Sassi is teething molars. We just got tips break out just this past week of both her first molars. I can only imagine the discomfort. Yet she’s being a champ.
I was in Karachi for four days Coaching the Startup Weekend Women APAC, full of these incredible women.
Seeing them ideate and run with it was like water to a dehydrated twig. The place was palpable to say the least, glass ceilings shattering left right and centre, Women-run enterprises or ideas of such, all-women Boards in the making.
Stuff of dreams, just that it’s as far from dreaming as it gets. This was real. In the world of today where women get marginalised all over the place for things big and small, here were thirteen ideas shaping into potential women-led organisations. If that does not define a potent space I don’t know what does.
I Also ran an introductory level Pricing workshop for women entrepreneurs.
Having trained, worked with and developed both men and women as professionals for some years now, as much love I have for the boys, there’s something near magical about working with women. The brimming potential, the eagerness to learn, the grasp so tight on what they want out of life is what reminds me how passion is the fuel women run on and when passion is what drives you, even sky gives way as a limiting factor.
This was, however, my first workshop as a mother. She has been going to all my meetings and work visits (ranging from various offices to warehouses in remote spaces) but I had deliberately been avoiding and excusing myself from giving longer sessions or running a training since Sass was born.
I chose an almost two years of age to kick it back off.
Yes.
She’s 16 Months and accompanied me through my training as well as coaching and one on one mentoring spread across almost 3.5 days
At first through the coaching, my child was either frolicking around, discovering newer things to play with, a dustbin to grab paper out of, all sorts of fun stuff (see that little ubiquitous head). Then it started getting boring. She would walk out of the cube (a meeting room shaped like a cube with an entrance only on one side) and lose the entrance, ending up in tears.
The active workshop the next day was more of a challenge. I took along the basket full of toys Neha Khala got for her in meagre hope that she will be occupied but as I paced the slightly heightened podium, rigorously discussing the merits of each pricing strategy and discussing costing methods with a room full of a keen (yet empathetic towards my toddler) crowd, she would run across all the while giving me a mini stroke when about to fall off the edge gleefully. There were also times when I just perched her on my hip at an attempt to listen to the participants closely instead of grabbing her shoulders to dangle her off the edge of the podium. And got photographed with her hanging like a kitten.
Through my one on one sessions with the incubatees at The Nest, she was tired and done with the day an hour ago already so we had crying fits and mini breaks until I found an inexpensive yet killer solution
I decided to martyr a box of tissues.
She’s a bright child and a strong willed one at that. This combination is rather deadly yet I have every reason to be thankful for it all.
She will not be holed in a corner while I wonder what’s on with her life.
She will not be told off.
She will know her mind and speak it too. Once she starts talking. Right now it’s a lot of assertive babbling but that goes to show the confidence she has in her ginormous opinions.
She will not follow the crowd into crap holes of life. She will probably walk into her own by herself but I hope she always has us to fall back on.
It’ll be difficult winning her approval once she’s older but she’s perhaps the only human being in the world I’ve ever wanted to be liked by.
The innate sense of protecting your child is overbearing yet I try to let her wander as much as I can.
With a hawk’s eye I let her toddle away until she reaches that edge of the limit I can take. Miraculously that’s exactly where she stops and looks back at me urging me to follow with her big brown eyes.
Either we share the spatial limitations our brains define as personal or these motherly vibes get through and pass off as near telepathic.
I can’t get my head around the fact that she is going through the last one of her 10 leaps (Read: Wonder Weeks). She’s bright, she’s sharp and it seems that the only thing standing between her and a teenager is speech. She understands EVERYTHING. Even instructions never given before.
The entire idea behind this post that appears all over the place, with events spanning a few days in Karachi and some work I accomplished is this.
My every day might not be as flashy as these but what remains constant across them all is this. My child and copious amounts of work. The stress of being a lone founder of two brands and a Company along with a toddler in tow is immense. However, thankfully I only feel it physically most times.
What makes me glide through it psychologically is the fact that I don’t give myself a choice. I don’t allow myself to sit back and say I can’t do this every time push comes to shove. I don’t let circumstance define me. I define circumstances. The arrogance I have against fate, life and everything that is not in my control which is most things, morphs into crazy levels of adaptability to surroundings.
I have the will. I always always find a way and if someone like me can do it, ANYBODY can.
Thank you Sassi for making mama a warrior deadlier than she ever was.