Honing A Craft

It is a slow Sunday morning and we don't have any plans for the day. DB, J and I are fighting the remnants of a cold that has knocked us out to varying degrees in the past week. I happened by the NYT as I do on some Sundays and read this essay by Jhumpa Lahiri that was ever so perfect for my mood today.

Her devotion to perfecting her craft is palpable in every sentence. It seems to me, pieces like this one reveal Lahiri's personality so much more than her autobiographical novels. Without having shared anything about her life, she is able to spark curiosity - a reader wants to know more about her and how her mind works. 

She writes "I hear sentences as I’m staring out the window, or chopping vegetables, or waiting on a subway platform alone. They are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, handed to me in no particular order, with no discernible logic. I only sense that they are part of the thing."  

I know for a fact that I will remember these lines when I look out the window of the kitchen watching a couple of raucous cardinals only a few shades apart from my bowl of red bell peppers. I may pay more attention to gathering my thoughts instead of letting them drift away unattended.

Connections

I got a flyer in the mail today that had contained an infomerical about a product called Liquid Granite. The story was too good to be true - the look of granite for a fraction of the cost and you would not even need to gut your existing counter-tops. I was intrigued enough to do some research online and came across IdeaConnection. I  quickly moved on from Liquid Granite to more fascinating things. I must have spent an hour reading about inventions I had no idea existed. 

This is how the internet experience used to be when I first got online in the mid 90s. There were no filters or aggregrators - you started somewhere and ended up in entirely unexpected places - the journey was fun and unpredictable. You could waste an inordinate amount of time looking for information and digress all too easily. These days, most of my reading online is via Google Reader - the reading list is long and diverse but there is still a corralled feel to it. I get what I want in one place and related information is already curated for me  - there is little need to "browse" and therefore fewer opportunities to happen by something outside the walled garden. Jumping from from a printed flyer to a related online source and wandering without direction or constraint felt strangely exhilarating - I have not done this in a long time.

A Little Knowledge

The other day DB and I were talking about people of a certain age coming to feel inexplicable emptiness in their lives. When everything is functioning on autopilot and there are no big problems (money, health, substance abuse etc) to worry about, instead of feeling at peace they feel lost and miserable. Often a true spiritual guru may be able to answer what ails them and lead them out of it but it is certainly not easy to find one. Is the guru not supposed to seek out the disciple when they are ready ?

The stories of charlatans and false prophets are widely known as are the accounts of the damage they wreck upon the lives of their gullible followers. The conversation got me thinking about another kind of misguidance that parents and other adults may provide a child. In many Hindu families of my acquaintance I have seen adults take a parable or quote from a religious text, translated, diluted and distorted in the final rendition to make a point to a child. 

While they have the best intent, they lack the qualifications for the job they are setting to undertake. So their lesson may be entirely incorrect and do more harm than good. The child might in fact have been better served without the lesson in morality and ethics. The body of knowledge is too vast for an average person to assimilate on their own and good teachers are hard to come by. The oral tradition has been on the decline for a few generations now so the learning parents pass on to their children is a pastiche culled from a variety of sources - not all equally reliable. 

When I was growing up, I often heard adults talk about the misogynistic views expressed in Manu-samhita and how it stymied the growth of the Indian woman for hundreds of years. Manu was held directly responsible for all the social ills of the country. Random quotes would be tossed up and torn apart for the purposes of these discussions. Though I was too young to participate, I itched to ask how many had read the original Sanskrit version of the text, how many had read any expert commentaries to it and finally what was the overall context of the quote that was under fire. 

Similarly, someone would quote a short passage from the Bhagavad Gita or one of the Upanishads and expound on it as if the literal translation was all that there was to it. My childhood is rife with examples of adults with dangerously little knowledge of Hindu philosophy attempting to mold my world view and teach me the art of living. Lately, I find myself trying to rid my system of all that meaningless clutter - become knowledge free so I have a shot of learning something right.

