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...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...

Heartcrossings

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