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going through all the "firsts" with him, you know, it's like he sets the precedents, and I would get my bearing as a parent, and then I will be ok with the second child and by the third child, I would be like a guru in this! And up until this point everything was really flowing smoothly and I was really flying nicely through this parenting thing! I really thought I had it all worked out.

Not long after that we noticed that big Z's voice started to break. Followed by frequent occasions of him seeming to be a lot more preoccupied in his thoughts. Growing up in a household like ours, he had cleverly developed his own special technique of being able to shut the world out (yes, including me!) whenever he wanted to or needed to, but during this puberty phase he seemed a lot less deliberate about it. It was as if he was just zoning out without meaning to, as if it was happenig by default. All these seemed to provide amusement value to our household, not only in terms of observing what was happening to Big Z but also in terms of my own reactions to his extremely personal physical evolution.

But then there was also the more sombre side of it when big Z suddenly seemed to be a lot more sensitive and emotional about things and events that ordinarily he would have just shrugged off or laughed about. I wouldn't say that he was completely signed on to "the dark side" at that point but he was certainly a changed person to how we had gotten used to knowing him and we all had to learn to allow him that much more space and that much more time so he could also come to terms and get used to the changes that he was going through. Communication also became a bit more challenging at that stage but was not completely hopeless. It just seemed to the rest of us that Big Z only heard every second or third word that we said to him and then it seemed that by the time the message reached him, half of it was missing! And he would give me this look that made me feel like I was some extra-terrestrial creature speaking to him in some kind of cryptic inter-galactic language from outer space! Hmm, it gives new meaning to the words "you're mother's an astronaut!"

It took about 18 months, I would say, before we regained some semblance of normalcy in our household, in that we could look at each other again and feel like we are of the same species and we speak the same language. Big Z eventually grew out of his Darth Vader phase and he became friendlier again and a bit more mature in his outlook, albeit

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