I have a choice, don't I??

“It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

- J.K.R

-"Why have you not had your lunch fully?"

My voice comes out a wee stricter than I intended to.....empty lunch-boxes from school are the house rules, I did not like to see them broken.

-"I had very little time to eat because I wanted to go and see the talentquest......"

Her voice floated to me from her own world of self-absorption :)

-"Ha, are you taking part in the talentquest?"

-"Nope"

This time she sounded as if she was coming back to earth and was preparing herself for the landing......in her case a showdown with her mum.

-"Why not?"

-"I don't like to."

I could sense the slight sulkiness creeping into her voice and wondered what was she so defensive about?

-"You do know mummy likes you to take part in such activities."

-"Yeah I know you do, but I have a choice, don't I?"

Bent at the sink washing dishes, my head reared back so quickly that I believed I might have suffered a whiplash from it. Mind you this is not a girl in her teens, she is just 8 years old....technically speaking she's still got a week left for her 8th birthday. She's also not someone who is by nature a rebellious or a tantrum-throwing kid, her brother steals the limelight on that one. I wipe my hands unable to continue with the chore of washing dishes and turn and look at her. I see her, resolutely refusing to look at me but instead continuing to be immersed in my almost empty address book on the kitchen counter.

I look at my girl who has always been the apple of my eye, my sole reason that has kept me persevering even on days when the going gets tough and I have been tempted to throw in the towel. I come from a culture where parents have been the sole architect of their kids lives, designing by trial and error in most cases and always ensuring that the kids do not get to repeat the mistakes of their own childhood. They also strived beyond their ordinary means and capabilities to provide the opportunities for their children to do the things they aspired to but never had the luxury or means to do it. It was like the parents lived their own childhoods through their kids a second time, savouring their kids victories and counting their accomplishments and achievements as their own.

As a child I have always given in to my parents wishes and demands and that continues in most cases even today. Sometimes I do think ruefully, that my umbilical cord connections are too strong to be severed despite the distance or my years :) It still continues in several eastern cultures - the supremacy of the parents over the lives of their children - be it the kids in question are intelligent, mature or old enough to make decision for themselves. The children, in turn, willingly succumb to this parental pressure, given that this is how the society and the culture that they have been raised in expect of them.

So what happens when expatriate parents try to impose their own upbringing and cultural values on their kids? For one, they are sure to experience whiplash injuries given my own experience :) On a serious note, my daughter's stand in refusing to do something that she was not interested in was her first step towards displaying her own assertiveness. Do I marvel at this streak of independence in her, appreciate her refusal to do something to merely please her parents or do I put my foot down and exercise my primal authority of parenthood?

I recall an incident where she had invited me to a parents & grandparents day at school to see her activities and I remember telling her I was not so comfortable coming to her class. She took a minute to reply and her exact words were "I will be very happy if you turn up. But if you are not happy about coming there, you don't have to come. I will understand. I will want you to do it only if it makes you happy". Her words then had made me laugh....especially out of amazement seeing that I had spawned such a mature soul. Of course I turned up at her school and was touched by her sheer delightful response to my presence.

But today those very words of hers was my own harsh wakeup call to parenthood reality - my little girl clearly knew her boundaries even when it came to making requests of her own parents. She knew despite her tender age that she has to take the other person's preferences into account when it comes to making demands of their time, emotions or benevolence.

How easily we impose our own desires, our own wants and needs, prejudices and opinions on people in the name of love or relationship? We expect the people, especially the ones that we claim as the closest and those we would readily lay down our lives for, to toe our lines. We make them the sacrificial goats in the name of our very love. We end up leaving them burdened by their obligations to us, and kids especially are exposed to these chains of love at quite an early age. Our intentions towards shaping their lives might be good, but at what cost? Would she ever apply her mind in learning a new skill or talent if she is being forced to? I remember those days of dancing lessons that I had attended merely to satisfy my dad and here I am regressing easily into the same flaws of parenthood.

I go near her, turn her to face me and get her to meet my eyes - I explain patiently to her that it is a good opportunity for her to learn something by taking part in the talent quest. I remind her how much she loves to sing and dance and such events might give her the opportunity to do it. She then confides that she is not entirely comfortable in performing on a stage, even though she had wanted to take part in it. I tell her to give it some time and it will come to her naturally. She looks at me with renewed confidence in her own abilities and promises to give it a go next term as the selections are already over. We hug each other and give big smiles, happy that we both have learnt something valuable and significant from each other today.

