Skip to main content

Failure Mirror

J's short visit home was mixed as these things always are for me. Expectations are never met on either side I think. We fall a bit short of what the other might have hoped for and yet there is comfort even within that flawed space. Like sunlight peeking through clouds and then sometimes the sky turning brilliant blue.  We both wait for the flash of dazzling blue. Those moments always happen and I do remember them fondly for a long time. Yet, in everything that falls short in some way, I feel myself witnessing the failures of my motherhood. 

Things that I should have tried harder on, not given up because I ran out of steam and found myself yielding to the stubbornness of a child who was adept at pushing my buttons tenaciously. If only I had been smarter and known to strike the right balance between not breaking her spirit and holding my ground where it mattered most. That time has long gone, the die is cast. I wish there was a different way for me to see what is in front of me instead of feeling crushed by the sense of failure brought upon by the endless misses and missteps. I wish I could also see the things I have done well even if not with the same blinding clarity. 

Like my friend C says, I have yet to learn how to be kind to myself and forgive myself. Each time I see my kid, I realize how far away I am from that. This time was no different. 

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...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...