Living Within Means

In her article Planet Singlehood, Amiee Ginsburg writes "Now I realise there was a price to be paid for being a couple that I could not pay, even though I had had my heart set on it. Now I’m living within my means." A long time inhabitant of Planet Singlehood, I can completely relate to her sentiments. It does take a lot of mental space and energy to come into and sustain a relationship. I had foolishly assumed the same amount of investment would not be necessary in marriage and I am learning I was wrong. While I was unable to extend myself as far as was required to just be in a relationship, I feel more ready, willing and able to do so in marriage simply because my spouse has gone the distance by making a lifetime commitment to me and J - as such, he deserves it. Yet, the effort that goes into the process does make me feel like I am "living beyond my (emotional) means".

Of her single state and its impact on her kids, Ginsburg says "I was not able to show them how to cross adulthood in a healthy relationship, but maybe they’ve learnt something about autonomy and strength, and true love." How absolutely true ! I don't know that I am the best role model for J as far as how to be in a healthy relationship. I have a lot of unresolved issues that are making their presence felt in my marriage with DB. In the end, she will take away from observing me and us, what she will. If it is within my power, I will encourage her to examine our life and decide what parts of it to emulate in her own and what to reject. Enabling her to do that will the best I can do in lieu of being the relationship role model, I have not yet been able to be.

Uncoiled Spring

I am enjoying a little time off these days after many vacation-less years. One of the pitfalls of having a clockwork routine for a very long time is that you forget how to unwind, relax and do nothing. It took me several days to learn not to look at the clock and let time ebb as is must without being mindful of its passage. I learned to watched the squirrels and birds in the backyard, consider the beauty of the tree that has a creeper covering its trunk and moss encrusting its bare branches. 

Once spring returns, I will not be able to see this unadorned beauty any more. When the day warms enough, I go out for a four mile walk. My route takes me past a high school and sometimes I see a bunch of kids in the schoolyard - if I happen to be there during their recess. Mostly, everyone is inside in the classrooms. The streets are empty, the traffic is light and I enjoy my solitude and music. My idyll was broken rudely one rainy morning, when I woke up feeling that my life was without purpose.

J is a fairly responsible young lady and requires very little supervision. DB is not a needy husband - he is able to give me as much space as I need and does not interfere with any of my plans. His mantra for this relationship is that I bring happiness to him only when I am happy on my own and he is willing to support any and all of my pursuits of happiness. The definition of "my life" outside my two roles in the family of wife and mother seems to be lacking if not entirely absent. 

So while I have a partner who is urging me to expand my horizons and seek out that which will nourish my soul, I don't know that I know what that may be. I use my work to give me a sense of self - with that missing for now, I was grasping for something else that had comparable weight. It was the "unbearable lightness of being" that I was experiencing. The incessant rain was not helping my spirits either. In lieu of waiting for the sun to pick me up, I reached out to my friend T to see if she wanted to do lunch. 

As I was going to find out, tapping into a source of energy outside myself can have some unexpected consequences.

Ego and Cry for Help

In marriage, each partner must balance their ego with their unheard cries for help. I learned this in my first marriage and am re-learning long forgotten lessons another time now. In the early days of my marriage with DB would ask for me to do a few specific things to ease him into the marriage - small changes, small gestures of understanding and kindness for me but deeply significant in their impact to him. I let my ego get in the way of doing what I was being asked to. I heard him making demands instead of hearing his cries for help. I would be more than willing to help but I refused to meet any demands. Such is the nature of perception. 

Each of us has a different way of reaching out for help from the one we love. For over a year DB appealed and I refused to comply because he was not talking the language I wanted him to talk in. Now he has given up and it is my turn to cry for help. His ego may be a little smaller than mine but it still makes its presence felt. I am not speaking the language that will appeal to his heart. As a result, he is holding back the help I am seeking just as I have for the longest time. 

