CervivingMom

I was at a social gathering when I heard 2 people talking… "How many kids do you have?" And the person replies, "We have two—a son and a daughter." And here comes the statement that made me frown, "Oh, that’s just perfect! A complete family!" I didn’t get this affirmation when I was asked how many kids I have and I said a boy. This perfectly captures the well-meaning, yet deeply restrictive, idea that the ideal family configuration is determined by having one of each gender. Why the "Complete Family" Myth Fails The root of this myth lies in viewing the family unit as a checklist to be completed rather than a living, evolving system built on connection and love. It implies that families that fall outside this narrow definition—whether they have two boys, two girls, no children, or are headed by a single parent—are somehow lacking or statistically less ideal. The truth is, defining family completeness by gender or number is probl...

There is a moment at almost every family gathering, social event, or even a casual lunch where it happens. The conversation lulls, and someone reaches for the easy button—the social cliché question: "When are you getting married?" or, "When are you finally going to have kids?" These questions aren't asked with malice. They are asked out of habit, a cheap conversational ticket meant to show interest and keep things moving. The problem is that while they are designed to be harmless, they can land with the weight of a truck on someone who is carrying a private, invisible burden. The Invisible Wounds Imagine asking these questions to someone who is silently grieving: • The Breakup: Asking about marriage to someone who just had a painful, private breakup forces them to either lie, deflect, or relive the pain in front of an audience. • The Miscarriage or Infertility: Asking about kids to someone struggling with infertility or who just had a miscarriage tu...

I recently observed a family member whose social media captions and comments have changed. The language is sudden, almost unrecognizably polished, leading me to believe she’s using AI to craft her thoughts. This isn’t a judgment on her, but an observation on a strange new reality we are all navigating. When we use tools to perfect our words, we are building a persona that is cleaner, smarter, and more articulate than the human behind the keyboard. This creates what I call the Unspoken Expectation. The Problem of the Perfect Persona We form an image of someone based on their output. If every interaction we have with a person online is flawlessly worded, witty, and deeply profound, we start to expect that same level of performance in real life. Imagine meeting that person in person. In a natural, fluid conversation, they might pause, search for a word, or express themselves simply—as real humans do. That small, human difference can feel like a sudden drop-off. The observer mig...

I'm going to be honest: Every time I've taken one of those personality quizzes, I've felt like I was cheating. I always feel stuck. Am I the person who loves planning an event, or the one who cancels 30 minutes before? Am I the confident leader in a meeting, or the one who hides for a day afterward just to recover? For years, I felt like a fraud for not being "one thing." I felt the cultural pressure to pick a team—Extrovert, the social powerhouse, or Introvert, the thoughtful observer. But what if you're beautifully, frustratingly, both? I recently learned the term: I am an Ambivert (sometimes called an Omnivert), and if you also feel like you have to fake it in either direction, you might be too. The Problem with Personality Boxes The idea of Introvert and Extrovert has been around since Carl Jung, and it's a helpful starting point—it's about where we get and spend our energy. But somewhere along the way, that helpful spectrum became a rig...

Being in a new country during this season, I saw something profoundly simple happen a night ago: kids, dressed up as heroes and monsters, were doing the familiar ritual of trick-or-treating. They would knock on a stranger’s door, and that door would open. People had bowls of candy ready, waiting. They were prepared to engage in a small, trusting transaction with their neighbors’ children. It got me thinking about the difference between that simple act and how we live now, particularly reflecting on the rapid urbanization and growth of my own home in Mumbai. The Open Door of Childhood I remember a time in Mumbai where the door of the flat was almost always unlocked, or at least unbarred. The children in the building were known, the aunties and uncles next door were extensions of your own family, and walking into a neighbor's kitchen for a glass of water was routine. The community was a web of overlapping, trusted relationships. That open door was a physical manifestatio...

