You have to do, what you have to do
This is not just my story but me and my hubby’s. We are parents to two adorable kids (aged 3 and 1), which means we are in demand and “wanted” always. We are a little old school, and believe that having kids is something that happens and should not be a life altering experience. We come from a setup where like many other Indians, we have to live in a city that is not our home town and thus we have no family to help us look after our kids. So both of us share our responsibilities and take turns looking after the kids to give the other space to work.
I am a storyteller and a researcher with a PhD in Visual Storytelling with a passion for artistic soap-making, while my hubby works for an MNC and is parallel studying towards a PhD. I made a conscious decision of choosing an alternative path of working from home, at my pace, rather than opt for a full time job. I must say, I am fortunate that I am in a position to have the luxury of doing that. My work comprises of giving lectures, workshops, storytelling sessions and creating beautiful soaps. I began getting back to work as soon as my elder son was 6 months old. I did not want to leave my children in a day care or in the care of a nanny at home. I personally am not very comfortable with that idea. Thanks to babywearing and an understanding hubby, who takes care of the kids while I give my lectures / workshops or story sessions, I have been managing to juggle work and parenting. The soap making bit is relegated to night times, when I am at peace and relatively undisturbed by the kids. We do have a maid who helps us look after the kids at home, but it is not possible to take her everywhere with us.
As both of us are researchers, one of the things we do is write papers and publish them. In 2016, we both wrote papers and they got accepted to be published and presented at an International Conference in Jan of 2017. We were asked to make a podium presentation for the same. I had also put in a proposal to take a workshop which was accepted. Now, we had 4 choices in front of us.
- Hubby attends the conference and presents his as well as my paper. I cancel the workshop.
- I attend the conference, take the workshop and present his paper.
- We both don’t attend the conference as we don’t have any place to leave our kids.
- We take our kids with us at the conference, I conduct the workshop and we both present our respective papers.
We chose to take the last option, we had both worked hard on our individual papers and decided that both of us should present them personally. But “working” while looking after the kids requires a lot of patience and preparation. We spoke to the conference organisers and informed them that we will have to bring our children along as we don’t have an option. Fortunately for us, the organisers were very supportive and extended a lot of help.They said, if we were comfortable attending the sessions with our kids, they had no problems. Let me tell you here that our kids are not extra ordinary; they are very much like any general kids. In other words, they play, run about, get bored, cry / speak loudly, fart, poop, get hungry, want to be carried, throw a tantrum, fuss when sleepy etc etc. We of course, had to ensure that our kids did not create any nuisance or disturb the conference in any way. So we made our preparations in advance.
How we prepared:
Firstly, we requested the conference committee to make sure that me and the hubby were given different slots to present our papers, so that one of us would be with the kids at all times.
Both our kids have been put onto normal food from the time they began to eat, we just ensure it is well cooked and less spicy. Water is drunk out of a small steel tumbler. Our kids love fresh fruit, so we just source fruit from shops nearby. My younger daughter is still breastfeeding, so I didn’t have to worry much about carrying bottles, sippy cups or sterilisers.
Thus, we were all set for the journey. When all was ready, my hubby suffered a fracture in his right foot, got a plaster and could walk with the aid of a walking stick…..Dang! Should we cancel our plan? After a consultation with the orthopaedic we decided we will go ahead with the plan.
We got to the venue and all was going according to plan, until I had to present my paper. That’s when my son got super possessive of me and refused to let go. My turn to present was almost upon me and no amount of coaxing was working. So I had to do, what I had to do, I hitched up my saree, tucked in my palla at the waist (like a lady on a mission), took up the Baby Carrier and put my son on my back! I walked down and took the podium much to the amusement of the audience and presented my paper. At this moment, my normally shy son went into performance gear and began waving and singing to the audience. I was praying that his voice was not being carried by the microphone and thankfully it wasn’t. I took questions from the audience and finished to a thundering applause JAnd that’s how it all happened!
— Sherline Pimenta —