I always try to sneak upon J unawares while she's at daycare before the chorus of "J, your mom is here !" alerts her to my presence. Yesterday was different. There was a Mother's Day tea party and I was supposed to be there at 3:15. As luck would have it, last minute stuff came up at work and I could not arrive until 3:30. In my estimation, I was just a little behind schedule but definitely not late.
When I opened the door to her classroom I was nonplussed. Mine was the only unoccupied seat. J eyes were brimming with tears and a bunch of moms and Miss A were trying to placate her. It took many minutes of holding J close to me, explaining to her how I had got delayed before her smile broke through the tear-clouds like a ray of sun. On the way back home J said "I thought you would never come to my tea party but now I know why you were late. I'm not sad no more" A great burden was lifted off me to hear her say that.
Fifteen minutes of a harried adult's time had felt like eternity to a child. She may have been able to count to the nanosecond in her heart as she waited for an infinitely long time for me. She reminded me of how I had grown desperate to become a mother when in fact we had been married only a year. No logic or reason would convince me that I had all the time in the world. The days felt like deadweight until at last God granted me my heart's fondest desire.
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...
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