Rethinking Motherhood

Now I’ve always thought I’d make a decent mother someday and that I would enjoy nothing less than fulfilling that “greater calling” in life. I’ve done quite a bit of babysitting. I generally enjoy spending time with kids. But I have seriously reconsidered motherhood after spending 5 days and nights babysitting my sister’s five children—and mind you my mom and I were both there. Which makes me even more terrified! There were two women in the house, which allowed for the luxury of a daily nap.

There were a couple of things that really got me about all of this. One, I felt like the worst version of myself came out. After my experience in India I learned not to consider myself “patient,” but this week I found myself wanting to lose it a more times than I care to admit. It’s not a pretty thing to see in yourself. And two, motherhood is so very selfless. I haven’t thought of myself as selfish, but this week I found nothing was about me. As the week progressed I took less and less care of my looks. Not only that, every night I wanted some sort of judge to listen to my grievances and deliver some sort of justice.

I can hear it now. I approach the judge in my pantsuit outfit carrying a folder detailing my case and say:

Your honor there are a few grievances I would like to put forth before you today and see that you remedy these situations. First, my one year old niece Jane was awake between the hours of midnight and 2:13am coughing. I kept running downstairs to get her some water until I was able to locate the infant’s cold medicine and administer it to her. I’d like to get my 2 hours of sleep back.

Second is the case of the 3 year old, Eve; my complaint is that she hit me multiple times and said “I hate you,” and “You’re not my friend!” repeatedly. I would like you to make her say “I’m sorry” and if possible keep her from saying “no” to my every request, suggestion, and mode of comfort.

The 6 year old nephew, Henry, has wet his bed for the second time since our stay. I would feel justified if he would wash the following items: 1 set of sheets, 2 pairs of PJ pants, and 1 pairs of underwear. I’d also appreciate it if there was some retribution since he lied to us regarding the wearing of pull-ups one night.

Your honor, Kate, the 8 year old, keeps forcing me to “play puppies” with her by getting angry when I refuse. Can you simply explain to her kindly that pretending to be kidnapped and then found by a stuffed animal puppy is only so fun for so long to a 25 year old?

And finally I would like for your honor to get my 10 year old nephew, Ethan, to put his Sunday shoes on the first time I ask him, instead of provoking his younger siblings to the point of tears.

In their defense those kids were fun to be with. They are so creative. Ethan made popcorn for our Friday night movie and handed it out like a regular salesman. During the film Eve climbed up and reclined on my lap while Henry and Kate tried their best to cuddle with my two arms. Ethan, Kate, Mom and I also played 2 rousing games of Settlers of Catan to my delight. I also enjoyed going to Kate’s 3rd grade class and giving a short presentation on India. And finally, Jane always had smiles for me each morning even though I wasn’t her mom.

There are sweet moments in motherhood I am sure, but I take my hat off to you women who do this day in and day out. To let it all go and love those kids despite it all is tough. You are amazing and deserve more than just one day to celebrate all the work you do.

Letter from the Author

Sorry I've been so busy since coming home. Celebrating Thanksgiving with family, buying a cell phone, signing a housing contract, lining up a job, organizing my thesis, and catching up with friends/family has been all I could manage in the last 2 (or has it been 3?) weeks since coming home. I've been thinking about this blog and what to write for a while now. Mostly wondering what to make of the end of this Indian chapter in my life. So, (first) I apologize for bombarding you with three long blog entries in one day. But they felt like three distinct experiences that have come again and again to my mind as I think of all this.

(And second) I want to apologize to regular readers (I've been running into a few and wonder how many more of you are out there!); while my life will remain being of interest to me, it may not be as exciting to you. I will try my best to continue writing and posting the entertaining anecdotes of my life. The next two chapters of my life will hopefully be entitled: "Madly finishing her thesis to finish grad school by April" and "Liann finds the first job of her career in this failing economy." I am planning for more Indian chapters to come, but the future is yet to be seen.

Reentry

I came from one sort of chaos to another.

India has streets full of people, carts, cars, buses, motorcycles, bikes, ladies selling flowers, begging mothers toting children, shops full of spices, restaurant stalls full of customers, men peeing on the sidewalk, women waiting for buses, salesmen with those useful odds and ends, and sacred cows meandering in and out of it all. Smells, sounds, sights, all senses are deliciously overwhelmed.

I come from a family of 10 children, all of whom made it home to Arizona for Thanksgiving. My house, big as it is, felt just as full as those crowded Indian streets. Boys running inside and out, girls telling jokes to each others' delight, toddlers screeching as they ride trikes around the patio, babies in highchairs crying for more food or freedom, mothers searching for lost kids, my brothers yelling at each other while playing the X-Box, my sisters constantly sweeping up while catching up with one another, and one old dog trying to live on the periphery of it all.

