Motherhood is a long series of subtle separations starting when your baby separates from your body. From nursling to toddler to pre-schooler, each separation is a hard-won triumph but then all of a sudden they’re in middle school and you spend very few hours a week with them. The greatest pleasure (and greatest trial) of this trip has been spending almost every minute of everyday with Nick and Nora. I haven’t had this kind of time with them since they were babies, and back then they weren’t very good conversationalists. That’s not to say they’re ready for a table at the Algonquin, but they are much more interesting now than they were then.
Nicholas has an amazing laugh that we don’t get to see much at home. When he really gets going, his eyes close, his nose scrunches up and his body rocks from side to side in silent laughter before he can catch a breath and start the giggling proper. I’ve also learned that he’s pretty good at remembering and telling jokes.
Politically, I get the feeling that he’s kind of center-right, his loathing of President Bush notwithstanding (and I had nothing to do with that, he picked it up from a babysitter he admired). He is saddened by the lack of peace in the world, but also thinks we should go to war with China over Tibet. It also turns out that Nicholas feels contempt for both missionaries and communists. In the east and south of India, there is a strong communist party presence and when he saw their flags he let fly with a stream of invective. I didn’t even know he knew what communism was. The missionary thing was even more interesting because he really seemed to put some thought into what it means to replace one religious culture with another. “You should never try to take someone’s religion away from them,” is how he put it. That applies to both evangelists and communists.
Today he told me he’s thinking about studying psychology in college because he feels he’s pretty empathetic—unless you’re a religious nut or a dirty commie, I guess.
The one thing it would have been useful to know before taking him to India: he hates crowds. Oops.
Nora, who follows the rules pretty closely at home, has applied her own rules to everything here. We like to say that in the Republic of Norastan things run differently. For example, in the Republic of Norastan, one stands while eating. “I’m not built to sit still,” she says when I ask her for the fifth time why she is standing while eating her meal. In the Republic of Norastan, kids don’t go to bed until ten o’clock, don’t need to brush their teeth and they eat candy after breakfast. Unfortunately for Nora, her mom and dad don’t live in Norastan, but I admire her effort to exert a little control over the wacky situation we put her in. We broke the rules of parenting by upending the safety and security of home and school, and turnabout is fair play.
Not only has Nora inherited her father’s card playing ability, she’s raised trash talking at the card table to an absolute art form. She is quick with a quip and it’s usually pretty spot on. Try not to get insulted by Nora, because it’ll probably hurt. We estimate that she’s played about 500 games of gin since we arrived, probably more.
It’s been no surprise to us that Nora misses her very active social life, but we’ve been amazed at her nuanced analysis of her social network. Nora likes almost every kid she meets and she’s adept at finding common ground with anyone. When she talks about her friends, even the ones she hasn’t know very long, she can tell us a lot about what they like and don’t like and who they mix well with. She’s still young enough that there is a charming lack of judgment. Some people get along, some people don’t, it’s no big. I wonder how she’ll do in the enemy-of-my-friend-is-my-enemy territory that is upper elementary.
But the best thing I’ve learned about Nora on this trip is that she laughs in her sleep.
As for what they have learned about us, the mystery that is one’s parents, I don’t really know. We’ve had time to tell lots of forgotten family stories about our childhoods, our families and the world we grew up in. I wonder what they’ll remember.
When we get back to our regular lives next week, there will be things I will miss about being in India, but mostly I will miss my kids.
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