Embracing the change - Part 3.

 "Eww, I don't want to touch the fish. I hate the smell. I won't wash them", I used to say to my kaki. "But you love eating it", she would counter. I loved the fish fry my kaki made. I developed the taste at her place. But washing the cut fish, the thought, would get me jitters. I never accompanied her to a fish market too. "It smells awful", I argued.

But now, at my place, every Sunday I cook fish for lunch. My kids relish it. I visit fish markets. I cut the fish, I peel the prawns. I marinate them. I watch new recipes on YouTube. And I fry, steam, curry cook and try various methods to make it more delicious.

Once you become a mom, there's no choice left with the smell and odour. When you can clean the poop in the bedroom, kitchen or anywhere it is, and in any form it is, what more could possibly smell worse? Change the poop filled diapers, in cars, in malls, right after you've had food or right before you start cooking. I guess you can make do with any weird kind of stench. The fishy smell is much more acceptable.

The 'Eww' vanishes in thin air, right after you deliver and change the first nappy. Cleaning the projectile pees or pukes, clad in kanjeevaram sarees or glittery gowns, isn't an extraordinary skill anymore. It happens mechanically. Once you smell the familiar stink, you know it's your baby. So automatically your hand reaches the diaper, 'snapp' it opens, 'zapp' you pull the wet wipes and 'whapp' you clean the bum. Out and out mechanical.

You ain't shy to sniff your baby's bum in public too. Perhaps, you would shy away to hold your hubby's hand in public. But, sniffing baby's butt, there's no awkwardness whatsoever.

As a kid, I would hate, when grown ups would talk about shit and butts in public. "How can they use such words in front of all?", I would think. But now, it's like colloquial words, use anywhere, anyhow you want. There's no taboo about it. Discussing poop patterns is as important as a seminar in corporates. Gladly no PPTs are used. But we moms tend to describe it in best possible ways, without the tech support.

Hesitations, gaucheness, embarrassments, all these words don't exist in a mom's dictionary. Narrating the whole episode of her first delivery, right from the labour pains to the sutures, everything in detail is discussed, on top of the voices, in a restaurant or a cafe or a park bench. The girl who was shy to buy a sanitary napkin packet from a medical store, happily converses about her periods being missed and how she got pregnant.

She's now, who isn't reserved to speak when it's about her child. She is a proud mom who has been through nine months of unerring process. Be it walking carefully or eating properly or exercising, taking the kicks, vomiting, losing appetite or sleep loss for that matter. She has metamorphosed from the coy, timid girl into a confident and bold mother. She has embraced the change.

Motherhood is amazing. And then it is really hard. And then it is incredible. And then it is everything in between ~ Unknown.

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