Skip to main content

Born From The Heart

Months ago J asked me where she lived when she was "wee little" qualifying that further by saying "really really teeny weeny". I told her the she has lived in my heart forever and when the time was right she came to me as a tiny baby.

J is astute enough to know that
tiny babies pop out of their Mommy's tummies. "Did I pop out of your tummy ?" she asks just to make sure and I say "Yes, you did". She was not overly concerned about the mechanics of it or in the fine print. The matter of her origins has since rested in peace.

A few days ago J announced "When I become Mommy, my baby will pop out of my heart and not from my tummy" This took me by surprise because J is a very good about sticking to facts however unpleasant unless she is in "pretend" world where
absolutely nothing is what is seems.

Besides the human body is her current fascination. At breakfast time J will claim she is so "full and tight" that her "intestine" hurts. While at the potty she will tell me about how her food journeyed all the way from her mouth to the "rectum" and was now coming out of her "anus". The "meta carpal" and "meta tarsal" bones are often displayed at dinner time too. I have no idea where she gets her yen for biology because I for one could barely manage a passing grade.

"Why would your baby pop out of your heart, J ? " I asked her. "Because that is where my baby lives. Same like I lived in your heart" My figure of speech had been taken literally and there was no way to undo it. Thanks to my misplaced metaphor, J's Pre-K biology is now grotesquely twisted.

Comments

Priyamvada_K said…
:D. That's so endearing. I'm sure J is 'pop'ular with everyone she comes across.

Priya.
Sideways Chica said…
Here's to J and her precius heart.

Ciao,

Teri
www.herestohappywomen.blogspot.com
Anonymous said…
Here's poem that touched my heart even though I was not overly fond of children or craved to be a mommy. I am sure you will like it too.
It remains my favourite till this day and I love to go back to it and give it to others.

http://www.cs.memphis.edu/~ramamurt/gems/gem27.html

-asterisk

Popular posts from this blog

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

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

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