Skip to main content

Perspective

A poem J sent to a well known children's magazine has been accepted for publication. She wrote this soon after DB and I got married and was in large part an outpouring of pain - she was having a hard time adjusting to a new way of life and the presence of a man in our home. We were talking today about how pain produces some of the best writing and J said "Then I will never be a writer - I haven't known as much pain as most people"

I thought that was an interesting observation being that J has actually gone through quite some upheaval in the last  ten years of her life. It turns out that she met a girl L, at her dance camp whose parents have been divorced twice and remarried. She has to divide time between two blended families and deal with adults being uncontrollably angry a lot of the time. She has clearly shared quite a bit about her life with J.

It was only a few weeks ago that J was complaining how she always had a schedule and there was not enough free, unstructured time in her day - and how we were not being fair to her as parents. The benchmark was some kids she knows who have no plan for the summer and can do as they please all they long. They also get to stay home all summer since the mothers don't go to work.

Held to that standard, DB and I were tyrants. It was interesting to see how the experience of doing something outside her comfort zone and meeting a group of kids she would not have otherwise met, has resulted in some serious recalibration. I don't know if she will get what I thought she might out of this particular camp, but I am glad it has given her new perspective.

Comments

Hope said…
Hmmm. It's good that J met the girl and found beauty in her own life. It's a very tender age for her to understand the importance of this, but am sure, it's doing her great good. Otherwise, it could also have been a time when she could go into self-pity mode, as kids of this age usually do. As they say, life is the best teacher! ATB!

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