Ironically, now that he never mentions it again, I find myself doing all those little things he had so badly wanted me to do for such a long time. He notices, but it means a lot less now than it would have once. I am only now beginning to realize how much work it takes to hear and be heard effectively in a marriage. I wonder if things are not that much harder for both of us because we've been single and on our own for so long that any request to change from our partner feels like an imposition and our immediate reaction is to bristle. Being relationship-free for as long as we have both been make our communication skills with each other more than a little rusty. When you throw a little bit of ego in the mix - it makes for a potent combination.

Hall of Mirrors

If life expectancy is hereditary, mine could go either way. One side of my family lives into their 90s, the other has folks dropping off like flies in their 60s and 70s. Lately, I find myself thinking about the half-life mark - specially since DB and I got married. Somehow, having the path to the future defined, has brought in its wake, the need to stop, take stock and yes - self-flagellate. An urge to reconnect with long lost friends apparently comes with this particular territory. I wonder where S (my best friend) with is, how she is doing, if we could talk all night like we did in our college days, if we would have even one thing in common anymore - and I chide myself for letting my communication with S ebb away.

Not knowing the answers to those questions bothered me enough to begin a search. So easy in the time of Google and Facebook and yet so perilous. Now S is nothing if not notoriously private and so are many of our common friends. Finding S, I discover is no walk in the park. I don't know if she is now married and if she uses her husband's last name. My quest for S, however leads me into uncomfortable territory - I have to start looking up hubs in our social network hoping they will somehow lead me to her.

These are folks with two hundred plus friends (which sadly do not include S). Some faces have not changed that much, others have transformed beyond recognition. And that is the easy part - the devil is in the details; careers, spouses, kids, holidays and the endless stream of pictures with everyone in them smiling a hundred percent of the time. My quiet world feels the full force of the information overload. I begin to wonder how I have fared relative to my peers - on all counts. I fear I may have "gained the world and lost my soul" -I fear that I may not be high enough on the happiness quotient relative to my reference group - nothing else matters nearly as much.

I think back to the days of our early youth, we were very different then too. This was the "fun" crowd - they were about taking it easy and having a great time - work came only as an afterthought. Some of them were very bright and enterprising so it comes as no surprise that they are doing very well professionally. This was the crowd you hung out with when you wanted to chill. Things have not changed that much - in time, the moments have added up and online I get to see their life distilled - with its best, most shining moments on parade for the world to see. It is like being in a hall of mirrors - things are not exactly what they appear to be and yet nothing is fundamentally untrue.

As I swirled through the maze, it became evident that S would remain hidden by her invisibility cloak as would some of my other friends. If at some point in their lives, they felt the strange pressure that reaching half-life mark exerts, they may do what I tried - maybe we will connect then.

Random Inspiration

The Child

Some days, I just have to keep my ears open for inspiration. Having the day off today, I was able to take J and her friend A to the museum to check out a couple of art installations I had read about in the local newspaper. A is a very polite child but it is impossible to get a reaction other than "I don't know" when asked for an opinion. So, I had know idea if she enjoyed the outing, if the galleries we went to were the ones she was interested in or if the lunch we ate at the cafe was what she really wanted. 

So imagine my astonishment when we sat down in the lobby on some Neinkamper chairs and A said "In my dream house, I must have these chairs - I simply love them". The passion  in her voice touched something deep inside me - for a ten year old to have a dream home and imagine what it might look like is not entirely unexpected but coming from someone who almost always says " I don't know", it was very special. Beneath the gentle and unassuming surface, I imagine there is a lot of steel and resolve - A might be one of those who tend to their dreams diligently in solitude until they came to fruition. From being frustrated with her at not helping with any decision around their day, I went to having respect for her.

