Dan is still in Bangalore, but returns on Saturday. Each day he calls at 5 am his time, 7 pm our time to say goodnight to Mia and Evie and to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ to Masan for 15 minutes for her nightly reading log. Even though he is physically and mentally exhausted, he has never missed a reading. While in Bangalore, he gets up very early each morning to life manage before he goes into the office where he works until 8 pm. Contrary to what his first phone calls lead me to believe, he has been able to get a ton of things accomplished: He opened a bank account (almost $8,000 is required to open one), took care of his visa stuff, purchased mattresses for the house, bought white bedding, plates, bowls and mugs, and turned on the water, electricity, and gas for the villa.

Today at 10 pm Bangalore time, noon our time, Dan called me from the hotel. He told me the following anecdote, which I think sums up my dedicated, selfless husband and his experiences in Bangalore thus far: He took an Uber from his office to a FabIndia (home goods) store, which was an hour’s drive, so to translate, that’s equivalent to a half mile away since the traffic really is that horrendous, to pick up some remaining mugs that the store hadn’t had in stock when he went the day before. On the way there his phone ran out of juice. Once he got to the store, the Uber driver told him that he couldn’t take him back to the hotel because it was too far. So now Dan is stuck an hour way from where he needs to be without a phone or a way to get back. And he begins to feel a bit of panic. So he bribes the driver, “I will give you a thousand rupees to take me back.” “No problem, Sir.” 1,000 rupees is a bit less than $15, but an exorbitant amount to pay for a ride, even an hour away.

Dan makes it safely back to the hotel and the front desk person takes one look at him and walks around the desk to give him a hug, and tells him that he looks exhausted and should get some rest. The porter comes to help him with his box of mugs and proceeds to drop it. Several mugs crack as the box hits the marble floor, but Dan tells the guy that it’s no problem.

Husband Dan is in Bangalore for 10 days. While he misses his girls, he seems to be adjusting really well. I hope he doesn’t mind, but I would like to share some of the things I have heard from him over the phone since he arrived in Bengaluru on Saturday. This is his second trip to the city where his goals are to start working and to get the villa set up for when we arrive in 4 weeks.

First phone call from Bengaluru to Brooklyn:

“It’s 4am here and I am walking around. The weather is great, and it’s really calm. There are monkeys climbing in the trees. Oh wow, that guy just dropped his pants and is going to the bathroom on the side of the road.”

Frantic phone call to me 6:00 am my time on Sunday:

“There are so many people in this city!” and “I have been trying to get basic stuff for the house for 2 entire days and have literally not gotten one thing yet. They don’t have anything plain in this country! I cannot find plain white dishes or plain sheets and there are salespeople following me all over the store. They are following me right now.” Dan, they are there to help. Ask them for help. “I ask them for plain white sheets and they instead show me 50 different kinds of purple with Mickey Mouse.”

Dan on starting work, which he is really enjoying:

“Working here is pretty much the same as working in my office in NYC, expect that every 5 minutes one of the construction workers uses the wall outside of my window as a place to urinate.”

Other conversations:

“Today I went to pick up the key for the villa which I thought would take the usual 5 minutes. It took 4 hours. Guess how many people were there? I took a picture! There were 20 people—the owner, the relocation coordinator, the broker, the caretaker of the house, some other people—I don’t know who they were—the cleaning person and her mother. We went through and recorded every scratch on every surface, every mark on the walls. Afterwards the broker offered me a ride to my office. When I went outside to look for the car, there was a moped instead. He wanted me to ride on the back.”

“I’m going to be sick.” Do you have any pepto or antibiotics on you? “No, I’m meeting someone for dinner, and there’s nothing around here. I need to go back to the hotel, but it’s so far. I thought it would be helpful to talk on the phone, but it’s making it worse—I need to go. Love you, bye!”

Okay, good luck, Dan!

 

 

Lately I have been thinking this blog should be called Brooklyn Mama’s Pre-Move to Bangalore Angst. As is disappointingly clear by this point to anyone that came to check out this blog for information about Bangalore or for practical advice about living in Bangalore as an expat mom, this blog is instead free therapy for me. (Move, already, dammit!). I could be moving to Idaho and the blog would be essentially the same. But I do promise that there will be more India specific content in the coming weeks as the plane tickets have been bought and we fly out June 10th at 3:00pm. There will be lots of posts about snakes and saris because what else am I going to do when I have a driver, housekeeper, and cook (ummm, yes, it’s true, but don’t hate me yet. I will process and express my guilt and white privilege in posts to come)? But right now, with the move 4 short (or long, depending on the day) weeks away, I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship. Not as flashy as venomous snakes, I know.