I felt right at home among all the chaos. I spent each successive night roaming from bed to floor to bed as the house guests came and went. I chatted with sisters about babies and with brothers about business. I did crafts with kids, wiped noses of toddlers, and held babies until they cried for their own moms. Overall, I just slipped back into my family's life. Jet lag made me a bit dizzy the first few days, but that quickly passed. Although each night I found myself going to bed early, not at all like I used to be.

So many people asked if it was weird being home. Strangely enough it hasn't been weird at all. I tell them the story about the bus and that tension I felt while thinking about the one world while living in the other (see my post below on my prep for reentry). But since I've been home it sort of feels like the last 7 months of my life were a bit of a dream, some very vivid dream I can talk about in great detail, but still a dream.

My Indian dream.

Goodbye

I was never very good at goodbyes. When I went to New Zealand and lived with as an exchange student (of sorts) for 5 weeks I found myself tearless at the airport trying to console the other 3 girls with me as we went back to America. I always like the scene in the Sixth Sense where the boy and the man pretend that they will see each other the next day even though this will be their last goodbye.

The boy says, "See you tomorrow."
The man replies, "See you tomorrow." And the man walks off.

I wish all my goodbyes could be that inconspicuous, none of this waving a handkerchief, running after a train, long crushing hugs. I would just like to walk out of your life like I walked into it. And we'll both know what that interaction (long or short) did or did not mean to us; none of this flaunting our relationship through dramatic scenes of parting sorrow.

The Daniels see so many students come and go I feel like all their goodbyes are of the simple, loving, but short nature. I'm sure they miss some students more than others. But they don't make a big deal about it. The first time I left them I know they didn't think I was coming back. They thought I hated India, and well they were sort of right. Only later did I see the value of my experiences in India. I knew (even then) I would come back, if only to prove to myself that I could do it better the second time.

Well, do it better I did. I even came to love the place. Strange that something so difficult could become so beloved.

I came to really love that family, especially Jeeva. Jeeva, the host mother, is a gentle quiet woman. I'm afraid that many students come to see her as part of the background. I think they perceive her as possibly a little dumb and quite submissive. Over those 4 months I was living there in their house I came to respect her more and more as a strong leader in her family, in the church, and among her neighbors.

My last day there Matthew, the host father, had gone into town. The girls, Jeeva and I sat on the porch waiting for 11:30 bus to come. We moved to the bus stop near their house. Jeeva came and stood with me, something I never expected her to do. As I stood by this small woman I knew we had shared a lot. I can't quite describe what we shared, or what made it different to leave her this time, but it was different. I think it has something to do with the many little moments we had together.

• That one Sunday night her Salomane tied me in a saree like the old village women and I hobbled around making Jeeva, Priya, and Salomane laugh harder than I've ever heard them before.
• The sacrament meeting where I watched Jeeva cry while giving a talk.
• The random evenings spent hanging around the kitchen just shooting the breeze.
• The daily ritual (created over time) of finding Jeeva when I got home and asking about her day and telling her about mine.
• The day I made Jeeva and Matthew laugh by sharing my silly thoughts on wanting to pick up the short old crabby ladies on the bus so they can hang on the tall bar (like some monkey bar) and stop pushing me out of my spot.
• The water days where we got Jeeva to come to the government tap (our own "nuclear weapon" to any conflict) to deliver justice and put the other ladies in their place.
• The mornings I woke early and watched with interest as Jeeva dunged the courtyard.
• The times she invited me in alone to eat with her family.
• Hearing her tell about bearing her testimony to the Jehovah Witnesses that came by.
• Listening to her broken English as she talked about what she saw on Guinness World Records Television Show and being amazed with her at all the crazy feats people do.
• The afternoons she put me in charge of their family's little shop while she ran an errand.

In some way all of those little moments added up to a deep and meaningful relationship and I was sad to leave her. Not that I was sad to leave India. It felt like the right time for me to leave. I knew I had had wonderful experiences and would have those memories for a long while.

It was my deep relationships with people in the States that made me homesick while in India. And it will be those deep relationships in India that make me long for that place. My ex-boyfriend grew up in Kenya and Nepal, but always spent his summers in Idaho at his grandma's house. He talked about living in-between, never really having a place he considers home. I don't feel that. I have a home and it's in Arizona. But I am finding that I make myself at home wherever I go by surrounding myself with loving relationships. After enough traveling I suppose I'll always be missing someone from a place far from me.

Preparation for Reentry

When I came to India I tried to keep myself from daydreaming about my life in the States--I didn't want to crave one place while residing in another. I wanted to embrace fully Indian's "live-in-the-moment" way of life. And for the last seven months that meant living in India. So there I was on my last long bus ride, I was leaving for the States in less than four days. The girls in my group teased me that I would be so weird when I got home. And I knew they were right. I had tried in the last three weeks not to talk too much of home since the girls weren't leaving for another two weeks. I realized I wasn't quite ready to go home. So I thought to myself, "OK Liann you have got start thinking about going home. You don't want to be too weird on reentry."