The Adult

DB is given to mulling over things for a while before he is able to fully articulate what he is thinking. Inevitably, the insights come when you least expect it. Today, while running a technical issue at work by me, he segued into our relationship and had this to say about what ails us. "The change I am asking of you is a change in the pattern of thinking about things. What you are doing instead, is reacting to each instance I am upset about and correcting that one thing when tens of other issues similar to it remain unchanged. That is frustrating and tiring both of us - I see no hope and you see no end to the criticisms. You need to change the algorithm and not the data sets - that way your reaction will follow the same pattern in all instances and you won't have to solve each instance as its own problem" We have had a million variants of this discussion from the time we got married. However, this is the first time, I felt like we were close to a solution.

Figurative Loss

Recently, I have suffered some figurative losses. You would think that not being material or tangible they may hurt less but in fact, it can be felt just as strongly if not more. Being in that frame of mind, I found these lines from an article by Olivia Harrison particularly poignant :

"Tragedy is much more of an adventure than joy. I am not saying joy is over-rated. But happiness is fleeting; it exists in the present. Tragedy casts a long and persistent shadow with the power to dim even the most perfect moment. It also has the potential to follow us to the end. We don't stop to analyze happiness but when grief and strife occur we recount the events leading up to it over and over. It wakes us from our sleep as we try to figure out how and where it all went wrong."

She writes this in the context of her husband's George Harrison's imminent death but the idea of raking through the content of tragedy over and over again to make sense of it transfers to the kind of figurative loss I have experienced. There was something then that is gone now. When it was there, it was important but I spent no energy to analyze what I had and what it meant for me. In losing it, indeed the perfectness of my present moment is greatly dimmed.

Elephants and Dragons

Ten years ago, around this time of year, I made an important decision - I was going to leave my husband. My daughter would be born a couple of months later. We would continue pretending to be a family until she was twelve weeks old and then she and I would leave. That was the beginning of a decade of strife, impermanence, uncertainty and angst. My marriage was still new when I bailed out – less than three years old and we did not own a home. During that time, I had always feared the rainy day and saved like a squirrel. When the rain came pouring down, I was grateful to have the resources to go solo with an infant.

For the first time in my life, I will have a home. DB, J and I are planning the big move coming up. We come to this point in our lives from very different places. For him, it is about making up for lost time – he wants to leapfrog to where his peers are in their lives without having put the twenty years to reach there. For my daughter, this event signals the transition from transience to permanence – something she has waited all her life to see happen. We are about to become a “regular” family that lives in a "real" house, has play dates and birthday parties there , the neighbors don’t holler when the kids go stomping up and down the stairs and there will be a backyard – her world would finally become "normal" (at least in her limited world view)

For me it is about the most expansion I have experienced in my life. I had grown used to living very minimally, planning for no more than a few months at a time – putting away as much as I could for the dread rainy day and my child’s future. Most importantly, I was not tethered to anything – place, job or relationship. I feel like being ejected head first from a dark tunnel into blinding sunlight – a near birth experience if there is such a thing. Suddenly, I feel the full weight of commitment – of making decisions for decades and a lifetime when all I have capacity for is six months. Even marrying again was not as unnerving as home buying is turning out to be. In a sense I am trading my financial security and mobility for things that I don’t know I am really ready for.

The marriage is now more real than ever before – it is no longer the commingling of two apartments into one and the constant jostling for space. Our battlegrounds had been in the closet, the cluttered living room, the missing room where we could get some alone time, the kitchen and the bathrooms – nothing was big enough for the both of us. We had grown too used to having the space alone and sharing just does not come easy. The problem of room will soon be history – if anything we will have too much of it.

The house will draw us out into the suburban life so many other families of our vintage live – unlike them who have done this for ten or twenty years, it would be the first time for us. I don’t have the excuse of “only temporary” anymore to run away from issues that have remain unresolved for a while. Once the dust settles there will not be another big dragon to slay – that is when the elephants in the room will want to stand up and be counted.

