Am I raising a Feminist?

At the dinner table today, my daughter looks up and says, "Why is bitch a bad word and "dog" isn't? 

I chew slowly and swallow my food my mind racing to answer this. All I can come up with is, "Why do you ask?" 

So she launches off into what her day in online school was like and that during the English class, they were learning masculine and feminine gender and when the teacher said, "A female dog is called a bitch", some of the kids tittered and then got reprimanded for it.  

She's watching me intently at this point and I'm struggling for words. 

How do I explain to her that as a woman being assertive and headstrong is the last thing people want from you? If you have voice, a loud one, stand up for yourself and fight back, you are akin to a female dog who bares her teeth and snarls when you get too close to her pups. 

How do I explain that this is years of conditioning. Years of consistent effort to make confident women feel shame for their boldness, their bodies, their opinions, their choices. If she's a professional, unflappable, composed - she's animalistic. 

She's still waiting patiently, so I give her the only answer I can come up with. 

"If you're doing what is right and what is strong, people who do not like that will call you names. Call them out on it and calmly ask them to explain their choice of words. That WILL make them uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough to think twice before saying that to another girl or woman. You cannot change what people say and how they perceive you. But you can stand up to them and tell them it's not okay. That is your right. You are not responsible for the discomfort people feel when they are called out on their ignorance." 

She continues chewing thoughtfully and then says. "So only if girls are assertive they're bitches, but if boys are assertive what does that make them? It would be wrong to call them dogs." 

I'm so proud of this compassionate little girl, who realises what is wrong and how two wrongs DO NOT make a right.

She's asking the correct questions. She's thinking for herself. She's aware of the difference in acceptance of the same set of attributes in boys and girls and yet she refuses to be part of the problem. The problem of paying back in kind. Like the lovely Michelle Obama said, "when they go low, we go high."

Bye Nanu

After my father passed away, I felt a vacuum inside me. A pull and a push at the same time. The agony was physical. Like I was missing a few organs, but my brain didn’t know it yet and continued to make the rest of my body go through the motions of day-to-day existence. I thought of him all day and dreamt of him all night. His voice, his heavy pats on my head, his amber brown eyes, his absolute fearlessness. Even if he wasn't part of the dream, he was present. Constantly. Walking around in the background, reading, eating, sipping his tea. 

Two agonizing months passed and one night I lay in bed next to my baby girl fighting sleep, craving it, my mind exhausted. And then my daughter said, "Bye Nanu". It wasn't the sleep-laced mumblings of a child. It was loud and emphatic. I fumbled for my phone and in the small light of the display saw that she was fast asleep. I lifted her into my arms and wept.

The next morning, I casually asked her what she'd dreamt of the night before and instantly with her mouth full of pancakes, she said "Nanu". Just like that. Matter of fact. "What did he say", I pressed. "Nothing", she shrugged. "I was playing with 'Pooh' and he was sitting next to me. Then he got up and started walking away and I said 'Bye Nanu'". She said this with the earnestness that can only come from a child.

The dead do not come back to communicate with with us. It is forbidden by the Bible to invoke them to do so. But dreams do hold some significance in The Word and I would love to think that my father just came to say his goodbyes to his beloved little grand daughter.

Harry Potter Revisited

Re-reading books I’ve enjoyed over the years, has been a habit instilled in me by my father. I’d rarely see him without a book in his hand and he’d always read a chapter or two before bed. Now seeing my daughter devour book after and go back to them in these two months of quarantine reminds me so much of him. Everything reminds me of him.

She’s gone through the entire box set of Harry Potter and has doubled back the second time.

I wish I could forget the books and feel the exhilaration of discovering them all over again. Making the little connections and marvelling at J.K Rowling genius. The constant question my LO has been asking me is, “But, how did she do it? How is she so awesome?” And I can only say, “I don’t know baby!”

I’ve cried with her over the loss of beloved characters, and agreed with her anger at Snape, only to console her when he died. This storm of emotions she’s going through now are an experience by themselves. There is no explaining, no confusion, no disappointment. Only awe. I want that again.

From weeping over Dumbledore, to crying for Tonks and her baby without a mother, the insight she has on the books couldn’t make me prouder.

I received the box set as a 25^th birthday gift from a dear friend and I’ve treasured them for the past decade. They came with me to the hospital when I went to deliver this child of mine and kept me company while I stayed up nights watching her, feeding her, and waiting for her to wake.

To now have her find joy in these 7 books like I did, is a joy in itself.

U2 and I

My love affair with U2 started when I was 6. That’s quite a tender age to fully understand the depth of their music, their poetry, and the complexity of their creativity. My father brought home “The Joshua Tree” cassette and that’s pretty much all he listened to for weeks. I wasn’t complaining. There was something about them that made me feel nostalgic. I was 6. What nostalgia could I possibly have? But yet, there it was. Bono’s voice made me emotional and elated at the same time. I didn’t have the vocabulary to express myself. Papa was addicted to them too! He’d put on the cassette tape every night and Bono’s falsetto would take over our little home. The sound from our trusty two-in-one would fill my ears with lyrics I could not understand, but the music I didn’t want to stop.

For years U2 has remained with me, my favourite, my go-to music, my unchanging love. And then I lost my father - my wisdom, my teacher, the ultimate bad-ass rocker. He knew more about music than any person I’ve ever known, and he knew even more about books. Authors and their books, poets, and their poetry, nothing was hidden from him. Long before books became cult classics, he’d bought them and devoured them and known their value.

