Today Indians celebrated their independence from British rule with flag raising ceremonies, yellow, green and orange balloons and flags decorating office buildings and stores, and colorful Indian attire. Indian Independence Day is a national holiday, although Dan and his colleagues had to work, unfortunately, and due to a mistake with Indian/UK sizing on my part with the big girls’ school shoes’ order from Amazon.in, the driver had to work as well. The cook and the cleaning person were also willing to work, but the cook told me I have to pay her extra, of course. (More on this saga coming soon).

As we all know, both the US and India were ruled by the British at one time. What does it say about us that our freedom was won with a violent, bloody war whereas India’s was won over a span of 190 years through a movement which involved peaceful resistance and civil disobedience? This difference in reaction to external stress explains quite a lot about the discrepancy between how native Indians deal with this place and how a stressed out, mom of 3, type A American from NYC (does living there for 18 years a New Yorker make?) copes with, learns from, and hopefully embraces all that is this beautiful, peaceful, colorful, dirty, confusing, dishonest, pushy city of Bangalore offers. But this is not the topic of tonight’s rant…uhhh, I mean post.

Instead, this post is about my independence day, which is celebrated each year in mid-August. This year it will be celebrated tomorrow, August 16, 2016 when 2 of my 3 children return to school full-time. Tomorrow could not have come soon enough for my frazzled self. As I attempt to write this post, Evie is showing her naked butt to the 8 year old neighbor, Masan is standing next to me naked and dripping wet asking me to open her dresser drawer which is stuck, and the 8 year old boy is screaming at all the nudity. At least today he is seeing my kids naked rather than me when Masan brings him into my bathroom while I am showering to ask me if they can play Mine Craft. Deep breaths.

Masan just said to me, “Mom, I don’t want you to tuck me in because you are just going to yell at me.” Ouch. Breaks my heart. But yeah, she is probably right. The last day and night of summer vacation definitely wasn’t the calm, fun mom and daughters sweet summer goodbye that I had envisioned. Fortunately, we ended on a high with Masan reading George and Martha to Evie and I while I french braided wet hair for tomorrow’s big day. However, this was after several bouts of my screaming at the kids precipitated by their incessant fighting that sent the cook to the other room. Oops.

It would have been a much different day without a trip to Phoenix Mall for school shoes. Unlike in the US, the mall didn’t have a billion high end stores selling good quality leather school shoes. The pickings were pretty slim with mostly summer inventory of knock-off US and European brand shoes in faux leather, canvas or rubber. The first store we hit up didn’t have any school shoes (black shoes) for kids in the girls’ sizes, although the sales people seemed reluctant to tell me this so they brought be a toddler size and an adult size to see if one would possibly work. Nope. The next store brought us more luck. Although it took about 25 minutes for the 5 sales people helping us to find them in the back storeroom, we were able to snag the very last pair of faux patent leather, diamond-studded bow mary jane’s in size 11 AND the very last pair of size 11 faux leather, sparkly black ballet flats. Mia also scored a pair of sour apple green Native shoes and tried to run out of the store at least 3 times while wearing them before they were paid for. Evie refused to try anything on without me putting the shoe on her foot myself, and the older girls were bickering over who got to own the patent leather pair, which is why the baby escaped so many times. Bad mom moment, I know, but there are so many more to come in this tale of today.

At this point it was past lunch time and the girls wanted to ride the train, drink hot chocolate, go to the play space and eat ice cream. We decided on a quick bite at California Pizza Kitchen, not for it’s gourmet food, but because it was located just a few yards (meters) from the penned in toddler play area, so that I could read the menu without kids begging to use my phone or arguing over who gets to sit where. Fortunately, Masan has a great imagination so the baby slides and ride-on toys were all props in the fantastic fantasy land that is Masan’s mind. And Evie is always up for throwing plastic balls at her baby sister to make her laugh. It took several minutes to coax them to the table once their pizza arrived, but totally worth the 10 minutes of peaceful menu reading. Once we were about 2.5 minutes into the kid-friendly junk food, juice spilling, ketchup gorging, Evie announced that she had to go number 2. Of course the restroom was located several football (cricket) fields away. I paid the bill with most of the food left on the table, strapped Mia into her stroller while she was doing that screaming arched back thing, corralled both big girls and made it to the restroom just in time.