If you’ve been on a healing journey—recovering from a serious illness, battling anxiety, or simply surviving the chaos of modern life—you know that sometimes, all you want is an hour of genuine, uncomplicated escape. So you turn on the television. And what do you find? Serial killers, endless political cynicism, gritty character studies of morally bankrupt heroes, and "dark reboots" of classics we once loved. It seems like the entire media landscape is convinced that entertainment must equal depression. And as someone who has stared down actual darkness, I have to ask: Why is the industry denying us light? The Survivor’s Need for Lightness The trend of dark, depressing content is often called "prestige TV." But for those of us with limited mental capacity—the survivors, the caregivers, the mentally drained—it’s just plain exhausting. When you are spending all your energy fighting an invisible battle (be it fatigue, anxiety, or post-crisis stress), you...

The phrase hit me like a splash of cold water. It came from someone close, someone who should know better, aimed directly at my son, who isn't even two yet. My toddler, still navigating the vast, confusing world of big feelings, was having a minor meltdown—a sudden overflow of frustration that only a tiny human can manage. That’s when I heard it: "Stop crying like a girl." My blood pressure spiked immediately. Not just because the speaker was silencing my son's natural emotional release, but because of the archaic, toxic stigma packed into those five simple words. The Stigma Starts Before Age Two When you tell a boy, even a toddler, to stop crying like a girl, you are achieving two terrible things: 1. You Weaponize Femininity: You use the word "girl" as an insult, equating crying, sadness, and vulnerability with weakness and inadequacy. 2. You Prohibit Male Emotion: You teach him that his pain must be hidden, suppressed, or converted into ang...

There are two distinct eras of childhood embedded in my memory: the 90s/early 2000s when I was a kid, and the current moment, now that I’m raising a toddler. And the difference in our playground songs is genuinely shocking. I was recently humming a random skipping rope rhyme—the kind of fast-paced, nonsensical chant that dictates who’s ‘out’ of the game. And I realized just how casual our childhood culture was about themes of peril, breaking, and even death. Think about the classics we sang without a second thought: • “Ring around the Rosie, Pocket full of posies, Ashes, Ashes, We all fall down.” (A playful song about... mass death.) • “London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.” (A song about irreversible, catastrophic structural failure.) • The “Machli Jal Ki Rani Hai” rhyme, which for us ended with the harsh reality: "Bahar nikalo toh mar jayegi" (Take it out, and it will die). The common thread was peril and fragility. We celebrated chaos, p...

It starts simply, casually, dozens of times a week. At the office, on a call, or even just in a text message. Someone asks: "How are you?" And what do we say? We reply with the expected statement that has become a meaningless mantra: "I'm fine!" or "Good, and you?" For those of us navigating the invisible labor of healing—managing anxiety, chronic fatigue, or life after a significant crisis—this simple question isn't a check-in. It's a curtain raiser on a performance we are forced to give every single day. It's the performance of the “Perfectly Fine Survivor.” The Hidden Cost of the Performance The cost of this seemingly harmless lie isn't financial; it's pure, mental energy. It’s the energy we spend editing our truth for maximum social comfort. We lie for two main reasons: 1. To Protect Them: We genuinely believe people don’t want the real, messy truth. We don't want to dump our fatigue, our anxiety, or the ...

I am profoundly grateful that my story, "Perfect As Always," was included in The Blogchatter Book of Food Anthology. Seeing my words in print was a beautiful moment of validation. But the greatest reward was using the writing process itself to finally make peace with a hard, quiet truth in my life: Food is about so much more than taste. The concept behind the story is simple, but the reality is deeply anxious: I am someone who enjoys cooking for my loved ones, but I cannot taste my own food well. When I went through cancer treatment, many things changed, and one of them was the complex pleasure of my palate. My fictional piece explores a character who cooks for their incredibly particular loved one, and the intense uncertainty that follows every single meal they serve. It’s the constant tension between effort and unknown outcome. Writing this story was my way of finding the true answer to that anxiety. It was the moment I realized that, in my own life, the ingredie...