THE DADA-DADI, NANA-NANI SHIFT
By Gouri Dange, Pune Mirror | Feb 28, 2017, 02.30 AM IST
Once these pensioners return to their homes in India, there is the whole rigmarole of starting up the house again, and picking up the threads of their lives ( REPRESENTATIONAL PICTURE)
The new tour of duty, post-retirement, is to baby-sit in foreign lands
Pensioner's Paradise did someone say? That sobriquet for Pune is now passé. Not only are many pensioners now hard at the task of baby-sitting on a daily basis, many have one more call of duty: baby-sitting right across the globe somewhere. It involves closing your house down for months at a stretch and flying to where your grown kids now live, looking after their new baby and possibly an older child, while the young parents both return to work.
Two sets of grandparents are usually involved, running a relay over baby's first year and on to the next, if the aim is not just to help the newborn and the newbie parents, but also to delay the child going into day-care till it is at least two years old. So, it goes something like this: first dada-dadigo, stay, take charge of the home, the baby; they then pass the baton to nana-nani, and return to their lives in India. The same cycle is sometimes repeated a few months later.
While many older people no doubt just wait to see this day — when they will fulfil their role as grandparents and give their grown kids solid support, there is a price that they pay. They rarely talk about it, almost never complain, because Project Baby on which they have been deputed is an all-important one. And the internal prompt as well as family and society expectations dictate that you will roll up your sleeves, tuck in your pallu, and step up to the role.
However, there are many things that all these 60-somethings sacrifice — willingly and sometimes not-so-willingly, but always dutifully and almost always with grace. Any personal pursuits, classes, sports, hobbies, health routine, pets, that they have established, have to be packed up. They gamely try to stick with some of them when they go off to their grown kids, but most of it falls by the way side. To start with, shutting down the home for months on end means planning and tapering down the many little protocols of daily life as the departure date arrives.
Many of the men — the dadas and nanas— are not particularly 'useful' in this birthing and nurturing. And yet, they have to go along. Post-retirement, some of the men have found part-time work to do, but then Project Baby comes up. Now, they have to come up with a work-around, whereby they drop the ball for some months, or find ways to continue doing it long-distance, which is not always an arrangement their employer or clientele of whatever new work they are doing, can work with. No doubt, many of them 'make themselves useful' in some way or the other once they go on baby-sitting duty, but it is mostly the women who take charge of the son's or daughter's home, cook, clean, baby-sit, shop for essentials, and 'look after' their husbands, too, while they are at it.
One such set of men recently joked that perhaps some of them could stay together in one of their homes and keep their India lives and work routines going, while the wives go on ahead to the far-away foreign country to contribute fully to Project Baby. This would not be such a bad idea. An over-practical 32-year-old who has her parents and in-laws flying in and out on this tour of duty, and many like her, says something like: "We love dad to bits, but he gets bored away from his own routine, he does nothing for the baby or the kitchen, and often his food habits are more rigid than mom's, our houses are compact, so…"
Once these hard-working pensioners on high rotation (especially if they have two kids who are having babies) return to their homes, there is the whole rigmarole of starting up the house again, and picking up the threads of their India lives, where they left off. In my yoga class, there are many such, who show up after a long absence. They take some weeks to get back into the groove, and everyone around pulls their leg about how as a result of their going off on Project Baby, they have become a little chubby, or stiff. Some of them admit that their aches and pains and any minor health issues that they bravely kept at bay while away and in their children's homes, have come back.
Some of them, both men and women, will come back with some relief — however much they enjoy that baby, it is not easy to live for long months with your grown son or daughter, largely confined to the house, play by their house rules, keep your opinions about some of their life choices to yourself and put a happy face on it all. On top of it, the absence of domestic help in most homes abroad means plenty of routine, hard, and mind-numbing chores, which many are fortunate enough back here, not to have to do.
Let us salute these portable nana-nanis and dada-dadis.
■ GOURI DANGE Writes about the love-hate equation that we all have with our city
■ Two sets of grandparents are usually involved, running a relay over baby's first year and on to the next, if the aim is not just to help the newborn and the newbie parents, but also to delay the child going into day-care till it is at least two years old
■ Write to Gouri Dange at punemirror.feedback @gmail.com
If forwarding further, please delete my id, and use the BCC field for addressees, to reduce spam, viruses and identity theft. Thanks!
No comments:
Post a Comment