Mostly, I dread my lack of preparation for that day which is probably right around the corner. The decade of strife is finally over and I realize that I have lost the skills to thrive in a time of peace – I need those elephants to deny and dodge ;dragons to chase to get me feeling alive. I very much want to keep the biggest elephant in the room around because he shields me from a lot of things I am not prepared to deal with it. If he insists on being acknowledged, I will likely be off dragon slaying to avoid making eye contact.

Lessons From Cupcakes

DB bought me a super soft throw a few days before Valentines Day. He does not care for surprises and is bad at keeping them. I got my gift ahead of time and liked it better that way - the de rigeur lovefest of February 14th is not my thing at all. Now that I had been given a gift for to mark the occasion and the first one since our marriage, I felt compelled to reciprocate. 

Knowing that he has a sweet tooth, I had in mind a couple of super fancy cupcakes from a cupcake boutique that is new to our neck of the woods. They are as decadent as they are gorgeous. Apparently everyone else in town was thinking just like I was. I decide to swing by after work, pick up what I liked and head home in time for it to be a surprise. Sadly for me, they had a note posted on their door apologizing for being out of cupcakes. Had I ordered ahead, I could have picked up as many were doing. 

For someone who does not believe in Valentines Day or the celebrations that go along with it, I was extremely anxious to pick up something that was close to what I had intended. Rescue came in the form of ice cream cupcakes from another store down the road. Though not nearly as exclusive as the offerings of the cupcake boutique, they were good enough. 

I felt strangely wistful driving home. DB takes the time and energy to think about what he could do different or better in our relationship. Him going out a few days ahead to pick out the perfect gift for me is one of many examples. I try to do as much as I can in as little time as possible - often without a lot of planning. 

In the many years that he was single before we met, he cultivated qualities that enhance him as a person and a partner. For my part, I focused on running a tight ship - with parenting, career, finances and yes even the tentative forays into relationships. I have possibly regressed on the interpersonal and relationship aspects in the last decade. 

Now that we are married, the difference in our personal growth over this period of time manifests itself in big and small ways all the time. 

The failed attempt to secure bespoke cupcakes on Valentines Day is a small but telling example. Each time something like this happens, I think to myself "I did not used to be this way before" Before - a long time ago, before my first marriage or until my divorce. I would plan just as meticulously as DB does. I had an abundance of imagination and creativity - I used to do the things DB does for me for my R (my ex) - a man who most decidedly did not deserve that generosity.

I want nothing more than to restore those traits that have gone dormant in me to the point that I forget they ever existed. I want to be fair to DB - be able to give to him like he gives to me.

On Doodling

I can't last more than a couple of minutes on a conference call before I reach out for a notebook to doodle. I feel guilty about this habit and always make sure my doodling is  hidden away - I do not want to come across being a slouch. Some of my doodles are pretty enough to be considered artistic but again I am not supposed to be making "art" while at work.

It would be hard to explain that doodling actually helps me focus on the discussion instead of becoming completely disengaged - that I am being more productive mentally because of it. Doodlers are generally viewed as disinterested in (or bored with) the activity of the moment not to mention mentally lazy. It was most gratifying for me to read this article on doodling - vindication at last ! The author concludes her case for doodling that would be music to the ears of compulsive doodlers like myself :

Like infants and dynamite, the doodle is deceptively simple. A staggering number of scientific, mathematical, and business breakthroughs have come via the act of making inelegant marks on paper. The beauty of the doodle is that it requires no educational degrees, no financial status, no training. It only asks that we unleash it and let it do what it does best: help us think.

Heat And Ice

One evening during the recent snowstorm, DB said to me "For snow to settle on the ground and turn to ice, the ground has to be cold. If it is sizzling hot, the snow will melt away". He has a way with metaphors. This one came about in the context of (and the challenges  resulting from ) my innate nature which is impatient, intense and restless. The snow turning to ice parallels the constant nurturing of a new marriage until it becomes rock-solid and stable. The parched earth reference is all too evident.

