Komal Porecha loves all her three babies—a pair of twins (a boy and a girl) and a boxer, but she admits that, “The first year of being a mother is the hardest. I needed to resort to my sense of humour to survive it.”
Her debut book Bringing Up Your Baby (Random House Rs. 299), is a funny, heart-warming take on the first year of motherhood laden with trivia, personal-accounts and medically- backed facts. It began by her, “jotting down snippets of things that amused me,” says Komal, a freelance writer who regularly contributes to fashion and lifestyle publications. Over time, as her writing piled up, she decided to develop it into a book.
Komal, a trained interior designer who has been part of the industry for nearly twenty years now, and is currently heading her own design firm, Komal Porecha Associates, says that one of the hardest aspects of motherhood were the changes it wreaked in her own routine, “ I had to give up work and sit at home. I was sleep-deprived, suffered from post-partum depression and was bogged down by the enormous task of looking after two new lives. We are a generation that wants it all. And there is a constant tussle between doing something right and doing it the way you are used to.”
What also makes it more challenging is our Indian culture, she feels, “Despite education and modernisation, we are still rooted to tradition in so many ways,” she says. “Our culture is diverse and rich but there are many aspects of it that need to be tweaked. It is an old wives' tale, for instance, that the mother should eat for two—being overweight is actually dangerous for both the mother and the child. We need to strike a balance between the old and the new,” she says.
Her children are nearly five years old now and Komal is back to work, but her memory of that first year is still fairly vivid. This is perhaps why she has written this book.
“It is a confusing time where every single day is a challenge,” she says, “The small things that we go through during the first year need to be articulated and shared. If this book manages to help you a little and give you a laugh in the bargain, my purpose has been achieved.”
