JC in India
So to know me is to know that I dream of going to India. Previous plans have been thwarted by another dream and that was to become a mother (check). But India remains for me as tops on my bucket list and now it is just a matter of when. So I was thrilled when students from Tulane and friends of Tatjana’s and now mine came over before they departed on their six-month trip to India. There is something about the young and smart that makes me want to go back and do it all over again instead of getting mired in sex, drugs and rock n roll as I was at their age.
Or maybe not, actually I was already married at their age just like they are and thinking about babies. Sex drugs and rock n roll was earlier.
When I think of India, I think of color so intense that it is almost paralyzing.
Jennifer and Curry started their blog which I am reading so I can trace their steps – I want all this first-hand information for my trip.
The thing about these two young, bright individuals is I had already missed them when they left our house. They seem wiser and larger than we do sitting here in the LaLa carrying out our daily busy-ness. That night we were here, I had a conversation about when it is best to get pregnant and start a family and I kept insisting to wait as long as possible, then in a separate conversation with my friend and doctor about this same topic, I realized I had misspoken.
After spending my forties trying to carry babies who wouldn’t stick around, I said to anyone who would listen that if I knew now what I didn’t know then I would have started trying to get pregnant when I was 20. I remember a conversation with a friend’s daughter who was living with a man in London who was a professional gambler where she was lamenting wanting a child and he was too obsessed with his career to care, and I told her to have her child nonetheless. Her mother was horrified.
It could be it was adopting Tin at 50 years of age that made me think otherwise because I had lived a full life before I became a mother, which makes it easier to give up on this or that thing I can’t do because I have a child. But my doctor friend told me differently – he said it’s a bell curve and the very truth of the matter is that a woman between the age of 22 and 30 reproduces easier, makes better babies, and has the physical stamina to raise a child or children. Ever since our conversation, I wanted to get in touch with the young couple and tell them – have that baby right now!!!!
They will be great parents! Yet, I feel confident everyone’s life develops at its own unique pace and mine was always destined to be later in my life as I’ve been forever a late bloomer and that is my destiny.
It most likely wouldn’t be theirs.