Of course there was no toilet paper because we weren’t in the VIP restroom, which was further away and required a proof of purchase at the mall of 1000 rupees (about $15 US) or a donation of 20 rupees per person to use, I kid you not. So apparently, in the non-VIP restroom toilet paper is a luxury. But with a kid about to poo in her pants (Why do so many of my posts revolve around this subject? Freud might say that it makes perfect sense that I am pretty anal about certain things because I am anally fixated) and a baby screaming her head off I am not shy about asking the bathroom attendant for toilet paper. She helpfully propped an industrial size roll behind the toilet of a nearby stall which I then asked Evie to enter. With Evie in the stall and me at the entrance to it, a tween stands right next to me looking into the stall. I assume she needs toilet paper and offer her some. She just stares at me saying nothing, but not moving. Finally, she says she needs this washroom not toilet paper. I don’t understand what she is doing at this particular stall since we are at the last one in the restroom and there were 15 open stalls before she got to this particular one. I told her that we were about to use this stall and still she tried to push us aside. At this point my stroller with Mia in it fell backwards because she kicked the wall so hard in her fight to free herself that she tumbled the whole thing (At some point in the next few minutes I could lose this post because the electricity keeps going between every 5-7 minutes, and I have no idea if it’s saving properly) and my phone won’t stop ringing. I freely admit that I lost my composure and started screaming at Evie to just go to the potty! What I really wanted to do was scream at this tween to find another damn stall and move out of mind! However, I can’t bring myself to scream at her so I scream near her, at Evie. This is not the first time my kids have taken the brunt of my frustration with other people, unfortunately. The tween finally moved.

Last night on Tango I was telling my sister about a recent excursion to a local hospital to get school forms for the girls, and because it was so trying an experience (hopefully the next post will touch on this particular visit) she asked me if I am constantly breaking down and crying because of the daily challenges of living here. I guess I could be, but I’m not. This city is great, and I love it here. And what helps is that I try to think of things as interesting anecdotes, and once I have vented to my poor husband I am usually able to somewhat calmly handle whatever craziness arises. But not today. As my dear friend Peggy who is no longer with us (I miss you, Peggy, you were very wise), some days we just don’t have any coping strategies. Amen and Amen. And today was one of them for me.

Next stop was the Mac cosmetics shop because I just needed a second of familiar (California Pizza Kitchen didn’t cut it). Shopping for make-up in a store the size of the driver’s Toyota Inova is not a good idea with 3 kids, needless to say, so I sent them for ice cream right outside of the store. As I waited patiently in line to pay, a woman a bit younger than I am wearing Western attire handed her purchases to the cashier just as I was about to take my place at the register. Seriously? Mia was screaming because she wanted ice cream too, and Masan kept running back and forth to tell me the play-by-play of Evie’s mischief. I could have silently waited and hoped that no one else cut the line ahead of me, but as my sister says, NYC has made me bold and prepared me for these type of situations (at ABC Carpet & Home I once told that actress from Weeds that I was next in line when her personal assistant tried to cut in front of me. I made him wait with his armfuls of cashmere scarves while I bought my $6 Christmas ornament), so I told the cashier that I was next in line and that those kids screaming were mine and that if he wanted them to stop he needed to let me pay. He rang me up. Not a glance in my direction from the other woman or any sort of emotional reaction. Where I was seething at her audacity, she seemed to just shrug it off as being all fair in love and shopping in India.

Outward signs of agitation or stress are rarely seen on the faces of locals in a city where the traffic is a horror show, there is very little breathing space or clean air to breathe in the first place, lakes burn fire as a result of raw sewage, work weeks are usually 6 days, invasive stimuli compete for one’s attention at all times, and there is a huge disparity between the haves and have nots. It’s like natives just breathe in and out and let it all flow past. Today I am just too burned out to even consider trying to do that, but I hope that tomorrow I can have the energy to adopt that meaningful outlook.

