When I lived in India, I shared a house with a man studying to be a Hindu priest, an American ultra-marathoner, an Argentine botanist, a mathematics professor from New York and her five year old daughter. Most of us ate our meals at our teacher’s house, which was also where our yoga studio was, a ten minute walk away or twenty, depending on how tired we were from practice.
Our schedule was full and tight, including 3-3 1/2 hours of yoga asana (physical postures), 2 hours of pranayama (intense breathing exercises), 1 1/2 hours of mantra (chanting) and 2-3 hours of satsang (studying of ancient yogic texts and philosophy). The snippets of free time were full of tasks like hand-washing the impossible red clay from our clothes or pumping water to the roof, then the water heater to take a shower. This was all day, everyday, except Sundays, when we explored.
At some point, all of the women (myself, the botonist and the mathematics professor) began taking afternoon tea. We purchased little Australian biscuits, teabags and what we hoped was genuinely pure water from a man two blocks from our house. We boiled the water for five minutes to be certain as Lakshmi (our teacher’s wife) warned us that bottling tap water to sell to foreigners was a popular enterprise. Lakshmi had lots of warnings for us. She would not have approved of our tea parties. We never discussed it, but there was a slight feeling of rebellion those afternoons. We sat on the marble floor, daring a cookie or two and burning our lips on the too-hot tea we could never wait to properly cool down.
One day the botanist, who must have been in her seventies, chuckled at our ritual, “We are like little girls playing tea!”
We giggled in response, making us even more like little girls playing grown-up life.
More than a decade later, I am living a grown-up life. I choose where the furniture goes in our house and what everybody eats. I dress my babies in outfits in the morning and change them into pyjamas at night. I decide where we go and how long we stay. It is my job to solve problems and kiss boo-boos. It is me who is asked every morning, before coffee, “What are we going to do today, Mommy?”
Though I must provide a real answer, the question persists until satisfied, I feel like saying, I’m going to play house all day. Even though this is my real life and the ordinariness of it can be quite mundane, a part of me feels just like a little girl playing mommy. I wonder if that is because I don’t have the certitude I exude to my children? I doubt my choices and know I don’t always have the answers I assert so assuredly to my them. Or could it be that the little girl inside me is so excited to have such a realistic playhouse at last? Or is it that what I call the little girl in me is really just the same me that was always and will always be there: my entire identity rooted early in life?
What are we going to do today, Mommy?
We are going to play all day, my darlings, all day long.
And tomorrow too.
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