The Decision to Come Home

August 8, 2011

I’m still jet-lagged and consequently did not put myself to bed last night until 5 am.В  The dogs woke me up a few hours later.I let them lay on the bed with me but they couldn’t settle.В  So I’m pretty tired right now, plus slightly loopy due to the anti-histamine I just took.В В  I haven’t mentioned that the stress of coming back, or something I ate, or the fabric in my new kurta, or all of the above, gave me a lovely and acute case of hives, which itched like mad on the long flights home.В  Brendan had stomach problems in Nepal, but I had skin problems.В  Maddening mosquito bites or bedbug bites or some other noxious insect attack.В В  And while Brendan is happily scarfing up food as fast as he can, I’m still trying not to scratch the tiny red wheals that have appeared all over my legs and arms.В  I should be sleeping, or taking a cold bath, but I have a lot to recount and want to do so before I forget too much.

The Decision to Leave:

From the point of view of my friends and colleagues in Nepal, I made the decision to return to the States with Brendan rather abruptly.В  In fact I had been deliberating for many days.В  It was a hard decision to make.В  It was hard to leave the women’s center and much, much harder to leave Anura, Bipin, Gaurima, Krishala, and Nirmala.В В  But I had very strong reasons to go.The most significant reason for returning with Brendan is that we had started out together on a two-month odyssey and needed to come back together for the odyssey to complete.В  When I first got to Nepal I was smarting from the break-up.В  I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to face the pain directly, and I also saw how much work there was to do.В  I didn’t see how things were with Brendan, in his mind and heart, didn’t recognize how important my presence was for him.В  This blindness amazes me in retrospect.В  He doesn’t like me talking about him in public, and that is why I haven’t revealed much about how I have come to see in him.В  He’s a very strong, intelligent, and complicated young man.В  He doesn’t get much attention from his father but never speaks an ill word about him.

I have to find a different way to tell the story.

Brendan developed a great deal of self-confidence and maturity during out time in Nepal, but he is also in a place in which the support and loving presence of his parents is vital.В В  I had responsibilities in Nepal, but my responsibilities to my son vastly outweighed them.В  He was visibly relieved when I announced that I would go back with him, and cheerful, thankful, and great company on the way home.В  Going back with him was good for me, too.В  Here is what I wrote in my journal on 26 July, while I was still pondering what to do.

26 July 2011

Am still feeling restless, dreading the time when Brendan will return, wondering how he will do by himself in Pittsburgh, and worrying that he will not do very well.В  I miss him.В  He’s here, but in another house, and I miss him.

The entry in my journal for the next day makes it sound as though I were fleeing the tension at Kalidas’s house:

27 July

I have decided, almost, to go home with Brendan.В  I had hoped to stay longer, but as soon as I moved into Kalidas’s unhappy house, I realized that I had had it with Nepal.В  I liked Kalidas, in spite of his domineering ways.В  He looked me straight in the eyes, which Sugandha rarely did.В В  And he shows the pain of their terrible loss.В  Not five months ago, they lost their 19 year-old daughter to cancer.В  He told me directly that the reason he wanted me to live with them was to keep his wife company and to teach her English.В  I felt sorry for them, but I also thought they expected too much from me.В  I needed a place where I could relax and recover from the long, hot days.В  Communal dinners with the other volunteers living at Sugandha’s house provided a wonderful respite.В  There was much laughter, usually because Brendan was entertaining everyone with silly impersonations of redneck, gun-toting Americans trying to speak Nepali or interacting with foreigners of any kind.В  He has a gift for jokesthey just tumble out of his mouth.В The Brits found him hilarious and insisted that he should be on TV.В В  At Kalidas’s house, I was the entertainment and the teacher at once.В  Dinner was an exhausting ordeal of answering personal questions or dodging obvious traps such as the following:

Kalidas

Me: Yes, we live to work, while you work to live.

Kalidas Me Kalidas

Me:В  I really couldn’t say.I’m sorry, I just can’t seem to decide.

Kalidas

And here he would jump into another long lecture about the superiority of Nepal.В  After two days in his house, he had convinced himself that I was going to see the light, marry a proper Nepali man, and settle there, in Pepsi-Cola, in the lap of luxury to the end of my days.В В  It was awkward.В  I had to get out of there, and did.В  After a week at this house I rode my bike to Boudha.В  The ride home that night was hilarious and harrowing.I will write about it in a separate post.

My need to come back with my son had much to do with what I felt obligated to do for him, help his get a good, strong start to his sophomore year in college, often the most challenging year.В  It would have been hard on him to come back to Pittsburgh and move into his room while Tim was still living in the house, and then to go down to college alone, on the bus or the train.В В  But I also needed to be with him, to spend more time with him.В  He is good company, as I said before.В  He comforts me.В  Perhaps because I spent so many years longing for him, the terrible years when he lived in his father’s house and I could hardly afford to visit him, perhaps that is why I have such a powerful desire to be geographically close to him.

The next entry in my journal for July 27 explains my decision to come home a bit more:

I’m at Boudha, in a bad mood.В  I got very muddy riding my bike here on the bumpy, rocky and pot-h*led roads.В  I find myself resenting the white tourists who dress so garishly and who appear so helpless.В  Don’t I look just like them?В  I think not.I hope I’m more local-looking, certainly not as idiotic as these ugly Brits and Australians and Americans and Chinese.В  I resent the Chinese the most since it was their government that decimated the Tibetan culture that holds this stupa sacred.В  Why do they even care to see it?В  They hate the Dalai Lama, kidnapped and probably killed the Panchen Lama, and ply the Nepali government with so much money that it persecutes the Tibetans.В  Tibetans in Nepal may display the picture of the Dalai Lama, but not in public processions.

