sleep cycle destroyed and no diet whatsoever, with a nursing baby and a household to manage, I could not think straight in the examination hall. I screwed up and got the exact same score, actually it was 319/340 and 4/6. So a reduction of a score point, and 16000 rupees, that we never saw again. The very next day I joined back work.
Its been two months since then and me and Rewa have been trying to recover from that trail of events - one research proposal, one IELTS, two GREs and a constant work schedule since with eight hours of separation.
But, I have now received an offer from the University of Western Australia for a PhD and we are in the process of applying for the visa. Come Chetan's role again. So now, me and Rewa try to relax as much as possible. Trying to bond every single day, only to be separated for eight hours again the next. But she is not Rewa. She's a Braeva (Braveheart). My little one. Always fighting. Always happy and always loving her "mamamama."
I love you so much. You are my everything. My everything is you beti.
So yeah, we have been waiting in the corner till our breeze blew in. Lets hope it takes us to a new world. A new day.
