It takes a village

Imagine if you will a nursery with pink walls, toys already safely put away, one toddler and an utterly exhausted mother. It is 8:30pm. Five stories have been read. The potty has been used one last time. The milk bottle is drained. The frog pajamas have been securely zippered. Now, it’s just time to sleep.

The mother gives one last hug to her two and half year old toddler, lays her down in the crib and says goodnight. She sits on the floor one foot away from the bed. There is no physical contact, no eye contact, no further conversation beyond a whisper. At first, it seems like the night will end peacefully.

Then the toddler opens the night’s battle, “Mommy, hug me.”

“Goodnight,” says the mother.

“Mommy, hold me.”

“Goodnight.”

“Mommy, hold my hand.”

“Goodnight.”

“Mommy, more bottle.”

“Goodnight.”

“Mommy, more pee pee.”

“You have a diaper on.”

“Mommy…” The toddler crawls out of bed. The mother puts her back.

“Mommy,” the toddler cries louder.

“Goodnight.”

“Mommy!”

The escaping, screaming and protests continue in the same manner for another twenty minutes until, in a final effort to get her mother’s attention, the toddler sticks her finger in her mouth and makes herself throw up. The mother is horrified. She turns on the light, cleans the vomit off, changes the sheets, and is tempted to give in. What’s one more night of rocking to sleep, and surely her daughter couldn’t have intentionally caused herself to throw up?

But then the toddler giggles, loudly. The mother narrows her eyes in disbelief. Her resolve returns. She repeats the goodnight routine and says “Goodnight.” She steels herself against the ensuing protests.

Ninety minutes later, the toddler has fallen asleep by herself for the first time in six months. The mother crawls out of the nursery, blurry eyed, guilt-ridden, her ears ringing with her daughter’s desperate cries for her. She can already hear her daughter’s conversations with her therapist. “My mother abandoned me when I needed her. I grew up feeling so unloved.”

Then the mother turns on HBO and takes a deep breath. The house is silent. She has not fallen asleep with her pregnant stomach wedged against the sharp edges of her daughter’s toddler bed, her hand instinctually patting a child’s stomach. No, for the first night in ages, she and her daughter’s bedtimes have been separated. She smiles wearily and thinks to call her husband and tell him of her victory. But she’s too tired. She just falls asleep with the remote in her hand, very very relieved.

The above describes my past ten days. Every three nights, I moved one more foot away from the bed in an effort to teach my daughter to fall asleep by herself. There were a few variations on the battle but the overall struggle persisted until Friday (the night my husband came home from the US) when my daughter finally slept through the night uninterrupted. She’s done it three nights in a row now. Last night, she didn’t even fight me at bedtime. She was snoring within seconds of her head hitting the pillow.

I’d like to take full credit for this turnaround in my daughter (and with my husband, I will J) but in reality, this was a joint global effort, a true example of why women need each other. The beautiful and open responses I got from so many other mothers helped me feel so much less alone in that dark nursery night after night, with no husband or family member on the same continent with me. The prayers everyone said gave me the strength to not totally cave in, and the encouragement I received about my writing has motivated me to use my newly rebounding energy to actually change some things about my life in Shanghai rather than just bake more muffins. Thank you to everyone.

Manika also taught me something without knowing it. Somewhere around the second or third night, as she slowly drifted into quieter breathing and deeper sleep without me close to her bed, I felt a strong pang of sadness. I suddenly wanted to go closer, put my hand on her stomach, and kiss her cheek. I realized that it was just one of many moments going forward when she would no longer need me, and I began to wonder how much of her dependency on me I’ve actually been encouraging to give meaning to my life here in Shanghai. Her challenges coupled with my pregnancy have been my excuses not to go out more into my world, to not commit too much to anything, to live as if I’m a transient just here to raise my children.

