You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March 2011.
She is leaving San Francisco after 20 years, another drop in the exodus of our friends who have returned to India.
She spoke yesterday about ailing parents, and about wanting her two-year-old daughter to experience “by osmosis” language, culture, heritage, and family. She also articulated her doubts and fears on returning. Not having lived in India since high school, she wonders how they will adjust to being there.
The key, she said, is to have no expectations.
“It’s so hard to leave. We’re so spoiled in San Francisco – the people, the food, the weather,” she sighed. “And California – the beauty – it’s incomparable.”
I felt a rush of emotions. First, an emptiness thinking about the city without her. We see each other rarely, but it’s a comfort to have someone who remembers the person you were at 19 in a city you didn’t arrive in till you were 30. She is a part of my roots here, now being severed.
In the news for being unaffordable and near bankruptcy, it was a pleasure to be reminded of the stunning beauty we take for granted as Californians, and the shelter and refuge that is my San Francisco.
And, finally, sadness. There is no rush of Pakistanis returning to the homeland, even with lowered expectations. To the UAE perhaps, but not to Pakistan.
Another friend of ours who moved back to Delhi in his mid-thirties, spoke of the dissonance of returning to a place he had always referred to as “home”, but which was unrecognizable as the country he had left at 18.
Pakistan is unrecognizable now too. In many ways, there is no home to return to.
I used to dream of returning and giving my (at that time unborn) child the transformational experience I had of spending my high school years there.
Little by little, I’ve put that dream away.
A group of people went to God and complained about the problems they’d been given, insisting that other people had it easier than them. God listened, and said, “Put your problems in the center of the circle. Then, take someone else’s instead.”
Each person put their problem in the center of the circle, and then stepped back to view and choose another.
After a silence, each person took their original problem back, and returned home.
—
I was speaking to a dear friend of mine – whose son is one week younger than mine – when she said, “Being a stay at home mom is so hard. I don’t know how you do it! I know I couldn’t.”
It was strange to hear that as I always look at her life and am wonderstruck at all that she is and all that she does. While I consulted & took time off during my pregnancy, she completed her Master’s degree, and worked full-time. When our babies were three months old, I chose to become a SAHM, and she chose to work outside of the home four days a week.
Whenever I feel overwhelmed by my life, I think about all the things she is juggling: being the mother of a toddler, buying a new home with her husband, caring for an aunt with advanced breast cancer and a mother with a failing memory, and working at a demanding job at one of the top universities in the nation. I am amazed at her resiliency, the deep joy and humor that infuse her life, and the love and attention with which she nurtures her relationships. And I find myself thinking, “How does she deal with it all? I couldn’t!”
And then I am reminded of this story, and how we are all blessed in life with what we need to thrive.
I heard a wonderful talk by Karen Armstrong in which this poem was quoted. It was recited in the context of how flippantly we speak for God and how self-righteous we can become as we pursue religion. One of her points was that the idea that religion bring certainty is very modern, whereas the initial definitions of credo and belief were more along the lines of love.
Enjoy!
—
In the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.
The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.
But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.
— Yehuda Amichai
We live in an apartment in which all the rooms open directly onto one long hallway. The other day I was cleaning the guest bathroom while Bean played nearby in the kitchen.
I heard his pants swish against the hardwood floors as they do when he crawls so I looked out to see where he was going. He glanced up and down the hall, evidently looking for me but not seeing my head poking out from the bathroom. After listening for me for a minute, off he went, swishing down the hall toward the living room and away from me.
At first I was going to call out to him to let him know where I was, but I stopped myself. He was not agitated, just curiously exploring so I remained silent, though watchful.
Eventually he had checked all the rooms along the way and reached the last one – the living room – and still no Mama. He paused again, head cocked uncertainly. Then he crawled into the room, out of sight. I walked down the hall to to see what he was doing.
He flung himself down on his favorite floor cushions a few times, screeching gleefully. Then he crawled to the window seat which doubles as his book/toy shelf, selected a boardbook, sat down on the floor, and began to flip through it, completely absorbed.
I watched him with a mix of emotions. On the one hand, I was immensely proud of his self-sufficiency and confidence. On the other, it was surreal and bittersweet to glimpse a private moment in his toddler life, one that is usually contingent upon me. He is so small that he often feels like a physical part of me still. But – if I do my job right – as he grows up into a young boy, the development of this life away from and independent of me will only quicken and deepen.
As a SAHM I treasure my time with Bean. But there are moments when I am bored of playing baby games, exhausted and wishing I could catch up on sleep, or missing my own private time. Watching his secret, interior life unfold before me that day, I was reminded that the baby games will end, I will sleep again, and I will have my space – soon enough.
Last night Basil & I (along with a sleeping Bean) went to our neighborhood French bistro to have dinner with my Manhattanite cousin and his five childhood friends.
My cousin is wonderful. If I could choose a younger brother for myself, it would be him. He is also a great photographer. He took a photo of Basil smoking sheesha years ago, face lit by a red glow and partially obscured by wisps of smoke. Over the course of dinner last night, it came out that this photo had graced the wall of the apartment my cousin shared with his friends and that Basil was considered the “epitome of cool” in it.
