Skip to main content

Under Parenting

Today I overheard one parent tell another that they allow their seven year old play Grand Theft Auto. There was an audible gasp from the other parent. The guilty party said "He's too young to understand what's going on. I'll make him stop when he turns ten". Now was my turn to gasp. Later in the day I read the news about an eight year old girl being sexually assaulted by 1st and 2nd grade boys. I am still trying to recover from the numbness that the news brought on me - that could have been my little girl.

You prepare your children for pedophiles and other perverts - you assume they (the perpetrators) would be much older and stronger than your child. I thought I was being irrationally paranoid when I told J she may not kiss, hug or be kissed, hugged by any other kid at daycare- no exceptions. I made this rule for J the day she mimicked a coital "Oh Yeah" moan over and over again like she had learnt to from her buddy Billy. Nothing J has brought back from daycare has stunned me more than that.

Now, little Billy is a good kid with criminally negligent parents who are well on their way to making a train wreck of his life. The same is perhaps true of the parents of these underage molesters of the eight year old girl. As long as there are those among us who have orgasms loud enough for their children to hear and let them play AO video games, the rest of us who allow sanity to prevail over their primal instincts will have plenty to worry about.

Comments

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...

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...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...