So after that night, I made a conscious decision to get out of the house, to risk getting tired and guilty about not spending enough time with my daughter, and to just try things whether they seemed feasible or not. I called a friend of mine who was looking for a writing teacher to teach a small class of aspiring writers, another friend who runs an online organic grocery company (mentioned in previous blogs), a real estate agent to explore the possibility of opening a space dedicated to freelance writers (many similar spaces exist in New York where writers can quietly work, meet together, network, encourage one another and get away from their children), and a lawyer to help me understand the fertility, genetics and stem cell industries in China (my previous area of expertise in the US). In short, I started throwing stuff at the wall.

In New York, any one of these things would take something like one to four months to stick. But this is China. The country has an abundance of workers, but not so many thinkers, creators, problem-solvers, or entrepreneurs. I have now been given a creative writing class to teach, I am building a marketing plan and fundraising budget for the online company, I’m still taking the interest temperature for the writing space but have already found lots of people to survey, a friend of mine is doing the first draft illustrations for a children’s book I’ve written, and I’m meeting with a lawyer about the IVF industry very shortly. I think I may have thrown too much.

But that’s okay. I’m much happier. I finally feel engaged in the Shanghai machinery. I have new projects to inspire and occupy me. I feel like I’m learning about China again and how it operates instead of just living in it. And I’m well-rested. Hopefully, in the weeks to come, my blog will be more about that then sleep deprivation. Hopefully, I can share a deeper understanding of China. And if kid trouble comes again? Well, I now know where to go for help and inspiration, and I also know that I can take it on. I just need a strong will and a tough arm to row through the occasional torrent of tears to the other side. I guess that’s why God uses childbirth (appropriately known as labor) to prep us poor mothers from the start.

I knew He has a purpose for everything.

Ever wonder why?

Today I started the day in tears again – a very frequent happening these days. My daughter, in a new and more determined effort to torture me it seems, woke up seven times last night in one nine hour stretch.

Regular readers of this blog will notice a theme – this Manika not sleeping thing. It is the single most dominant event of my life these days. It controls my ability to think, to function, to be in a good mood or a bad mood. I frequently have to cancel afternoon plans because I’m too tired. Never before have I encountered such a persistent, rampant, and uncontrollable problem and it is making me hate motherhood in ways I never thought possible. It’s also making me depressed.

To all whose immediate reaction is to say – “then do something about it,” I would like to point to my extensive library of sleep books, the picture montage of parents and stickers on the back of her bed placed in an effort to both comfort and reward, the highly regular bedtime routine, the elimination of the milk bottle as a falling asleep prop, the no television, computer or other stimulating tools three hours before bedtime rule, the relaxing baby massage I give every night before she goes to sleep, the $70 bunny sleep clock I’ve put in her room that indicates when it’s okay to get out of bed and when it’s time to sleep, and the three week “sleep without mommy’s help” process I’ve repeatedly followed only to have to redo. I am calling a sleep clinic in the UK today to try to create yet a new “sleep plan” for her in hopes that perhaps $500 - $600 will unearth some new path to success I haven’t yet designed. I even tried using grandparents during the holidays. But my two-year old daughter is tireless. She wakes. She wants mommy (and only mommy) to hold her and help her go back to sleep and if she doesn’t get it, she’ll sacrifice hours and hours of rest to win and scream repeatedly at the top of her lungs “Mommy, mommy, mommy,” until I wish she’d either just wear out her throat or I’d finally go deaf, once and for all.

On top of all this stress, I’ve once against lost my only other nighttime resource – my husband. Normally, this is to his job, which is very demanding. But these two weeks, he’s in the US. Sadly, his father passed away, although it was after a six-year battle with cancer so we all hope his soul is finally at rest. The culmination of these events – the complete loss of control of my life to a toddling tyrant, and my family’s first close encounter with the death of a truly loved one, have caused me to contemplate, “Why the hell are we here anyway?”

