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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
5 comments
Read more

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...
111 comments
Read more

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...
6 comments
Read more