Skip to main content

Three Wishes

J and I read a story of the Three Wishes genre today. At its end the author asks the reader if they think the protagonists wished wisely or well and "What would you wish for if you were granted three wished ?" J does not know of themes and genres or that she will one day read The Monkey's Paw but her responses to both were interesting.

In the story, Anna and Fritz are a poor couple who struggle to put soup on the table for dinner. The day they are granted the wishes, they decide he will have one, she will have one and the last they will have together. It is past dinner time and they are still mulling over the wishes.

By this time, Fritz is really hungry and wishes there was a sausage to go with the soup. A big bratwurst plops on the table. Anna chides him for frittering his wish away for just one sausage and wishes she could have many more sausages. Soon it is raining sausages upon their home. They grow desperate for it to stop and invoke their last wish. Status quo is restored, they are back to being poor but happy.

J thought they could have been smarter about making their wishes and that it was a waste of a great opportunity. To the question about what her three wishes might have been she said:

1. A house with a backyard and garden full of trees and flowers
2. My grandparents could come and stay with me forever
3. I have a computer all to myself (today she uses mine but has her own login)

For the longest time, she has ardently desired a "real Daddy" and today that wish was conspicuous by its absence. When I asked her about it she said it was not as important any more. She would be glad to have one but it was just as fine to not have one.

When I told my friend K, she said "You should be proud of yourself. You must be fulfilling all her emotional needs otherwise she'd have continued to ask for a dad"

I don't know about that but I do know how J longs for a sibling. Sometimes she will touch my stomach and go "Mommy, I know for sure there is a little baby growing in there that will pop out soon" and I have to dash her hopes and tell her there is not a baby getting ready to pop out, that it may not happen any time soon. She goes away looking crestfallen.

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...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...