This is not some new thought, and for the longest time, I’ve believed I already had a satisfying answer. When I was very young, I converted from sort of nothing to Christianity. I’ve always been a believer in God (although my frequent swearing might not always point to my faith) and since I was very young, I’ve always found comfort in the knowledge there was a purpose in everything that happened to me – college rejections, job rejections, loss of a loved boyfriend or friend – and my primary belief has been that suffering teaches us to need God, to love in ways we haven’t thought possible, to let go of the illusion of control we have on life, and to remind us to live in the present and follow God. It has been this belief that has kept me from packing my bags, changing my name and running away to France after so many nights of incessant waking. Yes, I’m a zombie, yes my prayers for a sleep miracle go unanswered, but I’m learning that I can love even the most demanding of prison keepers. Bleary-eyed, headached and tear-filled, I can still find enough love in the morning to dress my daughter in matching clothes and make her oatmeal with just the right amount of honey. I have even at times, been thankful, for the newly discovered knowledge of reserves of strength I’ve found. When the time comes for true disaster – a long illness, the loss of someone close to me – I am no longer afraid the way I used to be. I now know I will find strength in those times too, because I’ve found strength in days through which I never even thought I could stay awake in places where I have not had one person to help me.

However, lately, those beliefs have not been enough to satisfy my soul. Yes, it is a joy to serve in motherhood, yes I’ve impregnated myself for the second time despite all of this (although that I will attribute less to foresight and more to too much alcohol drunk in the company of my too willing husband), but it is not enough. I simply cannot imagine I was just put on this earth to serve my daughter and husband only, that this is the solace with which I’m supposed to sustain my soul. If it is, then why am I not actually happy in this knowledge, and more importantly, why am I not at peace the way I used to be with this belief tucked in my heart?

Instead, I am constantly conflicted, mainly because I’ve always believed I have another purpose as well and that is to write. That isn’t to say I’ve always fancied myself some God-ordained, super-talented writer, but I do know that I was put here to do it, good or not. I have always felt called in this direction, and I’ve sacrificed many things in my life for this. When I was a teenager and young college student, I completely abandoned my relationship with my father and his approval to pursue writing. When I started working, I gave up nights out and a social life to get up at three or four in the morning and write before starting my day. In 2004, when I left the world of investment banking, I also completely sacrificed financial security. I did this all with blind faith in the voice I felt inside of me. And yet, I’ve still had nothing ever published, my novel continues into its sixth year (Kiran Desai took seven with no children, so I’m still optimistic) and even if I am published, there is no promise that money will follow. The only occasional affirmation I get from people are the kind words of friends reading this blog.

In that way, writing is much like motherhood. It does not yield much to my control, it does not demonstrate noticeable daily progress, there are no real milestones, no way to predict how efforts will result in the future. With this awareness, I have searched for connective lessons, ways to draw on one experience to assure me that the efforts in the other realm are worth it, ways to use one struggle to bolster my spirits in the other. But those efforts to knit some mental web of support are also failing me.

So I find myself asking this question anew – Why are we here? The context is deeper now than it was when I first asked and answered it as a teenager. What I’m really wondering is, why do we have a temporary physical existence and this deep spiritual journey intertwined when the two are so clearly incongruous? Before Manika, my physical existence simply wanted financial sustenance, and so the battle was simple and identical to many artists – I work a little for money, I write when I can. At times, I wanted more money so I worked harder. When I wanted less money, I wrote more. Over the years, I found a balance I could control. Now, there is no balance to be found. My physical existence desires sleep, time for my own self, some external validation of my talents, some monetary rewards for my efforts, and my waist back (how I miss having a waist). My spiritual self is calling me to be selfless in serving my daughter, to learn to make peace with a country I am not comfortable in for the sake of my husband, to live in depths of solitude and isolation that I’ve never known before. But it also continues to call me to write, an activity I cannot do without sleep and some sense of daily stability and control, without some satisfaction of my physical wants. So round and round the struggle goes. I’m completely confused and discouraged. If my purpose is to live for my family, I am joyless in it. If my purpose is truly to write, then I need some grace, some mercy, some divine hand of strength to help me continue. And if my perspective is simply wrong altogether, I need a new lightning bolt of wisdom. In all ways, I am hungry for an answer.

