Skip to main content

Saving Us

I listened to No One is Coming to Save Us on my walks the last several days and found it generally interesting and informative. Notwithstanding the pundits who held forth on their areas of expertise, the most memorable nugget of wisdom for me from the Gloria Riviera's young son - famous last words at the end of the last episode. I don't recall his exact phrasing but in the best way that a child could say it, he asked his mother what is the point of her going to work to some place just to pay for a sitter to take care of him in another place. That question hit hard and took me back about fifteen years in time when J had asked me her variation of that very question. I am going to guess this is top of mind for any child in that age group who has a working mother and therefore needs childcare during the day. 

J was very lucky to have her grandparents around her until four and a half years old. Her daycare days were the bridge between that age and kindergarten. Even during that period, the grandparents were around during summer. In summary, the "problem" in J's case was relatively short-lived and yet I was asked this question during one of those gaps where there was no family to take care of her. This is clearly a big deal. I was never asked why do you leave me with grandparents so you can go to work - it was not a valid or logical question so it was never asked. But when the care-giver was paid for their work and not family, the very point of my working for a salary was brought into question. For a child it does simply not compute and that was my big takeaway from the podcast. Riviera's son had said it all. 

A lot of time and effort in the podcast was focused on what the government should do to help every working mother who needs help caring for a baby. I raised J alone as a new immigrant and a single mother in America so I am well aware of the challenges though mine were not nearly as dire as other mothers I have known over the years. Multi-generational, joint and extended families are a mostly untapped resource and should be talked about a lot more in this country. Government has a definite role to play but families can help their own out too. 

I was blessed to have my parents pitch in for J and have known friends who had two sets of grandparents helping out with their kids. My friend L, also a single mother, travels extensively for work for decades and has raised two kids along the way. Her sister and parents live in the same town and were her reliable support system. I was disappointed the importance of family was completely ignored in this podcast besides a nod to villages in Africa where indeed the whole village parents the children and there is no concept of a child being the exclusive possession of its birth mother. I wish the lessons learned from that observation had translated to actual calls to action for those in America. Not to generalize but no matter how wonderful a paid care-giver, if there is a loving grand-parent, older cousin, uncle or aunt who is willing and able to step in for the child whose mother is working, they would generally win hands-down. What is possible in an African village likely isn't in American suburbia but it is well worth the trouble to figure out what is. 

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...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...