Playing The Part

“Oh Wow… you are a mother of two children?… Man, you don’t look it?!”
“OMG… you don’t look married… that’s awesome!”
“What…. your children are in Engineering?! I thought your kids were in KG!”

“What?! You have a few months old child?! I thought you would have elder kids”…….. Okay, now that is usually what I get… while the ones above are what my peers and people around me get…
And that has got me to write this post…

Increasingly there is added pressure on Not looking the part… you are not meant to look what you actually are or rather what your actual status is…

So if you are in college, you should look like a school going girl; if you are married or working young you should look like you are still in college, if you have kids you should look like someone who is not married at all and so on and so forth.
And not surprisingly the men do not have any such social issues or problems or concerns for looking their part…I mean they can look and be all that they are and not are and its okay… but Woman… you have to NOT look your part…
So the market is flooded with anti-ageing creams and wrinkle fading creams, ads show younger looking moms with each passing day with grown up kids, Kellogs would have you believe that Lara can owe all her svelte sexy figure to them and them only and I am now left completely confused about not what is my role in life now but surely how the world expects to see me….

mirror_reflection - Image courtesy - the sgl.com

It is a quiet dissension in my head and it is growing with each passing day. So I am walking a few good miles, running the treadmill, am on all fours working my *** off at home and trying to lose all the pregnancy fat… and while some may say, isn’t that good for you and your health?! and while I do agree that it is good… what is not good is the pressure under which I am doing it.
I may choose not to give into that pressure, but trust me, men if you are reading this and the women who are reading it will agree, the pressure is daunting!

I have friends of my age and older who are looking younger by the day, married ones are sexily carrying off haulter necks with sindurs almost as a fashion accessory, the ones with kids are tiptoeing on stilettos and are slipping into stretch jeans and are throwing abundantly the statements of vanity and may I also paradoxically add determination of getting back their youthful halo.

I am caught hence, wondering everyday on what should I look like today… a young mother?! or just a mother?! a homemaker?! a content homemaker?! a young mother aspiring to get back to work?! And while I am still struggling everyday with these questions, the wardrobe throws back the same quandary of what should I wear to look the part that I don’t look and then finally and obviously what should I look like?

The television is increasingly defining what women are supposed to look like in my country…

I have never found myself being hit so badly by the advertising world or by the society we live in… I have very quietly always been able to manage an offbeat fashion, a style, and always carried the look and lived the part of a self aware woman who was more keen to set standards rather than be following the ones around her…

But sadly I have become a victim today…. find myself in a quagmire of self effacing questions and social concerns…

I know the part I am playing now… but I am so sure I don’t know what to show…So Are you not supposed to look the part? Will my child be made fun of if her mother looks a mother and not someone out of the Dettol and Santoor ads?

This post is more a reflection of my mind today than ever before and all my posts before this…. would love to hear your views and get inspired.

Of Thank you notes and Greeting cards…

Today is my brother in law’s birthday…he lives in the US and all I had to do to show that I cared and remembered was send an e-greeting… how convenient…but how impersonal… And while I say that to myself, I realize that in all our humdrum and chaos of connectivity and being reachable; its extremely daunting to remember birthdays and anniversaries and other such important dates and days in our lives… we have become lazy as a culture… lackadaisical and even jaded to some extent…

When I was little, my mother taught me how to make a greeting card album…first of course there weren’t any emails and e-greetings and twitters and Facebook… (Bah! Facebook even helps you remember important dates in people’s lives)…but in those days to have received a greeting card on one’s birthday and a phone call on one’s anniversary gave one that special buoyant feeling that you are remembered, thought about and people care to remember when you first landed on this planet 🙂 So well yes, everyone sent handwritten letters or cards … and we received a dozen… every year…anniversaries, birthdays, just to say hello cards, congratulation cards to wish on getting good grades in school and invitation cards to marriages et al. My mother used to buy the simple drawing books or sketch books and paste the cards in there… soon we had some two or three such large drawing books full of lovely greeting cards and invitation cards…they were such amazing conversation starters when people came over… they were some things that I showed off to my friends… they became my store house of creative ideas and designs that I could draw from…

Image is from http://www.clarks-news.co.uk/

 

So everyone I knew had a coin album, stamp album and all that… but I had greeting card album… my grand parents marriage invitation card, my brothers annaprashan ceremony (first time a child is given rice to eat ) cards, my parents wedding anniversary cards, cards from my friends, and new year cards…

But now we don’t get cards that often… we send e-greetings.. so there is hardly anything to collect… of course we do save a lot of trees by not sending paper cards and all that… but the charm of remembering people is lost… Facebook helps you remember birthdays, 123 greetings helps you send e-cards, you sms wishes and even have gtalk statuses saying Happy Birthday dear… but the old world charm of Oh-you-remembered-my-birthday excitement has faded… guess am aging … but then am not complaining… it’s something I miss… a fond memory of beautiful thoughts, lovely words, thank you notes and three dimensional two folds that made each of those days so special… 🙂