Precocious Child and the Single Mother

My daughter J does not merely test the rules to see where my break point lies, she also creates new and intriguing challenges. For instance getting positive attention, affirmation, affection and adoration is routine and thus boring. She wants to keel over to the other side - bait me slowly, little by little until my patience is completely worn out. Fan at my anger until the heat turns white hot. Now that is exactly like my Ex.

How I hated being manipulated then and how much more I hate it that this three year old can do just the same - only with more panache. I was furious this evening - I finally lost it. Ended up doing and saying things that I will regret at leisure - J had taken me well beyond breakpoint. That she could do this to me is a failure on my part and I feel duly ashamed.

She is highly intelligent, intuitive and imaginative - her actions are almost always motivated though I'd find it hard for anyone to buy into that. Most likely I'll be called delusional.

I wonder how a victim of an abusive relationship that has since ended can avoid feeling deja vu when seeing traits in the child that are reminiscent of that partner. The very traits that voided the relationship. Isn't anger and pain natural to feel ? But the child is an innocent victim acting on a DNA sequence and no more.

I find myself in this quandary more and more as J grows up, develops an individual personality. There is lot about her that is heart-stroppingly adorable and equally as much that leads to incidents like this evening. While I don't want my bitterness about Ex to cast it's shadow between J and I, I can't obviously exclude from J what she gets from him. God grant me patience !

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...

Heartcrossings

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