Why am I in such a foul mood?В  Because I know I’m going back to face the ruin of my relationship with Tim.

The 5^th Chapter of the Dhammapada:

If you cannot find a companion who is better than or like yourself

You should make your way, steadily alone.

In the childish there is no companionship.

I’m in a restaurant called Paradise overlooking the stupa, drinking pretty bad wine.В  Behind me is a father with three younger persons, some of whom must be his grown children.

I miss Brendan.В  I wish he were here with me.В  He would probably not be willing to sit here as long as I want to.В  He would not write in his journal while I write in mine.В  He is not as literatealthough he is certainly more talented verbally than I am.

Dhammapada open on my table, a gla*s of wine next to it.В  I don’t want to leave the children.Yet it is imperative to go back with Brendan.It’s quite simple: I want to spend more time with him.В  I was so starved for him during the years that he lived with his father.В  Some deep wound in me is still unhealed, some mother-need still needing.В  Something seems to be missing.

Yet here is the Buddha himself magnificently before me, strong, rounded, ample, powerful.В  They say that this place, more than any other place in all the world, is where wishes are heard and answered.

I have been watching a man doing his puja, his prostrations, for over an hour.В  He is wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and he is bald.В  He has wrapped his prayer beads around his wrists.В  He stands, raises his beads with both hands to the top of his head, then to his third eye, and then to his chest.В  He kneels, hands sliding up the wooden prayer board, lays himself out and pushes himself back up, swings his hands above his head, touches his third eye, his chest, and down to the board.В  His hands slide up to support his body in plank, and then brace to push him back up again.В  He has repeated this movement twenty or thirty times while I have been describing it.В  He looks older, maybe 60.A woman in a pink kurta sits indolently on the board next to him, where a dog is sleeping in the shade.

I love the children at the orphanage, especially Anura.

I wish I could bring her home with me.В  Here she is a Dalit destined to marry another Dalit, some idiotic Nepali man with stupid ideas about women’s nature.В  There she could do anything, become the scientist she longs to be.В  I hate to leave her.

But I have a son, 20, not yet fully grown, who I need to take care of.Or rather I need to take care of myself by being a good mother to him.В  The mother in me needs to spend time with him.В  Sometimes I regard the mother-aspect of myself as a separate, stunted, crippled, neglected entity.В  She is thirsty to drink the waters of mothering, of nurturing.В  Her mother died when she was carrying this child, this child she got pregnant with in a hurry as soon as she found out that her mother had cancer.В  The child was her last best gift for her mother.

I thought the only way I could truly appreciate and connect to my mother was by sharing the experience of mothering with her.В But I lost my mother as I became a mother В That loss hurt as much as the loss, only temporary, of my child during those crucial years in which I could only dream of bathing, reading to, and cuddling him.

I never abandoned him.В I had to take the job that I had worked so hard to get.В I moved to St.Louis first, and then found another job, closer to him, at the University of Pittsburgh.В I stayed in touch with him as best I could., В I visited, I came back again and again and again even though the greeting was gruff and the time short.В  I would drive four or five hours down to see him for 30 minutes.В  After dropping him off at his father’s house I would often have to pull to the side of the road to weep.

The lady in the pink kurta has gone away.В  The old man in the Hawaiian shirt remains.

What are my wishes:

1.В  I wish to heal.В  Heal the mother in me who feels wounded.

2.I wish for true companionship.

3.I wish that my son will find his way, his strength, his chai, his chi, his life-force, and know his inner beauty.

The first wish is nearly granted.В  I am a good mother if hardly conventional.В  I have done my best.В  This wish is the one I cam to Nepal to ask, to plead.В  It requires a sacrifice.В  I would like to stay here to explore further sides of myself in the world, accomplish something that feels like an accomplishment.В  But it is time to return.В  The journey must be completed for the wish to come true.This is what the spirit of the place, Boudha, tells me.В  It called to me and I came.В  There was much to learn.В  Have I learned what I came here to learn?

That I love my son.

That I have a great desire to take care of him and to be with him.

That, although he can care for himself, I want very much, very much, to spend more time with him.

He has confessed that I drive him crazy, that he doesn’t always like me!В  This makes me laugh.В  Bravo!I am shouting.В  Hooray for you to be able to tell your mother this!

I like Boudha.В  I could spend a long time here.В  It is a good place.В  I like the people circumambulating the stupa, an anarchic procession they call chora or kora.В  I liked riding my bicycle here.

Question: if we were so wrong for one another, then why did we spend 3 years together?Why did he leave me?

Answer: I loved my son more than I loved Tim.В  I had business to finish with Brendan.В  I had to find a connection, a bridge, and a way back to him before I could fully open myself to a new partner.

I am looking up at the Buddha’s stern, blue eyes and this is what they say to me:

«The connection was never lost, never broken, only tested.»

«But,» I complain, «there were gaps, missing slats on the bridge between us!»

The Buddha says,

«It is wh*le.В All is well.В The bond, the bridge is sturdy.В Trust is across wide distances and deep canyons.В You will never break it.»

The sky is so beautiful tonight.В Bright clouds are puffing out behind the dark mountain and the golden rooves of the gompas.В Bells are ringing, dogs are barking, and the tourist stores are broadcasting «om mane peme hum.» В Prayer flags are swaying gently in the wind.В My heart is full of love.

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