I posted this to fb not too long ago, but I have been reading this book lately called ‘A Little Life: A Novel,’ by H. Yanagihara. As one main character so eloquently describes to a currently friendless tween, “…the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are-not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving-and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad-or good-it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

In life what I have found is that what friendship is based on changes dramatically depending on life stage. In high school and college it’s based on mutually agreeable bands, clothes, interests, art, etc. And if there’s a bit more, and they show you that you can trust them to carefully hold your vulnerabilities without dropping them, the ones that you can even bring yourself to share (you’re hesitant because emotional pain hasn’t been handled well growing up, and you are afraid of burdening anyone or having your pain brushed aside), and this thing you have going isn’t just about a ride to the Black Cat, this can become a long and cherished friendship, one that started with, “I like your skirt” on a Catholic school dress down day, involved many trips to thrift stores to buy way-too-short, discarded Brownie uniforms and purple embroidered sweaters, AKA “dead people clothes” per your mother, and evolved into a 24 year friendship. And if the friendship is just based on mutual interests, and one person moves away, the friendship may not travel well. And it’s sad, but it’s okay.

When I first moved to NYC in the late summer of 1998, I didn’t know anyone. I left friends, family, and an on and off-again boyfriend in VA for grad school. I remember being so excited to be in NYC, the noisy Amsterdam Avenue right outside my dorm window. But it was so incredibly hard for me to make friends. I was so homesick and lonely that I was literally sick to my stomach and couldn’t eat. So that I didn’t starve, my mom wisely suggested eating peanut butter out of the jar to get calories, which I lived on. I wasn’t able to connect with my quiet, Korean PhD Music Education suite-mates or the commuter students in my Counseling Psychology program who ran out right after classes to get back to their real lives. I had one really good friend. She was from CA, so like me, out of state, and living on campus. Having her around helped me survive that first year of grad school. But her program was only one year, and mine was 2, and once her program was over and she left, I was again so incredibly lonely. I hung out with fellow dorm dwellers who I didn’t really have anything in common with or connect with, just because I didn’t want to be alone. It was frankly miserable. My friendships were based on proximity and my neediness.

But I stuck it out. For whatever reason, as hard as it was, I knew that I was supposed to live in NYC. And it took time, but I made friends. And now that I’m a mom, I’m a friend-making fiend. Having kids makes it so much easier for me to start a conversation with someone new, it gives us an easy commonality. And I can finally say that I have really great friends. Whom I love, although I may not be as demonstrative as I could be with them for fear of rejection, but hopefully they know how I feel. Each one of them meets a different need, and I hope in turn that I meet some need of theirs. I have spontaneous, ‘up for anything’ friends who are always good for a last minute playground meet-up who I have learned to say, “for sure” way too many times from, I have friends to have incredible and festive joint birthday parties with, I have friends with whom I can quietly process feelings and emotions with, I have friends who bring me soup when my kids are sick, I have friends who help me think about things in a practical and logical manner when I start my emotional spiral, I have friends who educate me about working out and who are there for every kids’ birthday party and awkward Thanksgiving dinner, I have movie friends and drink friends, and everything in-between friends. Each of these beautiful people is so much better, kinder and more generous than I am. They possess traits that I hope to one day have, but probably won’t. They teach me about inhibition, organization, party planning, spontaneity, moving past emotional childhood baggage, dedication to your craft, patience in parenthood, savoring the small moment, making the mundane feel special, among millions and trillions of other lessons. And now we are 4 weeks away from testing the friendships with distance. If they are based on more than having kids and being neighbors, then they will travel with us to Bangalore, and if they are not, then it’s okay. And I am so grateful.

Please note that if you are reading this you are obviously a friend since no one else would indulge me, and if you are not in the photos above it is not because I don’t love you, it’s for lack of an easily accessible photo of you. XO

 

 

 

 

I have been a planner for the last 20 or so years out of anxiety and life management necessity, although I have always appreciated a good, organic, ‘go with it’, ‘let’s see what happens,’ ‘live in the moment’ kinda perspective. My appreciation for both ways of being is probably why I plan things with friends and then cancel at the last moment. On Wednesday it seems like drinks on Friday evening with friends is an amazingly fun idea, but now that it’s Friday and I have barely gotten through the week with my sanity intact, getting out of my sweatpants, putting on make up, brushing my hair to get together with adults to have adult conversations and drink wine seems like a mountain too high to climb. Or we have our weekly playgroup meet up after school at Jenni’s house, but Masan’s friend from school drops by, so we bail on playgroup instead of kicking out the drop-in friend. This last minute change of plans probably also stems from my family of origin’s way of doing things. Gram often tried to get out of hosting us for visit at the last moment to assuage her anxiety about having guests (although she was an amazing hostess). My mom would more often than not question or change plans at the last moment depending on what new information came up or how her mood struck her. Visits were sometimes cancelled or changed because of rain or cold weather. So despite my knowledge of all this, it’s a pattern that I often repeat, although I hate that I do it.

