Oof. This has been a week. In fact, it may very well have been longer than a week. Last time I came up for air it was the middle of August. It’s still August, right? It’s not? It’s OCTOBER? OK, I will start again.
Oof. This has been an intense period of much, much longer than a week. This latest week has definitely been the peak of the intensity, however. In the past 7 days I have launched my book Not Quite to Plan online, held a launch party for my book, worked two part-time jobs, simultaneously, each at almost full-time capacity and started to move house. I have not, I would hazard, been considered for any parenting awards during this time.
When I look in the mirror I see unruly hair I never have time to dry, scruffy nails I haven’t had time to take polish off, grey hairs, a crazed glimmer of ‘what have I forgotten’ dancing in the backs of my eyeballs and my slightly slimmer body dressed in one of about three outfits I know to be both presentable and practical. In short: I am frazzled.
One week ago, however, I pulled myself together, for one night only, and hosted a book launch party. I have never attended a book launch before, so I have no idea if mine was as should be expected, but I do know that in my view, it was perfect. I planned it with the same aesthetic obsession that I planned Dylan and my wedding. It’s probably a good thing there was no overlap in guest lists, besides Dylan and me, because the two events gave off a distinctly similar vibe. We swapped a Jersey country garden for a trendy Mumbai bar/restaurant, but besides the venue, there was little to distinguish relationship launch from book launch. In fact, my outfit for the book launch was whiter than the one I wore to our wedding. (A bold choice for the mother of a toddler, I admit, but apart from a new, blue, pen stripe added by Jasper when he got over-excited about helping me to sign a copy of the book, my impractical white jumpsuit emerged unscathed.)
The event was at the Bombay Canteen and, helped in huge part by their style, class and efficiency, was thoroughly enjoyable. The drinks flowed, the food wowed and nobody seemed to mind that I blubbed my way through my speech. I had stipulated in the invitation that my speech would be at 5:30pm, because I wanted to ride that inevitable wave of emotion as early as possible. But, this is India. Saying 5:30pm meant that it would be 6pm at the earliest and I think I even missed that by a quarter of an hour or so. I practised my speech several times in the hope that repeating the words over and over would somehow take the meaning out of them but, still, I could not hold back the tears which streamed down my face as I shared a tiny insight into the story behind the story.
Despite having spent over a year making sense of my entry into motherhood and turning that newfound sense into a collection of words that now very much resembles a book, I am still incapable of talking about the experience without being overwhelmed by emotion. For everyone at the launch event, therefore, all of whom I have spoken to previously about Not Quite to Plan and the experience that led to the writing of it, it came as no surprise that I struggled to hold it together. While recording my audio book, too, I have had a similar problem with my voice cracking and my heart crumpling to the point of having to regroup and re-record several passages, several times. At least nobody can question the authenticity of what’s expressed in the book. (Or tell me that I am an elegant cryer, once you look at this next photo).
Before and after my speech, I spent a lot of time laughing, however. The evidence is there in almost every photo. I loved talking to everyone who came: helping them choose a bookmark, signing their copy of Not Quite to Plan, accepting their donation to the local non-profit SNEHA (www.snehamumbia.org) in lieu of payment for their new readable, packing their book and bookmark into a branded bag and sending them on their merry way. Sure, adrenalin made me spell my own name wrong a few times, but for the most part, I had a smooth little production line running.
The entire evening was such a buzz that it is perhaps no surprise that by the time I left the Bombay Canteen my vision was starting to fuzz with the telltale symptoms of a migraine. By 7:30pm I was at home and in bed. Hardly the rock and roll lifestyle but, again, I have never been to a book launch so perhaps that’s the way it ends for all the great authors. The following day, instead of basking in the glory of having launched my first book, I created a cave in my home office, powered through some emails and wore sunglasses whenever I had to leave my sanctum. (Another feature of it no longer being August is that it is no longer the rainy season which means big, round, bright sunshine - glinting off everything, everywhere.)
