One year

Graziac, France

Today is my baby boy’s first birthday. It is a momentous occasion for me. Right from the time I was pregnant with him to his birth and initial days and through his first year, it has been nothing short of unique. This boy has a presence that can move mountains, instill the greatest force in everyone he meets and light up a room with his energy and spirit.

Here’s to my special love, my world. Someone who was not even in my life a few years ago but whom I now cannot live without. My joy, my heart, my inspiration and my guiding light – I love you so very much.

Since he has taught me to take up challenges and face my fears and I am very grateful for that, I have decided to bake him a cake for his birthday. I have never been a baker and have very rarely attempted baking. There is also some level of anxiety about baking and its associations with health anxiety for me.

Today, I have decided to face those fears and pray and overcome them.

The plan for the day is to relax, receive greetings and talk to friends and family, spend the day with my family, bake a cake and cut it in the evening at 4:00 pm. We will take a few photos in the garden and spend our evening playing together.

Update: The cake turned out to be a success! I baked a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, to keep things simple. I got the recipe from my nephew, and a few baking tips from my sister. It was not an easy task for me, since I did not use any appliances and hand-mixed everything. But in the end, it turned out delicious. It did not look half bad either. My family enjoyed it very much, all of them. My daughter said that eating cake was her favorite part of the day. My husband was impressed with how it turned out and helped himself to a second serving at night when we had all gone to bed (a true testament to my baking). My son, the star of the show, was video-ed as he tasted his first bite of cake, and broke into a huge smile once he had eaten it. The clean up is all done, and when we were talking about how the day went later in the evening, my husband commented that it turned out great but that I seemed to have all this unnecessary worry about the cake and that I was going to fail. He was right. I suppose in my current state of mind, every little thing matters to me. Things that are supposed to be easy seem like a huge task. Sometimes, a simple outing seems like a small victory. As silly as it sounds, baking for our kids seems to be sort of a right of passage for "moms". I do not really subscribe to that line of thinking, but it influenced me nonetheless. I am learning to overcome these feelings one small step at a time. I am however glad to have been able to bake something and have it turn out well. Now to sit tight and hope that we can continue in this journey of cautiously venturing forward with our lives.

The first cake that I baked by myself from scratch

An emotional post

A recent bloom in our garden

The past few days, I have been feeling rather high-strung emotionally. We had quite a stressful week, worried about our work and jobs, our health, and being in tied up knots with anxiety over different things almost every day of the past week.

The weekend was set to be packed with party planning for my son’s birthday, laundry, organizing photos, baking and more, but proved to be exactly the opposite of that. On Friday, my son got sick and we spent the evening worried about him, but thankfully he improved by Saturday. I spent my entire weekend with him in my arms or by my side. Almost nothing else got done. I was running on very little sleep. I broke one of our drinking water glasses on Saturday morning, and as it shattered to the floor I felt my self confidence and motivation shattering as well. But the important thing was that our childrens’ needs were met. My son felt better even with fighting sleep all day, and was snuggled and held and made to feel secure and reassured all weekend.

Then, last night as I was going on four or five hours of trying to make him nap and trying to remain patient (it was a monumental effort but I succeeded), I read the news about the horrible incident that took place at the Gilroy Garlic Festival. This tragedy and senseless act of violence has shaken up all of us. It is so close to home (a mere 25 miles), and at an event filled with people having a fun day out. We have no walls anymore that separate us from being targets of gun violence. They have all broken down. This happened in California, in the bay area, and at a family-friendly event. Where are we safe anymore? For some reason, I had even been contemplating going to Gilroy just this week even though the last time I had been there was several years ago. But thankfully, for some unknown reason I did not get around to doing it.

Just a few days back, we were enjoying an outdoor concert in the park near our home while our children played in the playground and ran around dancing to the music with other children and families. I remarked to my husband how fortunate our kids were to grow up here in the US and in the bay area, with so many fun-filled and well-planned activities for children and families to do. He agreed, saying that even though both of us had great childhood experiences growing up in our respective home countries, that the infrastructure and level of planning here make it so amazing for young children. All of that was negated with this incident this past weekend. We have had this growing fear over the years, but this time it hit so close to home that we just cannot look away even if only to preserve our sanity. The thought of our children growing up around gun violence, learning safety drills at school and being taught by parents and teachers how to respond in case of an active shooter situation, living in fear (let’s face it, as much as we all resolve not to live our lives in fear, it is always there at the back of our minds, especially if we have children) of not being safe in a park, a movie theater, at work, at school, at a concert, at a shopping mall? It is terrifying and paralyzing.

