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

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

Heartcrossings

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