When the f@#$ did womanhood happen here?-In search for the Girl in me!

Why aren’t there more women’s night outs and get-aways in India that are so religiously performed and basked in by our fairer sisters abroad, as depicted in soapy soaps and sit-coms from the West? Yes television is spoiling us, admitted...can we now move on? Our very sexier version of forty somethings of ‘The Sex and the City’ in the U.S. of A have a ball meeting up for a drink to discuss and dissect their sex lives or the lack of it and we are still stuck on maids and mothers-in-law? Excuse me, it is just not me, it is a disease of infectious proportions prevalent among the species that have mated and consummated the task of having junior versions of themselves sauntering along the planet.

Why aren’t there more bars/night clubs/lounges where single beauties and even the marginally so ones can go by themselves and get a date? I have a plethora of still single women friends, who have given up hope of ever finding a suitable guy at a night joint for it is flocked by “boys-girls” or couples...whatever happened to those in between? Why do we have to give up on girlhood and adapt to womanhood, just because we cross thirty?

The Desperate Housewives gals/women or even some of our own metro chicas know how to ruffle up smooth surfaces and raise many an eyebrows when they make entries and we are still hung up on who’s watching and thereby how we should appear to be. And those who don’t bother about the onlookers, the onlookers are most bothered about them and brand them as the next slut on the block. Wtf!

My god, the society-we can neither live with or without it, in or out of it.

There are days when my husband can have one of his many frequent boys’ night outs term it as a stags’ night out, for boyhood would be an illusion now and for me it would remain just a distant dream for many reasons per se:

A. Why do you women need a night out when you can meet over coffee or visit your friend’s home during the day or mall hop? ya right, we meet over soppy coffee and you over wicked vodka-isn’t that a fair world we respire in...sigh!

B. How would you return home baby at late hours, it is not so safe you know? Me: Reallyyy, why don’t we all stack up at one woman’s house then for the night and return home next morning in broad daylight and when we are sober.

He =HUH!!!!!!!!*that sound that emits from your beloved’s now-not-so-beautiful-seeming mouth asserts that you have just committed something short of a terrible blasphemy, even by the mere thought of it*

C. Log kya kahenge oh, crap! Now the only remaining thing to say would be-tum hamare khaandaan ke izzat ho!

Last year while visiting my still single friends in Delhi, we went lounging till the wee-hours, sang songs at the terrace and drove back with blasting music way past midnight enjoying the cool breeze of half deserted and yet alive lanes of Dilli. What a blast it was, making me empathise just for a wee bit of a weak moment with my beloved’s need to do a night out by himself for you realize it is so liberating, when done once in a while. I recommended it to all and sundry in my gender of sisterhood at the cost of being branded as someone whom husbands hushed their wives to listen less to. Needless to say, after many months of trying I could not materialize an encore in my small town and gave up. Maybe it is not so much a matter of small or big town as it is of small minds.

Till three decades of my life, I tried to keep alive the girl in me, so much that I never really felt I had left school so long ago and even unknowingly called some of my age-mates ‘bhabhi’ for along with the fringes of their saris were tagging along toddlers and not so tiny tot brats. I was wild in some sense though always bridled. Heck, last year I was even thinking of joining tennis classes so I could accompany my G when he goes to play squash every morning, learn an instrument/language and lose so much weight with vengeance that Salman Khan signs me up for his next movie session that is, totally besotted.

Things stand at a different shore this year.

Seeya’s bought a change and made me grow up. And needless to say I see-saw between the inferences of whether THAT is a good or a bad thing. You can’t be the girl anymore when the girl in your arms searches for the woman she wants to look up to.

There are days when friends who knew me from then and now turn around to comment how serious I have become or how they miss my puns and double meaning innuendos and banter that would keep them in splits. It makes my heart go split wide open with a strange ache despite the love balm that Seeya’s smile spreads on it each day. I miss writing blog posts that “I” liked and that did not whine. Someone mentioned the other day how I ruled Face book in my hay days with the wittiest of status updates on a daily basis and a string of 60-70 comments on each one. Hay days?????????? My god, what happened since then? Who the donkey, ate up my hay? :(

Somewhere in doing this and that and being here and there, in doing what we must and in being what we ought to, we lose we. And although the men enjoy the pleasure of continuing to be boys all their lives, we women struggle to be more as well as less of a woman yes, that confused is our subsistence.

There were days when I advised these pearls free of cost:

You can’t help getting older but you don’t have to get old!

Growing old in inevitable and growing up is optional!

It is not the years in your life that counts, it is the life in your years!

It is important to have a twinkle in your wrinkle!

Today I look back at these and say what the crap probably the recipients muttered the same under their breath. There are phases in life that very few can obstruct and go past unaffected. You change while shifting from school to college, while transcending from the bachelor state to that of having walked the aisle. Should we then lament and relent or accept and forget? I am now trying to make a mature room for the fun craving girl within me.

Growing up/old is as unavoidable as the sun rise each day no matter how much you like the dark to party. It is important to keep the old girl alive in me but not at the cost of strangulating the young woman also within at each of such attempts. I don’t resist growing up, I resist growing boring. I don’t mind having a wrinkle in days to come, I would mind when that would be all that my face would have to show to the world.

We would always be little girls from inside. We would wish for mothers when we get sick of all that’s happening around and for daughters when we want to see our dreams manifesting through someone else. We would wait for love to happen to us that fairy tales are made of. We would want to be free like men and pampered like women and struggle between realizing ourselves between this to and fro of genders. We would constantly be haggled by “what ifs” and “why nots”. I guess the girl within never gets drowned in the lake of the mirror of time, she just sits by the shore watching the woman tamper with the hitherto silent surface. I guess if I could make this woman happy, she would stop inviting the girl to fill in the gaps.