While my blogs are generally featured around a theme or a thought that’s crossed my mind during the week, this one is simply about the past week. I suffered from brain-drain and had not an iota of energy left to put my thoughts down, so I decided to simply share what I had gone through during the week.

Globally too, it was a really busy week with all the days being marked as days to celebrate some event or another…

March 17th -St. Patrick’s Day

March 20th  – International Day of Happiness

March 21st – Mother’s Day In UAE/ World Poetry Day

March 22nd – World Water Day

And while the world was busy celebrating the third week of March, so was I.  I was celebrating hurdles week-we had an internal audit of our processes happening, another external audit taking place at the same time to provide us the certification on being compliant, the H.R. deciding that the employees needed to complete a training on “Time Management” by the last day of the week along with a deadline for managers’ to provide the team objectives with a deadline of 26th March and a few projects under testing phase which all of a sudden needed to be finished by the end of the same week.  All this with the never-ending emails from branches, clients with the words ” Top Urgent”.

If this wasn’t sufficient, got a call from India that dad had to be taken to the hospital because he had a hairline fracture and another call from a team member who had been out of office for a fortnight to say that she had been detected with cancer. These are the times you realize that family and life are far more important than work. Not a great realization though, when one is in the middle of audit and must necessarily be on alert and focused rather than ponder about ‘the truth of life’.

 Like they say, ” When it rains, it pours”. And pour it did – quite literally. The off-season rains during the night created water logging in front of my apartment building requiring me to wade through the waters in my heels to get to the main road  to haul a cab. Fortunately, I managed to reach office, intact, just a minute late. However, I am sure all of you will agree that it doesn’t matter whether it rains or snows; one must reach office in time. That’s punctuality! So, the next day very promptly there was an automated email from H.R. saying ” Smitha Vishwanath was late by a minute on 21st March  “. Whoever coined the term “Better late than never” surely never worked in an organization with an H.R. department.

Talking about pouring, my husband had to travel on business during the week, so I was left managing the home-front on my own. With the home comes a package of a teen and a tween. Undoubtedly with dad not around, getting through each day was no less than a battle. Every night I would rest my tired feet much like soldiers who returned to their trenches during the World War, plan a strategy for the next day to get through unscathed and pray to God for his mercy.

By mid-week despite drinking milk and having cheese and eggs everyday and praying and being patient, I seemed to be losing the battle.

I had to bring myself to  focus on the beauty of motherhood and remind myself of all the benefits of having kids but strangely I could think of none except for the rose that was kept on my office table by the H.R. Department,  on account of Mother’s Day. Don’t get me wrong. I love my kids. We have wonderful times – times when I allow them to watch T.V., times when I allow them to have dinner on the sofa and times when they are doing the talking and I am doing the listening and times when we discuss subjects close to their heart which of-course does not entail subjects close to mine.

However, like all good things come to an end, so do difficult times. Got to know on Thursday evening (the end of the working week here) that one of my colleagues who had been battling cancer since the beginning of last year was declared cancer free. That was honestly the best news I had all week. In fact the kind of news that can’t be compared to any other. It was like a signal from God that cancer can be cured and I felt hopeful that the girl in my team would recover and come back stronger. Also, thanks to God, the extended family and neighbors, dad’s doing alright now and his fracture is healing.

Husband returned on Thursday night and I very gladly handed over the kids and home to him and slept…Actually I crashed and did not move until the early hours of dawn. Woke up to the sound of the rain and felt grateful that I had crossed my hurdles, at-least for now. I had survived!

For all those who read this blog, thanks for staying with me through this week’s journey.  Have you had a crazy week at some point in time when you felt you wouldn’t make it but eventually did? If you have, do write back. Would love to hear about it.

Have a great weekend and I’ll let you know soon what I did during the weekend to get my spirits up to face new challenges:).