After becoming a mother I have wondered how parents give away their babies to a stranger. I am amazed by how determined they can be to accept something like this or how desperate the situation can be to take such a bold step.
Maybe my thoughts are too shallow to wrap my arms around something like this as I am an extremely possessive mom. (So much so that I did not call a day care provider who had advertised “I will be a mother for your child”. My thoughts: Hello a mother? Am I not alive and kicking?)
No situation can be judged unless you are in it, so my comments here are only a personal opinion. But still….
When I was doing my masters at a university in the US, I met a girl in the bus. She looked Indian, but when I heard her speak she had too strong an American accent, so I assumed she was an ABCD (if I may). It was her first day in school and she wanted me to show her where the library was so we walked into the campus together. When we introduced ourselves, she threw an American name at me and I was a little surprised and curious and had all these Whats and Whys in my head. She made it easy for me when she said “Are you from India, I am originally from there too, which part of India are you from?” When I said Bangalore, her eyes almost popped out and she said “That is where my birth parents are, I was adopted and got here by my parents”. And in the next few minutes described all that she knew about her birth parents, that they were construction workers, that they spoke kannada, and her original name was something else and her American parents did not remember what it was. She said that she had joined school to be able to study and earn enough to go to India and find her birth parents.
I felt really sad for her, here was a naïve girl who hardly knew anything about her birth parents and she had dreams of going to a far off place called Bangalore (all she knew is she needed a lot of money to go there), and find her parents who are construction workers. How easy can that be? What an irony that her parents probably got tempted with this offer when they thought their daughter can go to “Amrica” and be a well educated person, when the daughter’s sole reason to enter college after her high school was to make enough money to go to India to meet them.
Maybe I spoke to her on a day when she got all emotional on hearing the word Bangalore and she is fine and is like any normal person of her age. But she continues to haunt me to this day, hope she is happy where she is.
Maybe my thoughts are too shallow to wrap my arms around something like this as I am an extremely possessive mom. (So much so that I did not call a day care provider who had advertised “I will be a mother for your child”. My thoughts: Hello a mother? Am I not alive and kicking?)
No situation can be judged unless you are in it, so my comments here are only a personal opinion. But still….
When I was doing my masters at a university in the US, I met a girl in the bus. She looked Indian, but when I heard her speak she had too strong an American accent, so I assumed she was an ABCD (if I may). It was her first day in school and she wanted me to show her where the library was so we walked into the campus together. When we introduced ourselves, she threw an American name at me and I was a little surprised and curious and had all these Whats and Whys in my head. She made it easy for me when she said “Are you from India, I am originally from there too, which part of India are you from?” When I said Bangalore, her eyes almost popped out and she said “That is where my birth parents are, I was adopted and got here by my parents”. And in the next few minutes described all that she knew about her birth parents, that they were construction workers, that they spoke kannada, and her original name was something else and her American parents did not remember what it was. She said that she had joined school to be able to study and earn enough to go to India and find her birth parents.
I felt really sad for her, here was a naïve girl who hardly knew anything about her birth parents and she had dreams of going to a far off place called Bangalore (all she knew is she needed a lot of money to go there), and find her parents who are construction workers. How easy can that be? What an irony that her parents probably got tempted with this offer when they thought their daughter can go to “Amrica” and be a well educated person, when the daughter’s sole reason to enter college after her high school was to make enough money to go to India to meet them.
Maybe I spoke to her on a day when she got all emotional on hearing the word Bangalore and she is fine and is like any normal person of her age. But she continues to haunt me to this day, hope she is happy where she is.
16 comments:
What an irony! Made me misty-eyed.
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