And I did have to leave my sanctuary because, on the Friday after the Thursday when I launched Not Quite to Plan, I had a media interview with a local newspaper called Sunday Midday. Jane, the journalist, had reached out to me via Instagram and so, scoffing down a borderline-irresponsible concoction of pre-emptive and symptom-relieving migraine solutions, I set off to the pool cafe (the same cafe where I wrote the entire book) to meet with her. The resulting interview was far more detailed and generous than I anticipated and, apparently, Sunday Midday is the preferred weekend news source of more than a few Mumbai connections. Colleagues (old and new), our new landlady, the audio recording studio owner and several mums from our current compound reached out to tell me they’d read my story over breakfast which topped up my post-launch buzz all over again.
Dylan frowns on the amount of time and effort I put into creating content to post daily on Instagram but knowing that my profile looks interesting and legitimate enough to justify an entire article and photograph in a weekend paper only fuels my desire to do more. At least, I would do more if I had the time, the energy and any creative juices left in my overcooked brain.
This brings me to moving house, which happens imminently. In fact, some of it already started today, when the IKEA furniture dismantling team arrived to take apart our beds and wardrobes ahead of The Big Pack-Up tomorrow and The Big Shift on Saturday. It was sensible of them to do this the day before the full manpower arrives to flood the apartment with boxes and packing paper tomorrow. What wasn’t sensible was to set off without any boxes and packing paper into which to move the contents of the beds and the wardrobes. At Dylan’s suggestion, I preempted this oversight before they arrived but not soon enough to avoid watching and listening to 3 lifter-shifters spending an hour sitting around our kitchen table, twiddling their thumbs and chattering like old fish wives while they awaited the guy with the boxes and paper.
I am certainly not winning any ‘Employee of the Month’ awards today - for either of my jobs - as I then spent the day moving myself around the apartment to be both in eyeshot and out of the way of the flurry of activity. I now see that I was naive to assume that I could be even remotely productive during this move and am glad that I will not be pretending to work tomorrow.
Where, in all this, has Jasper been, you might ask. And that’s a very valid question. He is, of course, absolutely fine; adaptable, dependable and irrepressibly optimistic as he is. He has, I confess, been adopted. Not permanently, but this week he has been welcomed with wonderful open arms into various different households where he has been fed, watered and entertained. On Friday and Saturday he will even nap in a friend’s house. I could take offence at the suggestion that Jasper is something of a latchkey kid at the moment, and that I am struggling to keep up with feeding him his vegetables, but it’s true and I am not above accepting help when it is offered. My success in eating down the freezer ahead of moving house has meant that I am at a loss for last-minute frozen portions for Jasper, and my accidental work overload means that I don’t have the time to cook every evening now either, let alone to jump through all the hoops required to complete a weekly grocery shop. It just might be time to find some help in the kitchen … before we all turn into a bowl of pasta.
The one thing I have done on behalf of my poor, neglected son, is attend and apparently pass an interview with his now-future school: DSB, or Deutsche Schule Bombay. Dylan and I Zoomed the school principal yesterday morning and were very happy to receive the ‘pay us the money and we’ll educate your child’ email yesterday afternoon. I say ‘happy’, because schools are very competitive here and it’s nice to know he has a spot, but the reality is that we are more relieved that I am in soon-to-be-full-time employment because the fees we will pay for his kindergarten here in Mumbai are about four times what we will pay for his high school in Australia.
So there we are: it’s a mad house. One mad house today, a new mad house on Saturday.
In case you are interested in supporting my fledgling author life, you can grab yourself a copy of Not Quite to Plan here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Not-Quite-Plan-experience-pandemic/dp/1399947508/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1694340504&sr=8-1
And then sing with me: Read → Review → Recommend. Read → Review → Recommend. (You can only review where you bought it, so, that’s on amazon for most people!)
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