One of my friends called me this week. She is that friend who I do not necessarily talk to every day but who understands me, who has known me for a while. We stay connected with each other with sporadic text messages, Christmas greetings etc. And although we would like to chat with each other more often, we just do not have that kind of spare time. For starters, we live in two different time zones and then she works full time, and I am a mother of three which is more than a full-time job. This time however, we had a few minutes to spare for each other, got talking, and had an actual conversation without interruptions.
After we had caught up on whatever was going on in our
lives, she told me the real reason she had called me. She said she was
listening to this song on radio," I don’t need a hand to hold, I got
that fire in my soul" and she could not stop but think of me, about
me. She said I was the only Indian friend she had with a fire in my soul, who
was not afraid of being who I was. Whatever happened to that fire??? well, it is
still very much there, it however got pushed back to one side but it resurfaces every
now and then.
I am not single anymore and not only that, but I also have three children.
I have a husband who has a demanding job (what his job has to do with me will
be hard to fathom for some of you and it calls for a separate blog post of its own),
three children who demand and deserve my attention; parents who don’t necessarily
demand it but very much deserve it and I like to give them that with whatever
little time I can spare as I cannot physically be there for them and then my work
; although it has trickled down next to nothing, it’s still there, I still have
to keep up with the license and in order to do so, I have to work a certain number of hours, keep up with
continue education requirements etc. Who has time for anything else?
But, I said,
there is Facebook, I spend my spare time on Facebook, which is kind of helping
to keep that fire alive to some extent. Some of you, who do not know me from yesteryear
and have only recently gotten to know me, do not know the real ME.
According to
my father and my family, I was meant to do remarkable things, not give up on a career
and stay at home. ….
But sometimes, life does not go the way you had planned or
envisioned it to be. My life took a different route, now I am just a mom to my
three children.
The fire is still there, it emerges every now and then, mostly during
the month of October of every even year. For those readers who do not live in
the USA, November is election month here in the United States, and we have presidential
elections every four years and senate/congress elections every 2 years which sums
it to elections every even year in our state of Virginia. And October is when
the campaigning is at its peak.
When I turned eighteen and became eligible to vote, in India, I refused to go, stating that I did not want to waste my precious
vote on someone who did not deserve it. The stupid, ignorant, and naïve me. My
father had tried to explain it to me then that change begins with you, at home.
But I was a teenager, and I had no sense.
But now I have gained a few years of
experience, maturity if you might call it that. The last two elections, I was
eager to go cast my vote; this year I am not, but I will because I now know
better! These are My rambling for this Friday just before the presidential
elections!!!
And I hope that the glass ceiling will be broken this year…….And
oh, please don’t say anything about my
man (here, I don’t mean the man of the
house, he gets to see the fire every day, I am referring to the man of the
nation, the current President of the
United states of America); this fire within my soul will turn into a volcano in
a matter of minutes !!!
Here is the link to the song, Fire in my soul.
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