Conversation turned to other things but DB's impromptu metaphor stayed with me. As I watched the snow settle down on the tree-lined streets and become ice, I found myself thinking about what cooling down would mean for me. It would mean learning to let go of things from the past, not feeling the need to be in control of my life, learning to accept that I have and continue to be wrong about many things, allow the snow to settle at its own pace without worrying too much about what might follow. Mainly it would be about learning acceptance and finding tranquility.

Flashback

Flashbacks are strangely inexplicable things. The memories of an incredibly difficult time from the past can come to me in the happiest of times for reasons I would never expect. Parallels that don't mean anything at all, can ruin a moment of joy. It takes a concerted effort to force myself from then to now, shake off the the weight of baggage I thought had been shed many years ago.

When this happened recently, I tried a slightly different approach than I have in the past. Instead of self-recrimination and regret for ruining now for then, I allowed myself to slide a little more into deja vu until I was able to find a place in the past where I had been similarly happy. It turned out to be a easier transition to make - suddenly the dread flashback was not a debilitating thing that could not be dealt with, instead it help me return to where I wanted to be - now.

Seeing Change

Miss W was one of J's first care-givers at the daycare center when we moved here over five years ago. Day care was still a new idea for J at the time as she had spend most of her time at home with my parents. Miss W made the transition easier than anything I had dared to hope to for and we became good friends. J and I have attended Buddhist prayer meetings with her, had her over to our place for dinner, been over to hers for lunch. She introduced me to Japanese food I would have never known to try on my own. Her warm smile and the sparkle in her eyes were her most attractive features and they made her more than just another pretty young woman.

J and I were ran into Miss W after nearly five years a few days ago. We were shopping at the same store. I kept looking at this woman with three kids in tow - she looked ever so familiar and yet I was not able to put a name to the face. When I finally connected it to W, I asked J to walk over and ask her if she was Miss W. And so she did and indeed it was Miss W who is now Mrs A. I recalled having met her husband back in the day when he was her boyfriend. She was just as happy to see J and I as I was to connect with her again.

The meeting left me wondering about the passage of time and the changes it brings to our lives. Mrs A is nothing like that wonderfully vibrant Miss W, I once knew. Three kids later, she looks completely worn out. "I won't have any more kids. Three is enough" she tells me in right after saying hello. I had trouble comprehending they were all her kids - the change was a little too dramatic to process.

From her vantage point, time would almost appear to have stood still for me. J is a third grader and I am five years older but other than that nothing has changed significantly about my life. Fleetingly, she may have wanted to return to that carefree time of being a young, free and in love without repsonsibilities. For a minute, I must admit I wished the winds of change had touched me too - even if not in the same way as it had touched W.

Passage Of Time

It is interesting to listen to the non-work sidebar conversations that take place when a bunch of people arrive for a meeting before the organizer does. A few weeks ago, I caught a couple snippets as we waited for time to pass. One woman was telling her neighbor that ever since she got herself a smartphone - the device is no longer "just a phone".

Her addiction to it is evident. She is typing away on it furiously at all times and when she is not, her eyes are glued on the screen checking stuff out completely indifferent to those around her. She went to to say she could not imagine life without it because it would be no different than missing a limb. When the iPhone was first released, a lot of people I know felt pretty passionately about it and were quick to get one for themselves but even they stopped short of likening it to a body part. Two guys compared the apps they had installed on their iPhones and the discussions were not unlike those between J and her buddies about who owns what cool toys - and I am speaking of a few years ago. At eight, even J's friends are too cool to inventory their toys. The smartphone seemed to have caused regression to infantilism for these folks. It was a fascinating thing to observe.

The group across the aisle from me were having a conversation about women and meeting their expectations on Valentines Day. One married guy said that he quit doing anything at all because he could not keep upping the ante year after year. His wife knows not to expect anything and he does not feel pressured to out-do himself each year. Then they turned to the solitary bachelor in the group and asked him if he would ever marry to which he responded "Sure, if she will marry me".