Today, I don’t have one. All I know now is that having this hunger must be part of why I am here, it has to be part of the answer. This is the purpose I’ve assigned it, if for no other reason than it makes me aware of my soul when the daily grind could make me forget it. The rest will have to come in God’s time or perhaps never. All religions have some sort of explanation, but their differences show that there is no one answer. Instead, their universal instructions seem to be to remain open to God, and seek Him in times of struggle. Sometimes we’ll get a miracle, sometimes we won’t. The miracles show us God’s love. The silence is his method of tough training I guess.

So for now, I will just try to wait and search. Perhaps I am still meant to write, but not today. Or maybe I’m just meant to write this – my blog – instead of my book or my short stories. Perhaps my words are meant for another mother today, and they will offer some comfort. Perhaps my daughter will someday be President and this will of hers will be what I’m most proud of. Perhaps me and my husband’s future success and livelihood lay in China, and someday I’ll be so grateful I came here. I don’t know. Only time will tell, I’ll just have to patiently and openly wait.

In the meantime, I still have my credit card ready. Pretty soon that sleep clinic in the UK will be awake. I’m ready for day three of my latest “sleep without mommy” sleep plan. God may ask us to wait patiently for answers, but nowhere does He say to stop living (or problem solving) in the process. After all, he did give me a brain, $600 and a Masters Degree for a reason too, I think.

I hope.

The sun shines in Shanghai

Over the past four weeks, I've had a total shut down and reboot experience here in Shanghai.

A series of random frustrating events (many captured in my last poem - apologies to anyone who I offended), led me to spend nights on end dreaming about Brooklyn. I woke on Saturday mornings dreaming of walking down Park Slope's Fifth Avenue, picking up a bagel with cream cheese and a coffee, popping in and out of little boutiques, spending a few hours at my desk at the Brooklyn's Writer's Space, and then going home to my snug apartment and having a cup of tea with my daughter and nanny.

Like all memories, the visions were lovely, sepia toned and selective. They excluded standing wall-to-wall with commuters on the subway. I didn't remember carrying grocery bags in one hand, a folded up Maclaren on my shoulder, and an uncooperative child on my hip. My 1,000 square foot apartment felt palatial when in reality, toys were always falling on my head when I lived there. And most importantly, my friends and family were always around - when in reality, we often had to plan to see each other weeks or months in advance.

My mind started to come back to the present around Thanksgiving. This year, because I'm pregnant, I can't go home for any of the holidays and so I did my best to recreate a festive atmosphere in my apartment by hosting a 12-person dinner complete with turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, pumpkin squares and apple cobbler. I spent two days cooking, hired two women to help with the setup and dishes, scrubbed my apartment from top to bottom and then, waited for the feeling to come. The warm smell of cooking fruit didn't quite do it. The sight of a beautifully laid table just made me wish my brother and sister-in-law were coming to sit at it. The guests started to arrive - a wonderful mix of people from all over the world. That started to warm me up. Here in one place were Italians, Kenyans, Americans, Indians, all celebrating turkey day together. However, a UN-like gathering wasn't really it either, and none were my family.

Then China decided to surprise me, or kick me, depending on how you look at it. All of the sudden, the lights started to flicker. It happened three or four times. We unplugged all the appliances, computers, and televisions. We left on only the lamps. These flickered one last time and then went off. The oven died. My hallway started to smoke up. We called emergency services and the guy said I'd "overused the electricity." He said it would take at least two hours to come back on. By then, I had a houseful of hungry, expectant guests, many who had conquered hours of parking-lot like traffic to be there. I tried to explain this in my frenzied Chinese, to which he replied, "Use candles." "But I have a turkey to keep warm!" I said in English. Of course, he didn't understand me. He and his buddy just laughed at the silly American who had overcooked. I was about to cry...and curse Shanghai forever. Next flight back on Continental - anyone have a ticket?