Now that the girls have all been tucked in with dreams of Mine Craft in their sweet, french braided heads, and the whining, begging, and fighting has stopped for the day, I can appreciate how much I am going to miss them once they are in school all day, even if right now I am still basking in the relief that tomorrow I find a bit of freedom.

Girls, I love you so much, but even Mom needs a second to breathe.

 

 

 

It’s a sunny 81 degrees in lovely Bangalore this early afternoon. In fact, it’s pretty much 81 degrees every day with an occasional evening rain storm lest we forget its Monsoon season. The girls are downstairs watching the making of Katy Perry’s ‘Roar,’ which isn’t as annoying this far into the summer as it could be since they are doing it for a purpose: they need to memorize all of the words, along with ‘Ebony & Ivory’ and ‘We Are the World’ for their choir class.

In yesterday’s Bollywood/Zumba class at the Adarsh Palm Retreat (APR) clubhouse a fellow student and French expat invited me to bring my kids to a choir class she teaches in her villa on Wednesday afternoons. In the vein of trying to say yes to as many new things as possible in my new city, and dragging the kids along in this endeavor, I told her we would be there.

The whole choir scenario ended up playing out like a slightly disturbing dream sequence after a night of spicy food and tequila. The villa which the class was held in looks exactly the same as ours does, just in another lane of the neighborhood. (Apparently there are 5 of these identical, non-Indianesque homes in the neighborhood). It was like walking into our own home and finding that someone had stolen all the simple grey furniture and pink toys and replaced them with musical instruments, superhero paraphernalia, video games, plants, and toy guns.

When the 3 girls, our 8 year old neighbor, and I entered the villa we were greeted by the teacher, 5 girls in the choir between the ages of 4 and 11 sitting quietly and politely on the leather sofas in the living room, my Korean friend sitting on the floor with her 2 year old on her lap, and the French expat’s 8 year old son running around the living room aiming his replica bazooka at us. Maybe it wasn’t actually as large as a bazooka, but it was definitely machine gun size, and equally as daunting when while singing ‘We Are the World’ a boy you have never met before is looking through his gun’s scope to take aim at your kids from various vantage points throughout the villa. What was most unsettling to me was that the teacher, his mom, didn’t address the gun aiming and occasional shooting AT ALL. Being our first class I had no idea what the boy’s role was. Was he also a member of the choir? Clearly he didn’t seem to want all of these kids in his home and was showing his mom and the rest of us instead of saying something. And like him, instead of voicing my concern, I took my cues for how to handle this situation from the others in the room who had been taking the choir class for several weeks. Most of the kids were cringing away from the gun while attempting to focus on the music and ignore the shooting, so I did too. I reasoned that the boy was probably friends with the kids in the choir and so wasn’t actually scaring them, and that he would eventually put his gun down and join in the singing, or that his mom would ask him to stop when it was time.

When it was clear that none of my assumptions were accurate, my Korean friend whispered, “don’t shoot, don’t shoot” to the boy while his mother’s attention was diverted, so as not to offend. Instead of putting the gun down, he walked upstairs, and slowly took aim directly at her from the balcony. The rest of us were singing, “Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony” and “We all are a part of God’s great big family, And the truth, you know, Love is all we need” while the boy was shooting foam balls and colorful bullets at us.

The situation finally came to a head with Masan, God bless her. She grabbed the bullet that the boy shot at one of the kids, and refused to give it back to him. She said, “Why are you shooting at us?” It was the question that had been on everyone’s minds, yet no one said anything. Once Masan spoke up, I was able to say that I thought the shooting was scaring some of the younger kids. The mom finally said something to the boy in French, who reluctantly put his gun away. He traded it in for a plastic sword. Masan and our 8 year old neighbor taunted the boy by saying that the toy sword wouldn’t hurt them. Well, he tried it out on Masan’s wrist, and of course it did hurt. She started screaming and crying, and wanted to leave. Of course she did, poor gal. She reluctantly agreed to stay when I begged her to not disrupt the class by leaving early. Heaven forbid we offend anyone with our desire to leave or not be shot at, toy gun or not.

(For whatever reason, even though Masan says she is done with choir, Evie wants to go back, however, instead of singing any of the songs, she ran around the room with Mia the entire class).