Skip to main content

Sign of Light

In light of our recent challenges with J, DB send me a short note this afternoon :
"You are making J feel like she can never make a mistake, you need to prove and demonstrate to her through actions that you will forgive her when she does make a mistake.. her recent behavior is her way of testing a self fulfilling prophecy"
That is possibly the best summary of everything that describes the dynamic between J and I. On the one hand I want to be the mother who is always available, is able to walk in her shoes and understand the importance of balance. To that end, her schedule is fairly light, the supervision is on an as needed basis and I never talk down to her or be disrespectful. On the other hand, I do have a high bar in terms of my expectations from her - I want her to be a very genuine person, have the capacity for empathy and be brave.  It turns out that meeting these standards is significantly harder than making good grades. So DB is right that I expect her to be perfect (as a human being) and not make mistakes. It would be much easier for her if I was holding her feet to the fire over bad grades. In fact, my lack of interest in her grades is somewhat frustrating to her being that she is not able to parley her As to gain my favor - or use them as a pass for bad behavior
As a remedy to the situation, I have set free J from the stranglehold of expectation. I told her today that it was her choice to meet my expectations from her or not. If she chose to repeat mistakes or withhold information from me, there might be consequences that would not be in my power to save her from. No matter what decision she made, I would still do everything I was doing for her as a mother and love her just as much.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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
111 comments
Read more

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

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