Then my wonderful, understanding, also-living-in-China friends came to the rescue. Little by little, we located and lit every single candle in my apartment. My ayi did what she could to finish dinner on the gas stove. Manika (thankfully) sat patiently in front of my battery-powered laptop. People started laughing again, and no one seemed to mind anymore, and some actually seemed to find the whole thing atmospheric. My italian friends said everything felt romantic, which totally adjusted my perspective my vision. My friend Ruth took charge of helping me bring all of the dishes out to the table. The turkey was (by the grace of God) perfectly done. In the best moment of the night, Manika started to get stressed out and cry, so someone gave her a candle. She said, "happy birthday?" Everyone - all eleven of the adult guests - sang Happy Birthday to her in response. She was thrilled! Miraculously, no red wine spilled on my cream carpet or sofa, and everyone could see enough to sit down at a table. The lights came back on right after dessert. By then, everyone was happily full. In those two hours, I finally felt at home in Shanghai, and I was truly Thanksgiving-grateful.

The sentiment spilled out into the days that followed. Manika has been stressed out since August it seems, first with our trip to the US, then with the transition from a crib to a toddler bed, then with the start of school, followed by my efforts to potty train her, and lastly, the beginning of dreams. My daughter, who used to sleep through the night, has spent eight weeks waking me up every day at 1:20am and then 5am, causing me to either get up and pat her back to sleep, or just surrender and bring her to my bed. All along, I blamed the terrible twos and the lack of logic skills to adjust to new circumstances. But after Thanksgiving, in desperation I downloaded a book on sleep solutions for toddlers, and inside, one of the first things I read was how stressed out parents can lead to stressed out children.

Well, that equation certainly seemed to apply in our house. I began to realize that my own inflexibility in adjusting to Shanghai was still causing me to be very inflexible with my daughter, even though I thought I was having both up and down moments but was overall getting better. I was still mostly saying: no extra book at bed time, no nighttime hugging, no sleeping in my bed. Pee in the pants was yucky, awful, not okay. No one should cry at school. As I reviewed my own behavior in my head in the light of this book's advice, I began to see that I had equal, if not greater responsibility for my poor daughter's uneasy soul.

So I launched fullscale operation de-stress Manika. Need six extra hugs to fall asleep. No problem. Want me to give your feet a little massage to relax you in the middle of the night. Okay. Come to my bed. Just don't kick my belly (have to draw the line somewhere). Pee in the pants - okay, wear training pants. It's okay, you're practicing. I cancelled appointments, I further emptied my schedule, and I just focused on her. I bought her classical music to listen to at night. I took her art supply shopping so she could start "expressing herself" right before bed. And most of all, I was forgiving. I was accepting. I actually smiled at her singing Old MacDonald had a farm in her bed for the tenth time instead of getting angry at her for not sleeping.

In the process, it seemed I broke every parenting rule I'd picked up in New York - consistency, tough love, don't create too much dependency, kids should learn to be independent, stretch a little but not too much. I became much more Chinese in my philosophy - children are little happy beings whose happiness should be a topmost priority. Most importantly and very unexpectedly, I became even happier. I let more things go. I felt less rigid. More of Manika's little laughter poured in and for the first time since I had her, the joy of having a child outweighed the extreme burdens of work.

She still wakes up at night a bit. She gave me a three day reprieve this week and then needed me last night from 2 - 3am because of some bad dream about someone not giving her the crayon color she needed. But instead of getting furious and cursing motherhood for lasting twenty-four hours of every day, I laughed to myself at what this poor girl thinks about in her sleep and let her climb in my bed and nestle against me.

After all, who am I to judge? I've been crying over missing round bagels and cream cheese, and Whole Foods, and Jcrew for months - equally silly things that in the end, won't mean nearly as much as the opportunities I got to accept the kindness of friends, or give my daughter late (very late!) night hugs.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Cleaning House

This past week was been all about cleaning house, literally and figuratively. My rampage started with two seemingly unrelated events: I lost my house keys and Manika stopped sleeping through the night.