While the phone and Valentines Day conversations were amusing, this one turned out to be the thought provoking one. This guy is dating someone in her very early twenties. The woman has the advantage of youth on her side and can be selective about who she marries - so it is only natural that she is not closing the deal with him. Ten or twenty years out, that would no longer be the case. The same guy would probably string her along, unwilling to commit. The balance shifts in favor of the man over the woman. The passage of time can be a force to reckon with sometimes.

Chance Remark

I met a group of former co-workers for lunch a few days ago. The group was diverse in many ways besides ethnicity and cultural background. We had among us those who were  young and still single, older and suddenly single, married for two decades and those who were in relationships that Facebook would categorize as "It's Complicated"

While we were waiting for our lunch, conversation turned to L's long time girlfriend who is yet to come into an engagement ring and has been prodding him to challenge the status quo. M made a comment mainly directed to L that stayed stuck in my head. "You should always choose your spouse with the greatest care. Any amount of time you need to make a decision is fair. After all, that is the only relationship in your life where you even have the ability to choose. You get the parents, family and siblings without your input or consent and its the same with your children. Your spouse is the only person you have the power to choose." M is married now but it took him a very long time to decide who he would choose to marry.

Clearly, his thoughts resonated with everyone around the table - and particularly with L who must have felt vindicated in his commitment phobia. Anyone who has dated for any length of time is all too familiar with hold-outs. These are the people who bring a lot to the table and have equally high (often deeply unrealistic) expectations from their partner. Like M, they want to choose with utmost care and deliberation. They refuse to rush or be rushed into a lifetime commitment against their will.

It does not matter if the process is emotionally (and sometimes even physically) debilitating. They will go on looking for this ideal partner for years and decades if so required - they refuse to end up with someone in an accident of fate.

That would explain the western world view of arranged marriages and the disenchantment with this system among the liberated and progressive minded in the east.Like their western counterparts, they have started to believe in the myth of being free agents when it comes to selecting a spouse. They honestly believe that their steadfast refusal to make a decision is an exercise of free will and it is critically important to have this ability if one wishes to choose wisely and well.

It seems to me that the more time anyone has spent discarding what and who does not work for them, the harder it is for them to exercise this supposed "free will" when time comes to make a choice. They have whittled down their options to just one - the last one standing by the process of elimination and not as a consequence of them being the chosen one.

This was obviously the wrong kind of crowd for me to say anything about the wonders of surrender and resignation, let alone suggest that if everything else in our life was pre-ordained or completely random, there is no logical reason for the spouse to be the solitary exception. We go through our lives with imperfect parents, siblings and kids that we did not get to choose and can suffer disproportionately due to the spouse that  we did get to select. Maybe there is something to be said for the lack of choice after all.
 

I held my peace and enjoyed the exceptional Caribbean Chicken Salad instead.

Two Birds

When we had a big snow storm some weeks ago, a pair of birds found shelter in our balcony. There is an old grape vine and pine cone wreathe that has seen better days and a small "bird feeder" I had made many months ago by of nailing an empty coconut shell to the railing. The sunflower seeds in the feeder have been around for a while with no takers. My friends tell me that not every bird eats sunflower seeds and maybe the ones that live in the woods nearby don't.

At any rate, that day these two birds found shelter in the wreathe and food in the feeder making me and J very happy. We had given up on ever having birds feed out of our improvised bird feeder. As depressing as it is to be snowed in all weekend, the birds made it much less so. For those two days, they became our connection to the world outside as they went back and forth between the woods and the balcony.

Watching them had me thinking about "shelters" I have sought in times of distress and what in normal circumstances would have been unthinkable became quite acceptable in that situation. Many years ago, I spent a month and a half in someone's stone cold attic. After the storm passed, the birds did not come back very much. I never had returned to the house with the attic that had given me a second chance in life. Like the birds, I turned to the woods where I belonged, where I could be free even if not always comfortable.

