When East Meets West, Parents and Grandparents Collide

When I was eight months pregnant, my British husband and I were living in my native country of India. I don’t know how -  and I wish I did, so that I’d know to avoid these awkward detours in conversation in the future -  but chatting with my mother one afternoon, I landed on the subject of car seats. How my husband and I intended to buy one so that we could, you know, bring the baby home safely.

This caught my very Indian, very traditional mother, much by surprise. “You’re going to put a newborn baby all alone into a car seat instead of bringing him or her home in your arms” she huffed over the phone. Car safety laws, and as a result car seats, are still a bit of a novelty in India. “What is safer than a mother’s arms”

“A car seat,” I replied and left it at that.

That was not all. (How could it be) Everything was a discussion, a debate, a clash of cultures in my biracial, bi-continent, bi-everything marriage. When my mother suggested â€" gently â€" that I consider not leaving the house for a period of 40 days so that my body could get the rest it needed, my husband simply laughed. Instead, after giving birth via C-section, as my baby lay in the neonatal intensive care unit with an extreme case of jaundice, my husband and I, feeling useless, helpless and alone,  braved Indian bureaucracy and got my son’s birth certificate, sat for two hours in an almost-empty restaurant, and made several trips to the hospital  Neonatal Intensive Care Unit  despite knowing we wouldn’t be allowed in. That my recovery consisted of a dance of two steps forward, three steps back was hardly a surprise to anyone but me.

When we took our newborn child and deposited him in a cot (and out of our bed, thank you very much) a mere three months into his little life, our Indian friends thought us heartless and cruel. Children in India tend to sleep with their parents, sometimes until the age of 5 or 6, and that we were sleeping in a different room was unfathomable to many people, who thought us cruel and lucky in equal measure.

I was in a perpetual state of caught in the middle. Between two cultures, two worlds, two ideas, and two attitudes. Everything the West did, the East thought overly practical and selfish. Everything the East did, the West found hilarious and outdated.

Slowly and surely (and after many “long talks”), my husband I learned to listen to both sides of our families. We took some of the East, some of the West, and most of what is referred to in the official parent handbook as “winging it,” and created our own little ways, our own customs, our own bicultural rulebook.

My 1-year-old has had a bed and a room of his own since the day he was born, but every time he had stomach problems, I called my mother to ask for the herbal remedies that have kept babies in this family gas-free for generations. When he started teething, the English side sympathized. The Indian side furrowed their brows and said, “Teething doesn’t have to hurt,” and chucked me a bottle of homeopathic pills.

If I had to do it again, I wonder if I wouldn’t do it a bit differently. Perhaps if I hadn’t been so quick to reject the “outdated notions” of the East and gone back to work two months after my son was born, I wouldn’t have suffered so much during my recovery. Perhaps, if I hadn’t rejected the “cold practicality” of the West and taken those anti-depressants my doctor prescribed for me, I wouldn’t have spent so much time hiding in a dark corner of myself. Perhaps if I had listened instead of judged, it might just all have been a wee bit easier.

Almost a month after my son was born, a photographer friend took us all, including the dog, to the park. There’s a photo of us looking tired and a little bit frustrated as we set up for the next shot, and as I look at it, it dawns on me that this lack of grace and confidence is perhaps what defines every new parent. In the modern world, we’re all bombarded with a million different choices, no matter whether we’re in the East or West, raising biracial children or not. Most of us are fortunate enough to inhabit a world where decisions are no longer made for us and we can create from all the various possibilities available, what we feel is best for our children. And maybe, in the end, that is what being a parent is all about.

Mridu Khullar Relph is a freelance journalist and has written for The New York Times, Time magazine, Ms. and The Christian Science Monitor, among others. Follow her on Twitter: @mridukhullar.