I know this is just the start of what is going to come in the future years - my hands are going to be full in rearing a child who knows exactly what she wants for herself. A part of me is proud that she would never allow herself to become anybody's doormat, but a part of me sighs at the turbulent years waiting ahead of both of us. I hope and pray that I will always be able to find the strength within myself to shape this girl's life without breaking her or her dreams. And as a parent, I know that this is the best gift I can give her..........her wings to fly in the right direction without ever having to clip them :)

Out of your shells please..........

"What immigrants feel immediately is isolation."

- Cecilia Johnson

Last week I had attended an event on women in leadership roles. It was a gratifying evening where I got to meet several interesting and successful women. It is not everyday you come across a 33 year old CEO of a hospital in person detailing her inspirational success story or get to meet women making their headway in politics and in the local councils. As a panel member in a leadership discussion forum, I also got to practice my public speaking skills while conveying my two cents worth on leadership. Though not at my best owing to a dip in my body temperature leaving me shivering and with chattering teeth ( I rather blame it on the air-conditioning vent right above me and not my nerves), my five minutes of the limelight still helped me break the ice with most women in the room and I happened to make some great acquaintances that night.

Once the room was filled, I surveyed the members gathered there and felt a slight disappointment in seeing very few non-Caucasian women in the gathering. In fact there were just a handful of Aboriginal Australian women and only one other Asian women in the crowd. This is a community with a growing migrant population and yet there were hardly any non-Caucasian women in an event representative of budding/recognised female leaders. Well, once the initial surprise died down, my thoughts, though spinning in circles first, later chalked this (in)significant absence to certain prevalent factors.

I tried to recall the initial days after I had migrated to Australia. On day three after landing, I visited Byron Bay, a beautiful beach in New South Wales. Perhaps not the right way to get acquainted with a new country and new culture :) I was the most overdressed person on the beach, talk about culture shock !!! I remember being a shy, frightened, young woman who was intimidated by most things around me - electric trains with automatic doors, ATM cards, getting on public transport, picking up the phone, the Aussie accent..... and so the list continued :) But yet that day, I stood before a gathering of 100 women and still remembered to breathe. I have come a long way but the journey has been an arduous one, despite being memorable at times.

Walking down the memory lane, I realised that before most migrant women can dream of leadership roles, there are some hurdles or rather social barriers one needs to cross. As a first step these women need to be accepted as an equal at the workplace or within the community. In most cases, I have been quite lucky in that aspect. I have had wonderful friends who have welcomed me with open arms despite my ethnicity and foreignness. However I have noticed in certain instances that the first impression that people have of me before I open my mouth is that perhaps I am not capable of stringing words together to form a coherent sentence. Stereotyping, labelling, marginalisation is inherent in any community/workplace, but I believe this is more out of misunderstanding and unawareness than of racism or discrimination. Most migrants irrespective of gender face this issue, with the women perhaps getting a more raw deal given that they take their own time to settle down in a new country.

I have to say from personal experience, life is not easy for migrants in a new country, especially for women. You are not only uprooted from your comfort zone but in most cases you are placed into an entirely new culture. The dislocation - the swinging to and fro between two cultures creates a lot of havoc and chaos. Life becomes a series of compromises and adjustments, with women losing their identities in most cases. The people or social skills that had worked for these women back in their own country perhaps no longer work in the new settings. As a result these women retract into their shells, diffidence becoming a major barrier.

Another common issue that I have noticed among most migrants - I am not entirely sure if this applies to women as well, is that they stick together without assimilating into the mainstream community or into the workplace , creating small ethnic "pockets". Even though this provides a temporary solace for them wherein they are familiar and comfortable with the world that they create, in the long run, it isolates and alienates them.

There is no quick fix for these issues – it takes a lot of awareness, learning and understanding from both sides of the fence. Something else that I would advocate is empathy from both sides. Migrant women need to understand their very strangeness, foreignness can be intimidating to others – can pose issues as people are not aware of how to approach them or include them; they have to learn to integrate themselves into the workplace and at the same time not lose their identity. It is not easy as it sounds as most of us tend to seek validation through other people's eyes - it is easy to lose perspective of your own worth.

