Recently I’ve been going through a rough patch, balance wise, work-life balance. Work has been extremely hectic and clients have been supremely thankless, we’re expecting our second kid (named Ira tentatively by Ria and her mom), there’s civil and carpentry work going on in the house(storage, painting etc. long overdue in this 6year old house of ours) and if this was not enough we recently had Pinky (one of Rias two governesses) take a month off. In short life got very chaotic for Ria past few weeks. We came to realize she does not quite adapt to or welcome change as fast as I do. She was turning cranky and irritable at the slightest provocation. We realized this coincided with me working out of a different room at night. She wakes up middle of the night and then stays irritated on not finding me in the room. Of course for me it has all been a triple whammy coz I have three of a kind to handle, Rias mom and clients are no different. All of them are totally anti change. Figured out I needed to be much much more patient with everyone including bawling clients, civil/carpentry contractors, kid, mom and help if there has to be peace at home. Most important finally after being a freelancer for close to 5years stress had finally made its way to me. Gym helps unwind but there was no time for that too…. happened very sporadically. In short everything was threatening to spiral out of control and we needed a course correction. So recently gave everyone an off, told the clients I wont be available except for emergencies for 3 days, bundled everyone into the car and drove off to Vadodara. We had intended to visit the zoo there and basically just chill out with no work of any kind coming in the way. Turns out zoo was closed (new year/diwali week in Gujarat). In a way it was a good thing. We got to chill with Chandan and Lajuli (theoretically my inlaws but in fact Lajuli is a few months younger than Sonali and Chandan is around 7years my senior… so basically friends). They’ve built this really really beautiful home in Vadodara and are generally very warm unpretentious people. None of the airs you’d associate with being successful and settled at an early age. Basically our sort of people. Abeer, their son, is 30months older than Ria and these two couldn’t be more similar in nature. He’s probably the first kid we’ve met who like Ria actually enjoys sharing toys and is as simple and sorted out. These two hung around like long lost siblings and we didn’t even notice the two most of the day. The drive, 421km in 7hours each way, too was very relaxing and just right for a short hop specially considering we’re in the 4th month of the pregnancy. Since I got to disconnect from the daily rough and tumble I realized a few things.
- Kid just needs a bit of me time in her day, evening 6PM to 8PM is when I need to try and be available besides being generally open to 5 minute incursions during the day when she comes down to the office or into my work space and wants to bond for a few minutes.
- Clients will come and clients will go I cannot help it and there really is no point losing sleep and sanity over work. If there is a crisis that’s gone on for more than a week then I need to rethink the association and either ask for more resources or clearly accept I am not able to handle the account on my own so they should move on to a bigger more established service provider. I chose the smallness of my operation for a reason and that reason is because I am not a very good peoples person and cannot have a huge team working with me, battle lines get drawn pretty early on. So my size of upto 10 people at most ensures work is peaceful. I need to keep this in mind and expand only for the development wing (which Sonali handles and she is a perfect people manager) not in the services area.
- I need to make sure I go to the gym regularly. I’ve gotten into some shape that is better than what it was last year but I need to build on it and get better. Besides the fitter I feel the better I can channelize energies to important stuff. I’ve recently started trying to eat right as well (2eggs and 2 toast for breakfast, protein shake for lunch, bowl of fruit in the evening and a chicken piece with veggies for an early dinner… no unhealthy snacking in between). Lets see where this gets us.
- handling help is all about respect and keeping them actively engaged. Just telling them to do this, do that wont work, what is required, and this I’ve learned over the years from how SG handles them, is to make them take the initiative. For instance tomorrow we’re all going to go away to saasus place (saasu being away at Kolkata means we have free access to her house and can throw away all her junk behind her back…. not) where SG and I can sleep and work while the girls clean up the place, cook, play with Ria and generally escape from the boom crash bang of the civil/carpentry work at home. They’re quite excited about the trip and are actually making plans to pack stuff to take along with them (earlier in the day I observed they were all wilted and ready to quit staying vertical and came up with the idea to run away for the day).
Hopefully things will fall into place and this sense of “out of control spiraling” will go away. Work as well as life suffers when you start over reacting to any event. Ria definitely senses the turmoil in my head and does not understand/approve of me being disturbed. So for her well being also I need to be more sorted out and less “driven”/”aggressive”.