Skip to main content

Small Rite Of Passage

The first time your little girl tells you about her boyfriend is a significant rite of passage in parenthood. Mine occurred about a few minutes ago when J told me that Byrce hit her "boyfriend".

Now, I hear about the ex-officio bully of the "Threes Room" every day but this is the first that J has been outraged on behalf of an assaulted boyfriend. When I seek to learn the identity of this person, she names a pint sized brat named Ryan I am very familiar with. Ms K and Ms W joke regularly that they (J and Ryan ) are in love with each other and will be married when they turn twenty one.

I asked J who had told her that Ryan was her boyfriend. "Jamie said so" was her answer. Jamie has just turned three and looks a lot younger - she is an utterly adorable baby. Not someone you would associate with astutely matching people with their significant others. I ask J whose Jamie's boyfriend is "Ryan. Ryan is everyone's boyfriend"

Looks like Casanova junior is on the roll with half a dozen girlfriends of diverse ethnicities. I ask her if Bryce is anyone's boyfriend. J curls up her nose in distaste and declares "No" How could I ask ? He is not quite the renaissance man like our friend Ryan and naturally not a hit with the ladies.

I try to find a little bit more about the pairings around the class to see if "boyfriendship" is lately in the air. J declares in all seriousness that Nicky is Hogan's boyfriend and Trace is Ryan's boyfriend and so forth. J is no one's boyfriend because she is a girl. I am amused at her complete cluelessness and relieved that she has accepted her girlhood comfortably. Maybe I have Ryan to thank for that and Jamie as well.

Comments

Reshmi said…
that is sooo totally cute!! :-)

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