The Birth of a Parent

The beginning of a new life can create other strange new lives, reflects Manidipa Mandal

- Manidipa Mandal

MATRESCENCE IS A PHOENIX. IT be-gins with a burn, nurtured by the conflagration of your former self, and becomes its own spectre.

Seven years ago, I was a woman with a plan, my future parenting journey mapped out and solidly signposted. Seven years later, I am a person trying not to anticipate beyond the next day, week, month and year, while still planning for the decades to come, hopefully better than my own parents did.

Mother and Child in a Maternity Ward 1962

But to begin at the beginning… In March 2012, I had a water-birth plan and a gestation plan, and was working to a conception plan and an adoption plan. One notion I had clung to from my own childhood: I was adamant about not creating a single-child family. I would adopt first, I’d decided, and then either adopt again or maybe consider a biological child. I was naïve.

Through half my thirties, I had tuned out the ticking clock. By 2012, waiting to adopt first could jeopardise the possibility of biological posterity entirely, my partner feared. So we applied ourselves on both fronts at once. I read up on water births and painted a picture of our child’s early years in our Kolkata mini-bungalow, with the handkerchief lawn and bijou backyard. As a writer with a mostly telecommuting co-parent (we both worked for the same publication), I imagined we could pop into the Delhi office as needed and spend most of our life working and parenting at home. We made the down payment on a tiny studio apartment near Delhi airport. It would just be used a few days a month.