THERE IS TWO OF US NOW-SABELLA

Wow! You could really go missing when you want to, no? There is lots of changes n my life .You will be surprised. I am a mommy now yaaay! I have a little princess who has totally changed my life in more ways than i can count.

Our odyssey as a mother could get a real wacky start, if you are a girl who has grown up on set stereotypes. Stereotypes that are so theatrically heralded by our Hollywood movies and daily soaps.

Alas, when it actually happened, there wasn't an iota of the drama I was dying for. What changed colors was just a damn strip and a very 'matter-of-fact' doctor. Much to my displeasure, she made it sound like the most routine thing while listing out all the dos and don'ts.

The morning after and all the mornings in the rest of the NINE months were anything but 'sick'. Every night I would go to sleep imagining that the next morning I would wake up to a whole lot of melodrama. Me, running to the loo, throwing up and a hassled family running around, and me lapping up all the attention.

Months passed and much to my disbelief, there was not a single day when I woke up to the morning sickness that was meant to be the major sign of an authenticated a pregnancy. So much so that despite the pot of a belly that I was carrying ahead of me at five months, I always had doubts whether I was actually ‘carrying’. To top it, my doctor never ever found anything alarming and would always laugh away my concern about the baby being normal.

Contrary to any sickness, every night I would stealthily head towards the refrigerator and gobble down litres of milk. So much were the hunger pangs and milk cravings. No wonder, by the end of those nine months, I almost resembled a dinosaur. From a delicate 40-plus, I was hovering around 80. And there wasn't anything utterly feminine or angelic about this mother-to-be’s frame. Nothing came even close to the aura around a pregnant woman that was so repeatedly mentioned in the plethora of books on pregnancy and motherhood that I had picked up in the preceding months.

As if the nine months weren't enough, the finale was a grand twister. It had nothing of the quintessential theatrical stuff I was so longing for. Yes, it had everything that laid to rest my cravings for drama forever. There wasn’t any ‘baby almost about to be dropped’ like situation. I wasn’t being wheeled just well within ‘cut-off-time’ into the hospital. Neither were my always prim-and-proper hubby and mother-in-law running around in their most disheveled state. That was so wicked of me but I had thought that at least on that D-day the world would see their unkempt look and I would be mighty amused. But that was seemingly too far-fetched a fantasy, perhaps.

 In the last two hours, of the gross ten hours before the baby decided that the mother had had enough, it was like the ‘workout’ of my life. At the end of which arrived a maroon-coloured all swollen baby, not resembling any of the cute baby pictures that had been hung around the whole house for nine months.

 With closed eyes and tears sliding down from the corners, as I savored every laughter and joyous shriek reaching my ears, I suddenly felt a warm, familiar hand stroking my forehead. Standing there was the ‘newborn’ grandmama all exhausted but so relieved. As I smiled and held her hand, I saw the button less sleeves of her not-anymore-crisp shirt and a few red marks. An aftermath of holding her hand badly every time the pain shot up. Both of us laughed, eyes brimming but words completely failing. Few precious moments, that perhaps made up for all the day’s pain and also for any drama that was lacking in the preceding nine months.

Looking back, I have inside felt so blessed at the smooth nine months and the even smoother finale. But we have laughed our lungs out umpteen times at my version and naive expectations of those nine months with family, friends and now with my daughter.