Thoughts I had previously forced out of my head were now welcomed in with all their vividness. Images of my parents' three-story home, large dinners of Thanksgivings past, warm showers, my overly abundant wardrobe, and my little gray Sentra came and went as I watched the lush green plants of India pass by. More vivid images rushed in: my brothers and sisters, my nieces and nephews, my friends--all dressed in nice, clean clothes, some with expensive cell phones and new cars. I pictured conversations I'd have with my family, trying to summarize my "foreign" experiences trying to understand what they found important in the last seven months of their lives.

My thoughts were interrupted as the bus came to a stop. The trees gave way to a dusty bus stop. About 10 men dressed in lungis and thread bare button-up shirts swarmed the bus. Each carried a basket full of some fruits or vegetables to sell; most carried cut up cucumbers. Each man rushed to a different window yelling to the passengers inside, sometimes even pushing the bag into the window forcing the vegetables on unsuspecting persons.

Instead of the feeling annoyed like I usually do when I get bombarded with aggressive salesmen, I saw these men for what they were: people, men, most likely husbands and fathers with more than their own mouth to feed. Questions came to mind. How many bags of 10 rupee cucumbers a man must sell in a day to provide for his family? What happens if he doesn't sell all the bags? Is he able to store and sell them again tomorrow? All I know is these men were fighting in this small town bus stand to sell what they had.

I normally don't get emotional about these kinds of scenes in India--they happen regularly. It's just the way of life here--poor people beg every day. Especially after living the life of a villager for so many months (carrying my own water, eating at humble roadside stalls, experiencing the regular power outages) it didn't feel needful to mourn their lifestyle. However, that day the gap between my own life in America and the lives of these men felt so wide. I fought back tears. I had seen so much poverty in the last seven months but not yet mourned it and I wasn't ready to cry over it all here on this crowded hot bus.

I remember talking with a European woman while I was in Thailand who had visited India. She described passing begging children on the street her first day in Delhi. She took them to an ice cream stall and bought each one of them ice cream then went to her hotel and cried and cried over the poverty she had seen. As I listened to her story I felt myself do a mental shrug. "What an overreaction" I thought. Then worry filled me! "Has living in India so long really made my heart so callous?"

I don't know the answer to that. I do know what I felt that day on the bus. I also know I don't feel compelled to dedicate my life to international development. I've seen a little more of the world than some and understand the magnitude of the things I own, but also the burden they bring at times. I'm very privileged materially, but also didn't see much of my father while growing up. So here I am, in America wondering how I'll ever put all these beautiful, painful, and sometimes strange life experiences in some sort of perspective. It's all just piecemeal, no simple and beautiful conclusion--kind of like how they are presented on this blog, one random story after another. That's life I guess. And if struggling with that makes me a little "weird" on reentry...well so be it.

Her Big Fat Hindu Wedding

I had just convinced myself that I am happy single. Not that it's been hard to convince myself of—I've been unexplainably happy here in India. In this state of euphoria I had decided that I would be able to get home to the crazed dating scene in Provo with my head on straight, my heart open, and my focus on graduation. I didn’t feel the desperate need to find a boyfriend anytime soon—they cause so much heartache, lead to lots of confusion, and take up so much time! And as I said at my 24^th birthday, “27 is the new 24” a.k.a. the age that seems very ripe for me to marry (mature, but not yet at the desperate 30). I’m two years from that “deadline” and in no hurry to rush things along.

However, I found my resolve melting as I watched this wedding unfold. Wait, first I’ll explain: I had been invited to this unconventional wedding by a professor in the Physical Education Department at Bharathiar University. Since the other girls in the group had never seen a Hindu wedding, we thought we might as well postpone our travel plans to watch this American man marry his Indian bride in the Hindu fashion.

Jeff was working for an IT company in South Carolina and had met Vidiya, an Indian working at the same company. They had a Catholic wedding in the states two weeks prior and all Vidiya had to say about that wedding was “It was short.” I laughed. Yes compared to the two day long weddings of Southern India with several ceremonies, clothes changing, etc. an hour long ceremony in the backyard would seem very short.

We came the night before the wedding to watch the many ceremonies surrounding the engagement. And that’s when my perfectly happy single future started looking like it might be missing something important.