This weekend one year ago, my husband and I spent our weekend just the two of us. I was about to go into labor to deliver our son, and our daughter was spending the weekend with my sister so we could go to the hospital when the time came. We were supposed to relax and enjoy the calm before the storm. We went out to lunch, tried to catch up on sleep and watched a few shows on Netflix together. But it felt lonely without our daughter around and very dull. We were so excited to welcome our son into the world the next day, on that Monday morning, as he arrived just as the suns rays were welcoming the morning as we looked out the window of our room on to the rooftop outside. We couldn’t wait to be at home with both our daughter and our son, as a family of four. We were looking forward to all the adventures we would have together as a family. The past year has been very difficult and challenging. It has required us to summon up strength we did not know we had, and we are sometimes unsure if we are even cutting it. But it has also been incredibly rewarding. We now have to learn how to give our children an amazing childhood, while shielding them from fear and worry over things they cannot control, and at the same time preparing them for the realities of the world they are growing up in. It is indeed a daunting task.

While I am struggling to reconcile all of these feelings, my perspective about this past weekend has definitely changed. It was not the weekend that was frustrating because I couldn’t get anything done since I spent all my time trying to make my baby nap and holding him. It was the one where I feel so lucky that I was able to hold him close, almost all 60 hours of it, and make him feel loved and secure, while feeling his warm baby unconditional love in return. Because, at the end of the day, that is all that matters.

Gardens and nurseries

A zen garden in Kyoto, Japan

A few years back, a trip to the nursery would not even have crossed my mind. I have often been on these trips with my grandparents, since my grandfather was very proud of his garden and was always looking for new and innovative ways to change it up. We have been to a few nurseries together, even through his old age, and he has carefully selected plants for his garden to use at the entry way, pond area, rockery and around his lawn.

On a recent trip to India, we were going on a family visit with my grandmother, and she did the same. My grandfather has since passed, and my grandmother has now taken over with the plants. It was nice to visit the nursery, and my husband helped carry the plants back to the car. My husband is very knowledgeable about plants and trees in general, having grown up in the countryside in his home country in western Europe. His mother still maintains a garden in her current home, and we spend a lot of time talking about the plants when visiting, sharing pictures and preparing confitures with the various fruits in season (most often apricots for us).

Our last home had a lot of fruit trees, but since it was a rental I think I did not get mentally invested in the garden. We had a vegetable garden for a couple of years from where we got fresh tomatoes, strawberries, butternut squash, and carrots. We had a herb garden with mint, coriander, basil, rosemary, thyme and laurel leaves. We also had a lot of fruit trees to maintain, including grapes, oranges, tangerines, apricots, and plums.

Our current home does not have very many fruit trees, unfortunately. However, it has a beautiful garden which we simply fell in love with and a lot of space. We have 4 gorgeous redwood trees, a nice expanse of lawn, and the best part is that the entire garden is visible and accessible from most of the house. We really love this garden. It has a small pond and fountain at one corner and a few rose bushes along the other wall. We have a peach tree that gave us a crateful of peaches this year. We recently planted our own basil plants, rosemary, lavender and lantana flowers. I am constantly on the look out for new plants to add to our garden.

For our son’s birthday, we are having a garden party and are considering gifting potted plants as party favors. This may not be too well liked by the children but we hope that they turn out to be more useful than some of the other items we might have chosen for them. So we went on a trip to the nursery this morning, and enjoyed our small outing there. We liked the perennials and will be looking into the idea a little more to see if we can buy ten small plants for the party.

Back home, I have a close family member who is also starting up a nursery as a business venture and I am very excited to see it come into fruition. This family member is very talented and has the vision and dedication to make it into a success. I am grateful to be able to have a garden, as well as people in my life who share the passion, knowledge and interest in gardening. It makes me feel so very fortunate.

My enjoyment of traveling and greenery have taken me to many botanic gardens around the world. Some of the gardens I have had the pleasure of visiting are:

Lalbagh botanical gardens, Bangalore
Botanical Gardens and Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate park, San Francisco
Jardins de Coursiana, France
Gardens at Schoenbrunn Schloss, Vienna
Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Melbourne
City Botanic Gardens, Brisbane
Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney
Gardens at Golden temple, Silver temple and Kiyomizu in Kyoto
Gardens at Nikko, Japan
Hakone Gardens, Saratoga, CA
Gardens of Manor House in Castlecombe, UK
Singapore Botanical Gardens
Gardens by the Bay, Singapore

On that note, I’ll leave you with a link to Bowie’s “Moss Garden”, which is only fitting because

-       We love love LOVE Bowie

-       The song is described to have tranquil and ethereal sounds

-       Bowie plays a koto, a Japanese string instrument that sounds like a mellow version of a banjo

-       We like Japanese gardens, and were ooh-ing and aah-ing over Japanese lanterns we saw at the local nursery only this morning, reminiscing about our trip to Japan when we were marveling at them in the zen gardens of Kyoto.

-       My grandfather enjoyed his visit to Japan very much and was always talking about it and the gardens there.

Moss Garden from the album “Heroes” by David Bowie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alSfXV_hnT4