Skip to main content

Pay Forward

I have known S for a while but she has never met my daughter. When S and I met a few weeks after my birthday, she asked how my day had been. I  shared with her that J had send me a beautiful floral arrangement and lunch delivered from my favorite place where she took me out on my birthday. S smiled and said that I must have been a wonderful mother. I was glad to hear her say that knowing how hard a bar that is for any woman to clear - being a wonderful mother. 

You do your very best, make a lot of mistakes along the way, stumble to recover from them and try all over again - try not to lose your sanity and self-esteem along the way. If you were to take an honest and full accounting of your performance as a mother, you might find that there were some great highlights but also significant lowlights.  In balance you were a mother who did the best she could and if the child knows and believes that to be true, chances are you have not failed them. I told S that while I have always tried my best, I am also very lucky to have a really good kid. J has always been a kind and thoughtful person  - she can make people she cares about feel loved and connected to her

As a child, on the morning of her birthday, J always woke up to a bedroom festooned with balloons and streamers. I did the decorations while she was fast asleep and quietly as I could. Seeing her radiant smile and look of complete surprise when she woke up was the best reward I could ask for. It was tradition to have cake for breakfast that morning. On a school day it was all a blur and she'd be half sleepy eating breakfast, opening her gift and wondering when her bedroom turned so festive and if she could stay up long enough next year to learn my secret. I wanted her to understand the reward of making the person you love happy. And that it is worth the effort to earn it - maybe I taught her self-altruism. This year, I got from J what I gave her as a child but done in her own way. She earned the same kind of reward that I did when she woke up on the morning of her birthdays as a child.

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