I have been extremely lucky in meeting some lovely women in this small community who have been very welcoming and extremely gracious in putting several opportunities my way in helping me integrate into the community and move towards leadership roles. I sincerely hope other migrant women in the community receive the same kind of support to bring them out of their protective shells, as these shells merely turn into hindering barriers in the long run.

I am totally confident that the results will be amazing – the richness that migrant women can bring into the society when given a chance to blossom is totally mind-blowing:) Won't you agree with me??

When matrimony ends in acrimony........

“All marriages are happy. It's the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.”

-Raymond Hull

If Life is a box of chocolates, I would like to know what marriage is. Perhaps this is the candy with the most eye-catching wrapping, HOWEVER, it comes with a disclaimer "TASTE AT YOUR PERIL". But (un)fortunately for us, most of us are not in the habit of reading the small print :) Coincidentally, this post comes just within days of my wedding anniversary. I swear it has nothing to do with the wry comment from a friend at work "you get less sentence for murder" when he heard the number of years that I had been married or the "deer in headlights" look I get to see in my poor hubby's eyes lately.

But seriously, this post was triggered by a conversation that I happened to overhear last week. I was placed in a position where I could not walk away but what I heard made me ruminate a lot about relationships and especially marriage. I gathered that the words were from someone who is in the throes of a marriage breakdown or perhaps experiencing the aftermath of it. Despite the words uttered in a casual tone, the hurt and pain that seeped through them were quite obvious even to a stranger....I was even able to discern the disbelief that embodied her words as if she was making a silent plea "how could this be happening to me"?

Sacrifices are made at the altar and sometimes it is true of the marriage altar too. Who knows what dreams are being compromised but yet when two individuals partake in a lifetime commitment, neither of them enter into it, expecting the relationship to be doomed or the bonds to break. But eventually as invasive weeds creep into an untended garden, some of these alliances come apart at the seams. What starts as mere annoyance or mild irritation mutates overnight into a sundering breach of relations and very soon there is a wide chasm that leaves the couple adrift in the matrimonial sea of differences. When I see this matrimonial rupture, instead of the much anticipated rapture that the couple must have dreamt of at the altar, it definitely makes you ponder of the brevity or perhaps the fragility of relationships.

For those blessed enough to stand within the sheltered confines of blissful matrimony or harmonious relationships, it is not easy to comprehend the vitriol and bitterness that the estranged partners spew at one another or the traumatic, acrimonious divorces that they undergo(or get subjected to). It only gets messier where kids are involved, especially when one of the parents starts treating them as mere transferable assets or at times as financial liabilities given that the relationship has soured beyond repair with the ex-spouse/mate. There is no more room for the shared past, as one friend puts it rather bluntly, no nostalgia for the spectral ghosts from the past as the people in the relationship have outgrown their need for each other.

Perhaps there is some comfort when the couple mutually separate despite the bitterness of the situation; however there are cases when the separation is forced upon one of the partners and in addition to the shock and grief one experiences at the split, the person is also subjected to the growing apathy from the other end. I am sure Dr. Kotarac would have been happier with her name in the papers for anything other than being found very dead and decomposing in her "on again, off again" lover's chimney. How can people put their ex-partners/spouses in such demeaning and mortifyingly (literally in this case) humiliating situations? It makes you seriously wonder how do they get to a stage where one no longer awards the other the commonplace courtesy that one bestows on a stranger.

This is what my gripe is about - how do people easily forget the memories they have shared, how do they let such animosity and hatred blind their eyes, calcify their heart and turn against each other? I am told that years of anger, resentment, hurting, disappointment and such negative feelings can chip away the foundation rock of a relationship and then there is nothing left to anchor the unmoored subjects who end up as human flotsum in the sea of humanity.

Well, I have spoken of the ones who vent their anger one way or the other and break free of their yoke when the marriage sours - however I have seen cultures where partners put up with their incompatible spouses and live their life either in denial or in total acceptance of their situation for the sake of their kids and perhaps the society as well. It is sad to see such lives drifting by - however the stoicism that they portray as they endure their roller-coaster ride is truly admirable.

I am definitely not the person to talk of successful relationships but I have been blessed with people around me who have the grace and fortitude to accept me as the person I am. But yet this post is a harsh reminder of what might go wrong in a relationship if it is not nurtured properly.

Dedicated to my husband - the only constant in a life full of variables :)