Interesting article about a mother's desire and even the ability to cook driven by depression. As a child, I gravitated towards food that was cooked by a person in good spirits. This was not something I knew or understood back then, but when I think back, it seems that the most memorable meals I had were cooked by a person who was in a good place mentally at the time of preparing it. When it was my turn to cook for a family, those who sat at the table to eat what I had made, could tell my state of mind from the taste of it. J is very sensitive to this and will tell me later she knew I must have had a bad day. When the meal was made in a happy frame of mind, she enjoys it a lot better and there is an overall sense of peace and harmony. It would be great to know what smells and tastes can trigger positive feelings for a person. That would be a great way to lift the spirits
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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