Skip to main content

Separately Flawed

My friend L has two kids of her own and two step children of which I she likes very much but still can't claim to love. Her own kids have posed more than their fair share of challenges to her and she struggles with them. No one is perfect here, no one has any illusions of being perfect - not L, not her husband and none of the four kids in the mix. This is a situation this set of people have landed themselves into - some of their own volition and others not quite. L told me once, that her own kids at flawed and complicated as they are a product of whatever she was able to make of them given the circumstances of her life - marrying too young, staying with the wrong man for far too long and so on. 

For better or worse she had an active role in how they were raised. With the step-kids that is the single biggest missing piece - they are the product of some other couple's parental framework, she mostly does not agree with the decisions they made regarding their kids. This is not to say all her decisions were perfect and flawless but she made them and is willing to stand by them. She has no desire to take ownership of mistakes that were not precipitated by her. She wants them magically fixed so its not her problem. Is that fair? Probably not but it is how real-life works.

That chat with L got me thinking of imperfect things we own that have sentimental value. If that sentimental value were dissociated with those things, their flaws could prove terminal and fatal. Maybe such is the case with kids and step kids. The flaws being equal one comes with a huge about of sentimental value and near infinite goodwill whereas the other is lacking both. So it is hard to make things whole never mind equitable. 

Labels

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

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

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...
Post a Comment
Read more