I married a fantastic, loving, kind man who, although very successful at work and in life, is not a planner. And this poor, logic-driven decision-making guy has to live with this sometimes flakey, often Type A planner who makes decisions based on how to ward off anxiety. Dan is a put-out-fires kind of guy. I don’t think he realizes that at least some of those fires are preventable with a smidgeon of planning, but regardless, his strategy works for him. However, his way often involves meltdowns (his, mine and sometimes the children’s) and copious amounts of the f-word when time has run out and what is now front and center hasn’t gotten done. Because we are married, we often have to co-mange projects—like the daily lives of our kids or how to get ready for an overseas move. Our opposite strategies for handling life—I did my high school projects the day they were assigned, and he did them in the bathroom right before class on the day they were due—often cause conflict.

For example, when I bring up one of my move checklist items, like needing to get at least 8 new suitcases for the move, to Dan and it’s not a priority for him, he doesn’t give it any attention and makes me feel as though it’s not important, and because he often knows the most logical way to do something I defer to him, and skip that checklist item believing that it’s not important. If I go ahead and take care of the checklist item myself, and he thinks I haven’t done it the way that he thinks it should have been done (like I spend too much money on the aforementioned suitcases), we usually get in an argument. So to prevent fights and promote harmony, I have tried to be very Type B about this whole move and managing the kids lives these days. I am letting him take the lead. And this strategy has worked fairly well—until now. Last week I barely worked on the move unless something came up that Dan asked me to do. Instead, I did work for clients, took yoga and cardio classes at the Y with Mia in child watch where she only screamed for mama for 10 minutes this time, and on Friday worked for 8 hours on graphics for posters for Evie’s birthday party (reliving my higher ed workshop flier-making days). And yesterday we all went to Sesame Place for the whole day with friends during which time I didn’t even think about all the stuff we still have to do for the move.

But this morning, s–t hit the fan. The baby had been up all night screaming from possible Elmo-withdrawal, but definitely a cold. All night. Dan, the saint he is, handled the baby. Then this morning when we woke up for the day at 9:15 am (the big girls had been playing their iPads for at least 3 hours in their room by this point. Masan, the one who aims to please, woke us up about 4 times to tell us they were playing their iPads so that they didn’t wake us up) Dan immediately started freaking out because he just that second realized that Masan is supposed to be in a procession at church before her CCD class. And church starts in 40 minutes. And everyone is in pi’s, and it’s a 20 minute walk to church—we can’t drive because Court Street is blocked off to traffic for some sort of street fair. Although the kitchen calendar has been hung up for the sole purpose of keeping us all on the same page when it comes to what’s going on in the life of the family, this is the first I am hearing about this procession (Dan is in charge of CCD stuff). Last week we showed up for class when class wasn’t happening because of public school spring break. We would have known this if we had had the CCD calendar, but again, Dan is in charge of CCD and he is not a planner (I do love my husband so much!). So now he is walking around in circles, panicking, upset about how Masan is going to feel about missing the procession (which is really sweet, but she is oblivious to it because he never mentioned it to her either), tearing through drawers looking for the CCD calendar so that we can find out if we have class today, and not able to process anything logically. So now I become the logical one who cleans up the mess by getting in touch with the teacher, talking to Masan, and helping Dan  manage his panic. But now that we are in a heightened state of stress, and my poor husband hasn’t gotten any REM sleep, more and more things we need to get done in the next 4 weeks come up, and it snowballs from here. He has to get to the office RIGHT THIS MINUTE to print out the visa applications he was given on Friday for our appointment on Monday morning. And there are 5 applications—one for each of us. And each one is 80 pages. And we need to inventory everything we are taking on the plane, storing in Brooklyn, and air shipping to India for our move. And we need to buy 8 suitcases and decide what may have to be sea shipped. And at this moment we realize that Masan doesn’t have her backpack to do her homework because she left it at the school playground on Friday, and I forgot to remind her because the baby had been knocked over by a kid and was bleeding from her mouth. And we just now realized that she didn’t have her backpack because I was trying to not be so controlling and let her do her homework when she decided she wanted to do it. (It’s come up that I am making her anxious by the focus I put on homework). I love my husband, but I think that it’s time Type A Sharon stepped back in.

P.S. As I write this Dan calls to tell me that the visa application coordinator never sent his visa application to him with the rest of the applications for the family. And it’s the middle of the night in India, where she is located, and he needs it today for us to print out, get notarized and taken to the consulate tomorrow morning. AHHHHHHH!