When he died, I lost part of myself and for more than a year, I could not bring myself to listen to the music I had loved for years. I couldn’t even bear to look at pictures of the band. For a year I pressed on, mourning my father, craving the sounds I heard with him as a child but unable to allow myself the liberty of enjoying that music he loved so much. 

And then when I thought I could listen to them without going to pieces, I did. I was wrong. Song after song of “The Joshua Tree” began and ended and I sobbed harder with each song. The memories washed over me, drowning me, enveloping me. And I had Bono to console me.

And then 2019 happened. U2’s tour of India happened, and my first concert happened. This band that I had grown up with, and wept my heart out to, performed the songs that shaped my childhood right in front of me. I wept, I screamed, I clapped, I sang, and I wept some more. Having my father in this experience with me would have been the gift of a lifetime. But for now, I’ll enjoy this music he shared with me.

Oak Tree to Acorn

They say that losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a person. And I believe them. As a mother, the thought is unfathomable. How do you live with a part of you missing? There are no words to console a grieving parent and there shouldn’t be. Nothing you can say will ever make them feel better, or help deal with the pain. But, that’s not what this piece is about. It’s about losing a parent.

When I was 11, a dear friend lost his father and I could not conceive of a life without mine. I cried my eyes out and all Papa could say was, “But, I’m still here. You still have me”. That made me cry harder. What would I do if he ever left me? As an 11-year-old, I didn’t think I’d survive a day without him. That sentiment remained with me till I was 32. Then he died. He just left. This strong, wise, funny, oak-tree of a man was gone. His wit was legendary. His compassion even more. From 600 kms away, my mother called to tell me he was on the ventilator. But I knew. I knew I’d never hear his baritone and the endearing names he’d make up for me. I knew I’d never walk into my parents’ house again and see him reading a book, dressed impeccably, his glasses perched on the edge of his nose, his silver hair gleaming. I held my 3-year-old the entire flight back home, crying. She slept soundly while I wept. I was holding a piece of me in my arms, but I had lost a larger part of me.

The 11-year-old me resurfaced. All my fears about not being able to go on without him were not irrational. The pain of losing him hurt physically. I remember every minute of his funeral. The sheer amount of people in attendance was mind-boggling. It was as if no one could believe he had gone, and they had all turned up to see for themselves. I wasn’t alone in my disbelief. Yet, I was the only one in my consuming grief. My little girl kept asking for her Nanu and I had to make my peace with the fact that she’d have to grow up without his wisdom in her ears. Without his advice. Without him.

Staring at life without Papa and a long-drawn divorce and custody battle, I felt ambushed. It was just round one of the biggest fight of my life and without my greatest supporter. But somehow I found the strength to push back. Years of litigation followed, but I never thought of giving up or backing out. My prayers were punctuated with sobs, and my Bible pages stuck together with the tears that fell on them. I pushed on. He would have wanted me to.

After 6 long years of standing my ground, stubborn like my father, I won. I got my divorce and my child was old enough to understand what it entailed. It was Win-Win. Papa wasn’t physically present to see me win. He wasn’t waiting for me outside the grimy court. He wasn’t there to shake my spectacular lawyer’s hand and thank her. He wasn’t at home expecting me to walk in the door with the best news he’d heard since the birth of my child. But he was there. 1708 days after I lost him, I walked out of that court, victorious. The strength it took to not falter, not waiver, not give in, not yield, could have come only from his testimony. His faith, his trust, his immovable belief that what we ask for we receive, was in me. When we ask of a Living God. He answers.

My oak tree had gone, but he’d left his strength behind for his acorn…

Loss

You will never be "old enough" to handle the loss of a parent. You shouldn't be expected to. How do you cope with the loss of a part of you? How you do come to terms with the realisation that your parent will never see your little daughter grow up?

I lost my father 2 months ago and I haven't grieved for him. Not because I wasn't close to him or being a parent myself, I'm old enough to handle it, but because the minute I break down and sob for him is the moment I will have to let him go. And I'm not ready to do that. Letting him go will be the most difficult thing I will ever do and I know I do not have the strength for that. 

I am the second of two daughters. Indians are largely son-crazy and my father was the happiest man alive with my sister and I. He never desired a son, nor did he rue that one of us wasn't a boy. It's tradition for Indian men to distribute sweets the day they become fathers. Very few do this when they become fathers the second time... to a second girl. He did. 

The loss is unbearable. Like an open wound that will not heal, that will not close, that will not let you forget that that part of you is not whole. There is no how-to for this. No quick fix. No five stages of grief. Nothing. It's sorrow at its darkest and worst. The light in this is the privilege of being the daughter of a man who respected her, loved her, protected her and will not leave her.

The one you can't have...

My latest love in music is Adele. I never really made an attempt to listen to her when she won all those Grammies, but somehow she found her way into my playlist a couple of days ago and man, I cannot get enough of her. I saw this video of her singing in Royal Albert hall, and she was so emotional about her song "Someone Like You". I must admit I cried a bit when I heard it for the first time. But listening to her talk about the song and the man who inspired the song is heartbreaking. She's sold millions of records, made millions, won Grammies, but she cannot have the one thing she really wants... It really broke my heart to see cry on stage. Seeing such a beautiful, talented, successful person cry over a relationship we sometimes take for granted kind of jerks things back into perspective right?

Check out the video here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9zmAv5bNug