One of the friends looked over at Basil now, with a sleeping toddler strapped to his belly by an embroidered carrier, and blurted out, “I almost didn’t recognize you when you came in. You aren’t that guy anymore.” Basil, looking ruefully down, chuckled in agreement. “Yeah, those days are long gone.”
My cousin and his friends are all in their late 20s, about a decade younger than us. Most of them are unmarried & – if I squint my mind’s eye – I can remember how ancient people approaching 40 seemed to me at that age, and how anyone with a baby existed in a universe I couldn’t fathom.
Now that it’s happening to me though, I’m flabbergasted that we’re being written off as old fogies. It’s true that old age is like the horizon, constantly receding as you approach it – or seen more clearly in relation to others rather than oneself.
On the one hand, their observation is correct. Those days are long gone. But when I look at Basil – who took seven weeks off for paternity leave, who still wakes up to walk the baby back to sleep at night, who cares for and soothes him just as well as me – he is still the epitome of cool because it isn’t limited to appearances anymore. It’s all inward now: someone who is compassionate, trustworthy, fun, and joyful. Not only is he a cool guy & husband, he is a cool dad now too.
My paternal uncle visited us recently from Pakistan, and admired how intimately involved Basil is as a dad, saying, “We didn’t do that when we were young, but we should have. We thought it was the mother’s job.” Through his engaged parenting, Basil changed my uncle’s mind about what it is possible for a man to be, and to aspire to.
I’d like to think that there is a definition of cool that is expansive enough to include a man holding a baby tenderly in an embroidered carrier. When I was in my 20s I stereotyped people based on their age. But now when I look years ahead or behind, I see people who live their lives richly in every circumstance, and at every age. They are stars to navigate my seas of possibility with.
Maybe by living our lives authentically, we can embody possibilities for those who seek our stars too.
A friend reminded me today how much I love Warsan Shire’s raw, powerful, steeped-in-womanhood poetry.
Enjoy!
“We told each other I think I know when we should have said Lead me farther through your amazing, astonishing interior.” – from the short story “Netherlands Lives with Water’ by Jim Shepard
—
Traveling is wonderfully clarifying. We spent 7 days in Kauai recently – a long overdue holiday. Basil and I remarked that in the almost-decade of our partnership, it was the first holiday we took for ourselves instead of visiting his family or mine.
Traveling with a 1-year-old, panicking at the tsunami warning, and braving unusually long rainstorms and large ocean swells made it quite an adventure. Had it just been the two of us no doubt we would have packed each day with activities from dawn til dusk, but though our son Bean proved a good traveler, his need for daily space to dream, swim, and explore forced us to slow down, unplug, and tune into each other.
What did I learn on this trip? That I love Kauai and would move there in a heartbeat if I could. That even with a baby we didn’t need the giant checked-in suitcase & would have been just fine with bathing suits, flip flops and casual clothes balled up into a carry-on. That wearing white pants on a trans-Pacific flight with a toddler is tempting fate.
And…that I miss my husband. Terribly.
I have missed my husband since the minute my son was born. That longing and loss has remained in the back of my mind, to be tended to when I have time. Which – with a newborn turned toddler – I never have found.
It’s strange because I’ve always been the one telling my younger sisters (who both had children long before me) that their relationship with their husbands is the foundation of their family, and not to get so caught up in childrearing that they forget that and drift apart.
Apparently I’d also emphasized this to a dear friend of mine after I had my son, and a couple of months before she had hers. But months later when we both made a list of priorities, her list had her husband on it, and mine read: Baby, healthful cooking/living, writing…and no Basil.
When I told her that seeing her husband’s name on her list made the gap on mine all the more mortifying, she gently reminded me, “But it was you that told me to focus on my relationship, months ago.”
Funny how we dispense advice that we most need ourselves, isn’t it?
Another six months went by and it wasn’t until we were on a Hawaiian beach that I felt something loosen its grip, and all that pent up longing surged forward.
As I watched Basil in the ocean in front of me, I wondered, Who is that man in the waves? In spite of a decade together, it was like watching a stranger. He dove into big waves with a playful fearlessness. The years slipped off with every dive, and, in the distance, he became that unconventional boy again that I remembered from our first dates.
As Basil came toward me after his swim, grinning, his dark hair now streaked with silver, his hands that of the strong man he had become, he felt unknown, yet quietly wanting to be known. He was the forgotten heartbeat, the pulse you suddenly discover in your own wrist which stops you in your tracks because you realize that it has silently and miraculously been sustaining you all along.
That’s what I mean by travel being clarifying. You discover parts of yourself – and your partner – that you’d forgotten existed.
This time, I’ll try to remember better, and remain connected to all the wonder and amazement of you. Lead me farther, jaan.
—
The title of this piece is taken from Mary Oliver’s poem “When Death Comes“
Recent Comments