Jeff was sitting on the “stage” holding the wedding saree his bride would be wearing the next morning. He was supposed to be presenting the saree to Vidiya’s sister. While holding out the saree to his soon-to-be sister-in-law, an old man from the village stood in front of the two singing old Tamil songs. The man was dressed in a worn button down shirt which was not quite white anymore, a lungi which looks like a long white hiked up to his knees and a towel wrapped around his head like a makeshift turban. He would throw rice at certain intervals during his singing and the drummer would hit his drum to emphasize the rice throwing. Frankly, it looked sort of ridiculous. Having been in India for 6 months I wasn’t much moved to laughter. I’d spent lots of time with Appa dressed this way, but trying to look at it from fresh eyes, this looked quite silly.

Jeff thought so too, but tried desperately to keep his composure, maintaining the dignity of the ceremony. He did well until the man’s singing droned on and on. Vidiya sneaked into the audience, sat on the second row, and started smiling at Jeff. His calm, dignified listening was interrupted as he couldn’t keep from smiling at her—a very shy sort of smile. My eyes darted back and froth between the two of them—yep, it was the look of love.

I watched them both again the next morning—this time I was sitting behind Jeff who was in the audience on the first row as he anticipated the arrival of his bride. His anticipation was killing me! She walked in and he only had eyes for Vidiya dressed in that beautiful pink saree. There are so many clichés I could use, but I must say I don’t think I’d do that couple justice. Their love for each other was so visible. I was touched at her willingness to go through a Catholic wedding and his willingness to go through a Hindu wedding. The sacrifice they were willing to make, the complete acceptance of each other (“weird” culture and all), and the deep love they conveyed in those small glances.

Maybe I won’t be so happy as a lone world traveler. Maybe I would like to have someone like that in my life. Maybe. It's yet to be seen if love will attack me with such force.

Making a Living by His Sweat and Blood

I don’t want you to think that this is normal—in the 10 months I have spent in India (last trip and this) I have never seen anything like this. Not that there aren’t beggars in India. There are plenty women carrying babies asking for milk money, kids touching your arms again and again repeating “Ma!”, and handicapped people laying on the side of the road displaying their deformities for money. But this, this was different.

I’d seen this “family” before—one man, an adolescent girl, and a small boy about 6 or 7 years old. On Diwalli we watched the man crack his whip and walk down the street to the sound of bells on his anklets. The girl will often play the weird sounding drum—I’m struck by her dirty salwar camis and her missing scarf. The boy often tags along with the drumming girl.

This Saturday afternoon we were standing at Gandhipuram waiting for the bus 96 to take us home when the family began. The man cracked his whip a few times in front of the waiting crowd. The young boy wandered through the mass with what looked like red paint splotches covering his chest. The girl started playing the weird drum while the boy and man emerged from the crowd and started stomping around with their bell covered feet, dancing on this makeshift stage--the road.

When he felt like enough of the apathetic crowd was watching, the man pulled out a knife turned so we could all see as he began cutting his forearm again and again—slicing it like the “cutters” I learned about in my psychology class. My stomach turned as I saw pink flesh. I tried to look away, but noticing the many scars on his arm I couldn’t stop staring. This was not the first time.

Like he had pulled a magic rabbit out of a hat he displayed his bleeding arm to the now fidgety group. He walked back and forth ignoring a bus as it pulled through past him and making a show of smearing some blood onto his own chest.

The drumming increased, but I didn’t appreciate the added dramatic flare. Horror came as I watched the boy lay down on his back, the man kneeled next to him and squeezed his fists over and over again so blood would drip onto the boy’s chest—making one more red splotch. The man then stood, cracked the whip a few times—intentionally hitting his arm with the tip as he wrapped it around himself.

The money collecting began. The girl, boy, and man wandered through the throng their hands out ready to collect spare rupees. The crowd was amazingly still and silent and a few reluctant people gave. The man stomped his feet in front of a group of well dressed Indian men, gestured to his bleeding arm, and stared with pleading in his eyes. It was a look that said, “I’m giving my sweat and blood here—can’t you spare a few rupees?” As I watched his face I could only think, “I didn’t ask you to do this to yourself. I’m not going to give you money, encouraging you to repeat this sadistic performance. There has to be a better way for you to provide. Your children should be in school, not taking part in this.”

I swallowed the bile in my mouth willing myself not to loose the contents of my breakfast. I tried to avoid counting the large drops of dried blood on the boy’s chest as he neared me, but I wondered how many times they’d done this “show” today. I hoped he wouldn’t get too close to me—the blood on his chest. I did what I normally do in India when I want to avoid contact: I gave that practiced blank stare and with it the tight control on my emotions. I have this smooth, apathetic look that helps me keep the tears from coming.

I watched as the family collected maybe 5 or 10 rupees for this little performance—20 cents for those drops of blood. There has to be another way. There has to be. I've thought quite a bit about that family since then, but I don't have any concluding thoughts. I'm still trying to figure out what this very vivid scene means to me.