The house keys wouldn’t have been such a big deal except our neighbors said they saw them on the floor outside our apartment around seven in the evening on the day they went missing, but didn’t bother to knock or pick them. That night, they disappeared. The next day, a stranger came to the house with some story about laundry falling from an upstairs apartment (the number of which she’d wouldn’t provide). She stood at the door peering in to see what the apartment looked like / had. The ayi and I later deduced she was there to see if we were home, and if not, probably would’ve let herself in. I had the locks changed that night. But the whole experience reminded me that it’s every man for himself here in China, especially when you’re an expat.

It’s often the same when you’re a mom. Manika’s new night wakings were a follow-on to her illness. While she was sick, she and I slept in the same bed, and I indulged every bottle and snack request she wanted, regardless of the hour. She is better now, but has decided having me on twenty-four hour call is much more fun than sleeping by herself uninterrupted. So she’s been waking up at two to four hour intervals, and making me feel like my whole world is out of my control (or more like in hers).

So I took back my life this week, or at least tried. I cleaned every corner of the house, bought a larger than life key chain and a hook to hang it on, organized, catalogued, shopped to fill in gaps, cleaned out email accounts, cleaned out my calendar and eliminated all sorts of waste, cancelled events I knew I wouldn’t enjoy, and prepped for the new baby. All of that gave me a vague sense of stability, security, and order during the day.

But nights were a different story. It didn’t help that I discovered my ayi has been bribing Manika to pee in the potty with chocolate chips, about seven to ten a day (far more than my two to three allowance), and one night she confused pumpkin pie filling for pumpkin soup and double-sugared my daughter up at dinner time. At nine pm this week, Manika just wanted to do laps around the apartment. So, all peacefulness earned during the day was spent in the hour and a half it took her to go bed. It was a miserable cycle.

Last night was the last straw. My house was clean, everything was where I could find it, and I was ready for a final standoff with Manika. I took her out all day, gave her a one hour nap only, read her five of her favorite books, and kissed her about a dozen times to emphasize I loved her. Then I closed the lights, and per supernanny’s expert advice, sat down on the floor facing her bed, and tilted my face down to the floor so we wouldn’t make eye contact. Then I waited.

At first, she yawned hard. I thought maybe, just maybe, she would finally comply, close her eyes and I could quickly tiptoe out. But no such luck. The nightly requests went as follows: “Bottle” (said repeatedly in escalating fervor and volume), “rock please” (followed same pattern of bottle but with the added drama of tears, “mommy’s bed” (accompanied by a chorus of screams and tears), “daddy” (emphasized with a few tugs to my hair and fists to my shoulders), and finally, the heart killer, “mommy hold you” (which means mommy hold me, but she doesn’t have her me’s and you’s down yet). To each request, I gently said no, hugged and kissed her and said “mommy loves you but you have to sleep now. Then I sat quietly until the temper tantrum ended. It was hell, especially because it was like the sixth time I’d done it and I was functioning on less sleep than a mother with a newborn.

So finally, in desperation, I did what I should’ve done much earlier – I prayed. Lately, I’ve been lax in praying for parenting strength and wisdom. In the beginning, it seemed I was on my knees almost every night, begging for the colicky torture to end. But I think my expectations were too high – my child never miraculously stopped crying until the books said she would, and pretty much everything else followed in the same internet-searchable fashion, which made me feel as if parenting was just some script you had to follow. Everyone took the same steps so prayer or no prayer, I’d go forward the same way regardless.

But last night was different. I was following a script, I had a rational plan in my head, but it was my heart that was faltering. I was tired, I was alone, and I was acutely aware that I was also alone in Shanghai. I couldn’t call my mother for help, I couldn’t count on a like-minded nanny to let me sleep in the morning the way I could in New York, and I certainly couldn’t lose my own temper the way Manika was because that would’ve just escalated everything. So I asked for God to help Manika sleep and then, when that was met with even louder shrieks from her bed, I prayed that God would keep me from strangling her. I tried to say the Lord’s prayer to myself, but that was simply too long to remember against the background noise, so finally I hummed in my head on old song, “Our God is an Awesome God.”

It was miraculous. Manika only fought me for thirty five minutes – a big reduction from the previous hour to an hour and a half, I walked away feeling less charred and beaten up, and my husband seemed to instinctively know I needed a hug (never happens!). Most importantly, Manika didn’t wake up through the night at all, and I felt internally cleansed this morning with rest, which was ultimately what I really needed.

