Babu Ahtah (Don't Wake Daddy!)

The first time my mom visited me in the U.S. and saw a board game called Don't Wake Daddy at the store, she squealed in disbelieving delight. Her dad who worked late as a telegraph master (Telegrams, remember them? When people counted words before Twitter?) slept late on the weekends. And if she or her four other equally rowdy siblings woke their father, there were threats and thrashings.

Inevitably almost, their reality spawned a game they liked to call Babu Ahtah (the Dad game), which consisted of one of them playing the dad and the others trying to play without waking him, but ended with the "dad" waking up and beating them all up to loud, playacting yelps.

And unfailingly (and somewhat hilariously) meta is the way my mom says that most of these games were so noisy that their dad--their real dad--would wake up to thrash them. Really thrash them.

Li'l A loves to hear that story, now that he's not so freaked out by that little detail about kids getting beaten as he used to be when he first heard it. And I think about my mom and her sibs all of whom in that particular time and and in that particular milieu expected to get beaten for bad behavior. And I choke on the extra love that comes from thinking of my amma as a vulnerable child and knowing how, when she became a young mom, that sad cycle of abuse was broken. 

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Wake up call

A long time ago, I had a dream.

Li'l A is a toddler crawling through one of those giant mall play tubes. He doesn't walk yet, and he seems to be having a good time. I used to call him "Aachu" back then--a mispronunciation of his name and also a mispronunciation of the Telugu word for love "Aasa." Kind of like how "Holla" is neither "holler" nor "hola"--but actively alludes to both. But, I digress.

It starts to storm, getting both late and dark at the same time; I start to call Aachu, but he doesn't show and I'm immediately scared and frantic. Then in that weird third-person narrativity of dreams, I can see him inside the tube and realize that he's crawling away from the sound of my voice as fast as he can. And not merely to be naughty or prolong playtime but because my voice terrifies him. This was at a time when his GERD-y refusals to eat and my Indian mom instincts to overfeed as much as/whenever possible were at the point of worst conflict.

I cannot begin to describe how sad and disappointing it was to see his fear. And I cannot begin to quantify how much I backed away from my pig-headedness about eating right away.

I think I remembered my dream because I heard Amy Chua (the infamous tiger mom) on the radio this morning and she described how her daughter would yell that she hated her. I'll admit to being the mom who expects all of Li'l A's grades to be As, to asking what happened to the missing two points on a quiz that garnered 98/100.

But I wouldn't be able to deal with my kids not loving me.

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Dressing in the Dark

One day--like most days--I literally got dressed in the dark; pulling on a pair of black tights that were more like disco tights in their shine value. Yi! Their inappropriateness for standing in front of a class of undergraduates!

The kids overheard me grumbling about it to my MIL and now they love to cock their heads at an assessing angle and ask me if I got dressed in the dark when I come downstairs. The little critics.

But after nearly ten years in this country, I just discovered trouser socks, and my cute shoes are back in winter rotation. Yay! And now I can add that to my list of immigrant discoveries about dressing appropriately for the weather.

Stockings! Yay! Saying no to summer dresses when it's bright and sunny out (but still only about 35 degrees)! Boo! Finding out that I'd need to pick "tan" over "nude" leggings! Yay! Finding out tights snag and run. Boo! Keeping a black Sharpie in my desk drawer to deal with that crisis! Yay!

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Drama Mama

Despite being the world's most terrible actress, I like to act sometimes.

Big A and Li'l A roll their eyes, my students delight in agreeing with me when I tell them my acting sucks. But Baby A--ah--she can't get enough.

My encore repertoire includes being the Jack in the box who surprises Buddy the Elf (played by Baby A) in the movie Elf, and the Woody who needs rescuing by Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story 2. Baby A goes climb, climb, climb and then yells "To himbee and beyond!" and rescues me.

Although much of the gender neutrality above may change. While I made dinner yesterday, she told me: "Now I'm Woody, Mama. He's a cowboy." As the words left her mouth, I could almost see her taste and parse that word. The expected amendment was delivered cheerily: "I'll be Jessie--she's a cowGIRL!"

:'<

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Gone!

The public radio station, literally down the street, is having an fundraising auction and I wanted to donate

(a) a five-course Indian meal cooked (by me)

and

(b) a poem written (by me) on any thing or person the successful bidder specified.

The station manager suggested that I assign a monetary value that would make it easier for them to advertise the "goods."

The Indian meal was fairly simple to calculate--materials plus time compared to the going rate at a restaurant. I asked Big A for help with figuring out how much the poem would "cost." He thinks the going rate per poem is about a nickel and sometimes a glass of wine and/or applause.

He's probably right.

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Happy Year of the Rabbit! (Do rabbits sleep a lot?)

Dinner out at the chinese restaurant we usually go to with the grandparents. This time it is a big bunch of neighbors and friends, and it is to celebrate the Year of the Rabbit. My favorite six-year-old tells the server, Gung Hay Fat Choy! He tells her that he's from Dayton, OH. Oh, I am torn.

Because we're cool and stuff and we want to go see more live music and stuff, we'd decided to go check out a band we'd heard about and stuff.

So we dropped off the kids at their grandparents and stuff.

Bored yet? Might as well be. We got home and decided to take a "nap." And didn't wake up until hours after the band went home.

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Martian sends

My mind clutches a phrase, rubbing it raw in its sweaty fist. I'm awake now and realize that this nugget-- "ColdMartin Locksheen"--is merely an unappetizing and useless amalgam of NPR, Pandora, and Jezebel.com.

Odd the way this mind grabs the surprise appearance of Coldplay, a.k.a. Chris Martin, on the Phoenix station on Pandora, news of tech giant Lockheed Martin's U.S. Army contract, and Charlie (son of Martin) Sheen(anigans) to produce some Palin-esque puffery.

Although this is the closest I've come to deciphering how a poem happens--starting out with a phrase that surely expands through all the hours of rote existence.

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