Bystander

Reading this heartbreaking account of a boy's abuse by his stepfather with the tacit consent of his mother had me depressed for days. I found myself thinking about the summer weekends when my neighbor L and her two daughters splashed in the pool all day with her boyfriend. I always thought the man was a little too friendly with the girls who were eight and ten years old at the time.

Like their mother, they were both very beautiful, friendly and outgoing.Since L seemed comfortable with the interaction between her boyfriend and her daughters, I did not think it appropriate to voice any concerns - maybe I was just being paranoid and needlessly cynical.The mother was right there with them, it was not like he was alone with the girls. Surely, she would be able to tell right away if anything was amiss.

After reading Joel Johnson's story, I don't know anymore - maybe L, like his mother knew what was going on and chose to turn a blind eye. The need to have a man in her life may have been compelling enough for her to do so. Maybe I should have trusted my gut and sought help. My maternal instincts made me want to rush out and take L's daughters out of harm's way  - and I felt guilty about not doing anything. I needed very badly to believe I was wrong in thinking what I was about L's boyfriend and that everything was just fine. I feel an even greater need now.

L has moved out of the neighborhood. Last I heard, she was getting married to her boyfriend. I hope never to see the day when L's daughters share a story like Johnson's with the whole world - I pray they never have the need to do so.

Facebook Happy

About five years ago, I came to got acquainted with a man (let's call him S1) - a physician by profession. He had been single after a serious relationship that ended a while ago. Given the demands of his job, he had little time to date or try out a relationship to see if it had staying power. To that end, he found desi matrimonial sites very helpful. Both parties come into it knowing there was a specific end game. If there is a click you get hitched, if not you move on. Sounded pretty sensible to me but there were a few red flags. S1 was extremely secretive about his personal details, he acted like we were getting married before the week was out and finally there was all together too much talk of physical intimacy being inevitable in "our situation". 

He did share quite a bit about his ex. They had gone to med-school together and were very much in love but there were far too many obstacles on the way to getting married. She had since married another man. S1 was attractive, attentive, interesting and intelligent - any woman would have found him worth her time. And then one morning his wife called me and told me about their six month old twins, a piling credit card debt and  a completely dysfunctional marriage - he had been threatening to divorce her for a while but she can't imagine such a future specially with her new born babies. 

She knows all about his cheating but is desperate to save her marriage. She called him a sociopath and yet worried that he may leave her. The woman's name was the same that of the girlfriend he had supposedly not been able to marry many years ago. The cleverly constructed edifice of lies came tumbling down in a few minutes. I knew that day this marriage was for the long haul. There was no way S1 was going to change his ways when the woman he was married to was so anxious to do whatever it took keep the marriage going - business as usual. He had absolutely no incentive to change.

A few months ago, on the Facebook wall of my blog I saw a face that looked very familiar. It took me a while to realize that it belonged to S1.In the picture he is accompanied by a woman and two young girls ( I am guessing it is the wife and the twins). He happens to be connected to someone I am connected with - such is the confounding web of social links and chains. It was not so remarkable that I should run into S1 in this manner but I was struck by the irony in a couple of things. 

He and his wife are smiling ever so broadly in the picture. Had I not known what I do know about them, they could be a poster for a perfectly happy (and an attractive) couple. Back when he was talking to me, S1 had guarded his personal details like a Cerberus at the gates of Hades.Thanks to his social presence on Facebook everything anyone needs to know about him is just a few clicks away. In real life, the very private business of a broken marriage had become public knowledge and yet commonplace things like name, age and place of work were kept secret. S1 had also lied about his religion which I still find quite remarkable. 

The "happy couple" picture on Facebook is perhaps restoring the balance between private and public.The marriage is painted bright and happy for everyone to see - the sordidness can remain private as it rightfully should. And yes, I was right about the longevity of this marriage - more than five years since the event, they are still very much together.