The Lazy Desi’s 25-year archive of chaos, dreams, kids, ADHD, gaming, and everything life swallowed too early.
They saw the young mom with the baby on her hip.
They did not see the silent equations running in the background,
the strategic overhaul I was architecting in real time,
the future I was coding with instinct rather than algorithms.
Genius doesn’t always look like a lab coat.
Sometimes it looks like a 20-year-old buying a house in a collapsed market while packing a stroller into an SUV.
I was absurdly young.
I was catastrophically tired.
I was hilariously overqualified for motherhood and simultaneously winging every part of it.
But my son turned one surrounded by family who adored him,
in a town that felt breathable,
in a house that felt like a mathematical pivot —
a calculated leap that only a certain type of mind can pull off at 20.
When we arrived, when he saw the house, when he saw the price, when he saw the opportunity —
he looked at me the way people look at Nobel winners on stage.
“You always know,” he said.
“You always see ahead.”
And for the first time, postpartum, exhausted, still half traumatized by early pregnancy and early motherhood —
I felt that truth settle in me like a long-overdue recognition.
Every new mother gets one absurd storyline in her origin myth.
Mine was TSA.
For the first year, I migrated back and forth between New York and my hometown like a determined salmon with a stroller.
Every three months.
Diaper bags, breastmilk, infant Tylenol, winter clothes in summer, summer clothes in snow — the whole logistical circus.
I became so efficient at airport life that I could dismantle and reassemble a stroller faster than most couples resolve arguments.
^ One. Handed.
My son was the only baby in the entire American branch of the family tree.
The first one.
The golden child.
The experiment.
My parents were bewitched.
My cousins — babies’ aunt and uncle — were deliriously obsessed.
I watched them all fall apart in adoration and thought:
If only they loved my secret Doula Certification like this. Sigh. (Who am I kidding? Even I KNOW it’s utterly useless lol)
But there is something magical about watching your own family meet the next generation —
as if your chaotic early adulthood suddenly acquires mathematical symmetry.
Pregnancy is unpredictable, but my son apparently skipped the memo about due dates.
He arrived in late January 2010, tiny, dramatic, and entirely on his own timeline — clearly inheriting my flair for narrative crescendos.
I had just arrived in my hometown “temporarily” to wait out the final stretch.
Good thing.
The universe clearly knew I needed to be surrounded by the few humans who understood my chaos in its native dialect.
…and Mackinac Island Fudge…
definitely the fudge…
The brain has an elite, almost militaristic capacity to continue functioning when the body waves its white flag.
I currently rely on that ruthlessly.
While my physical form languishes in hormonal chaos, my mind pirouettes through complex thought with the same velocity it always has — analyzing, calculating, interpreting like a research algorithm.
It’s such a bizarre sensation:
my body belongs to this pregnancy,
but my mind still belongs to mathematics, anatomy, sociolinguistics, cosmology —
anything that could anchor me to myself.
I am two entities at once:
biological and intellectual,
deteriorating and ascending.
New York in Autumn is a creature with pulsating arteries, sprinting through its own existence.
Meanwhile I moved like a newly-installed operating system booting in Safe Mode.
Every step required triage:
the nausea, the vertigo, the tidal waves of exhaustion that would have made sense if I were finishing a residency rotation — not just walking to Duane Reade to buy saltines and ginger ale.
This city shouts; my brain whispers.
(There is something very wrong if I’m not the loudest thing in a place…It’s. Just. Wrong.)
The dissonance is astronomical.
So…
While other newlyweds went to family dinners and weekend outings with in-laws,
I was in the corner with the new Jak & Daxter, my go-to X-Men comics, and Call of Duty: World at War.
Gaming feels like breathing.
A place where effort isn’t punished and tasks come with reward sounds.
He’ll just pass by and kiss the top of my head, murmuring,
Harado saro ko, meri Gamer Princess!
For once, I wasn’t failing anything.
Every brilliant girl who failed to launch knows this feeling:
You can see the heights.
You can see the potential.
But your body refuses to move.
My mind could diagnose medical cases better than my physicians.
I could understand endocrine pathways and write code in the same afternoon.
But I couldn’t get up to fold the darn laundry.
People said, “She’s wasting her talent.”
He said,
“You’re not done. You’re interrupted.”
That sentence has kept me alive more times than I can count.
UnderTheRock Diaries 