I learned my lesson. I may be (or at least feel) alone in Shanghai at times and in motherhood, but I was reminded last night that, no matter what, I still always have God. He is truly everywhere, including my small block apartment in China.

Now if He could just help me get Manika to eat her vegetables.

Manika and I are famous!

Manika and I are on the cover of this month's Shanghai Family!

http://www.shfamily.com/bin/view/magazine/main

Sick in (of?) Shanghai

This week was another butt-kicking seven-day marathon of mommydom. Manika got a small cough on Sunday that accelerated to a respiratory infection and led to a complete bodily shutdown on Wednesday. She woke up over ten times that night, and couldn’t fall back asleep over the fever and cough. So, after a night of no sleep, I took her out in the stroller to help her sleep. We walked to Thumb Plaza (about half a mile away) and I sat and had a coffee while she slept. 

Unfortunately, she woke up midway through my moment of peace, and then proceeded to flip out like I was poking her skin with needles. She screamed at me in the restaurant for daring to take her out, screamed outside for trying to put her back in the stroller, and after I finally agreed to carry her home (balancing her on my twenty-week large pregnant stomach and pushing a not-small jogger stroller with the remainder of my energy), she screamed to every Chinese passerby how awful she felt and how useless her mother was because she was unable to make her feel better.

People stared, and I mean stared. I was in makeshift pajamas. My hair was sticking out above a grey sports headband. My glasses were lopsided from Manika pressing her head against my face. Manika had no pants on and was thrashing around like her legs were on fire. I missed New York where crazy people walk around reciting the Koran in loud speakers and no one even looks at them, and if someone does stare, you can respond back to them in English, glorious English!! So in an effort to conjure up some sense of power so I could to finish what fast became one of the longest walks of my life, I yelled back to every staring, well-meaning, trying to help me with my screaming child, morning walker / commuter / off-to-work-goer, “What the hell are you looking at!” Most didn’t understand me. One Italian man looked like he wanted to hug me. I wanted to cry louder than Manika.

Then I got home and my ayi, who is a truly lovely lady but not so smart, told me that maybe Manika had been watching too much Elmo on Sesame Street (who occasionally scares her with talking window shades and larger than life puppet bugs), and had some “heise de” stuff on her mind, which is the equivalent of saying some grey matter had possessed her little soul.

I went into hibernation. For the next two days, Manika and I slept off dueling coughs (she generously shared hers with me). We slept curled up together, we slept on opposite ends of the floor of her room, we slept in her small bed, we slept on a queen sized air mattress, we slept with my back to her and her hand lodged under my sweaty armpit, we slept on the couch in front of the television. Of course, at moments there was a certain motherly magic to the whole thing - two female spirits, suffering together, that sort of thing. But most of the time, I smelled like stale milk vomit and wanted to do nothing but check into a five star hotel room with room service and no one else.

On Friday, Manika and I finally went outside. Maybe we were just so starved for outside interaction, maybe we’d been shut-in for so long that we’d forgotten the world existed outside of us, but it was as if Shanghai was trying to cheer us up; it really felt that way. There was sunshine, a perfect breeze, people smiled at us, called Manika beautiful. A shopping trip to the mall actually went efficiently. We passed a group of old ladies practicing a part foxtrot, part tai chi dance routine to Jingle Bells outside (in the tail end of October). Saturday went even better. We went to a Halloween party, and in the evening my husband took me out to a lovely Thai restaurant in a beautiful old French style villa. Afterwards, he and I walked down this long street filled with clothing shops and I got to window shop, sans screaming baby, sans fever, sans cough. I felt almost normal, and like a prisoner who starts to fall for its captor, the rollercoaster experience almost made me love Shanghai – for once, I did not feel abused by it during a crisis and I was so grateful, I almost dared say to my husband, “Maybe I could learn to really like it here.

But I ultimately kept my mouth shut.