First time I was physically apart from J for more than an hour was when she was about seven months old. The memory of the physical pain it brought on is still bright. I experienced a version of it yesterday as I watched her drive out of the house for the first time. A driving license is a grand rite of passage and now it has happened for her. My friends had warned me about how it would feel and the mixed emotions this event would bring. And yet I was very far from being ready. The umbilical cord tugs just as strong as it did so many years ago. I was the one that had to leave back then and now it is her turn.
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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