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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

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