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Balancing Act AS in most ‘first’ books, writer Meera Godbole, falls back on her personal experiences in life and draws heavily from them, exploring her own life and choices as she does so. Balancing Act is the story of a professional architect who gets married, has children and decides to be a stay-at-home mother. Her perceptions of herself change and diminish as she feels herself less of a person than other women of generation because she has chosen to be a full-time mom and a housewife—rather than be out there, doing a job, exploring and fulfilling her professional aspects and thus satisfying the longings of the soul of a trained and competent architect.
Then comes Tara’s struggle to create an equilibrium in her life that pulls her in several different directions. The children can’t be left alone, her husband is attracted to her best friend Sophie, she has an important essay to give on the Salk Institute in California that she loves and venerates and she also has to make up her mind about taking up a job. Added to all of these are her self-esteem issues. She feels that she’s been left along the way somewhere, out of the race of life and professional accomplishment, lost in the world of nannies and nappies and play dough. Tara, the architect, is inspired by the Salk Institute and hankers to replicate its clean lines and perfect symmetry in her own life, which, scattered as it is, is not possible and that is the dilemma of this protagonist. The love for architecture is evident in the life of Tara as well as that of the author. Meera Krishnamurthy, in fact, begins each section with a quote from a famous architect. The most esteemed name mentioned again and again in the book is that of the architect Louis Isadore Kahn. The book is the personal journey of Tara, as she struggles to understand who she is and what she really wants. The author describes it as a "non-judgmental discussion of conflicting notions of feminism and motherhood". Many mothers who are professionals are familiar with this dichotomy of modern life. Professionally qualified women who give up their jobs for their families are often hounded by the question whether they made the right choice. The questions that haunt them are about their own wasted capacities, about how they are judged by society and also a niggling doubt about weather it’s a sacrifice and if, finally, it’s worth it. The book does look at these issues, but in a superficial kind of a way. In the final analysis, its chick lit that’s easy to read and easy to put away. No great profundities here, only the humdrum life of a woman who is confused between being mother or professional or both. No huge emotional upheavals, no earth-shaking questions being asked. The book is a slice of life at a given point of time in the protagonist’s life!
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The blurb asks,
"What do you call a feminist who is a mother? A femimom? A
mominist? Or just a confused woman balancing many roles in her life:
working professional, mother, wife, daughter ...?" Tara Mistri is
all of that. She just loves being a mom and a wife but the
professional in her is struggling to be set free. Still, she is
fearful to get out there and get a job because she’s been out of the
mainstream for several years now. She is constantly goaded to get back
into the working groove by Yakshi, her alter ego who keeps questioning
her choices. The predicament in Tara’s life occurs when one day she
applies and is offered a job.