I will never forget the moment I walked through my mom’s door to see her sitting on the couch looking so scared, so frail and so child-like.
We looked at each other, tears streaming down both of our faces and we embraced. She was shaking as she uttered one sentence that crosses my mind almost daily:
“Jeni, I will never get to meet your babies.”
It was like an arrow went through my heart at that exact moment. (more…)
The letter arrived in the mail on Saturday. There it sat, long, white and unopened. My heart skipped a beat. No, it wasn’t the anticipated college acceptance or rejection letter. Nor was it a job offer or denial. It was the letter that would represent my young son’s future: His teacher assignment for first grade.
I opened it up quickly with mixed feelings. Who would it be? Would it be who I wanted? Would his newly made friends from Kindergarten be in his class? Or, would he be all alone, faced once again to meet new friends?
As I read the letter, these thoughts raced through my mind, but a deeper, more powerful reaction took over my mind. (more…)
Where in the world do you live? And, are you from there?
I live in Adelaide, which is the capital city of South Australia. I was born in a small country town called Inverell in New South Wales, which is on the east coast of Australia. We moved around a lot when I was a child because of my father’s work, moving to Perth, the capital of Western Australia when I was 5 and then several years later to Kalgoorlie which is a mining town 700km north-east of Perth. From Kalgoorlie we moved to Adelaide when I was 13, and I’ve been here ever since.
I attended four different primary schools and two different high schools, yet in contrast, my children all live in the house they were born in. (more…)
My family has just settled back home after a 2,300 mile road trip from Illinois to Colorado, and back. Our primary destination was Rocky Mountain National Park, a most spectacular place composed of mountain elevations ranging from 8,000 to over 14,000 feet. To place perspective on this height, our home in Illinois is at 600 feet.
American citizens are blessed with a national park system. It is a collection of some of the most spectacular and varied natural places in the world, protected for all to experience, free from progress and destruction. It’s an understatement to call this a treasure, especially after you’ve experienced the indefinable thrill and beauty of such a stunning natural place. (more…)
Have you ever thought about what Noah’s Ark might have sounded like? A pair of all the animals in the world in one big boat would have been loud! If you crept into the eating quarters, would you have seen Mr. and Mrs. Duck talking to Monsieur et Madame Chien over a cup of tea? “Quack, quack.” “Ouaf, ouaf.” “Slurp, slurp?”
Well, we don’t live in a boat, and our animals are mostly in 2-D, but you can hear some pretty international animal sounds blaring from our windows lately.
I am French, and my husband’s Norwegian, and we both talk English to each other. Therefore, there are three strong languages, our mother tongues plus English, under our one roof. (more…)
When I think of my country, India, I am reminded of a small snippet from the collection of poems” Geetanjali” by the world-famous Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
And, on August 15th, 1947 India awoke into that freedom. It was born as a nation, perhaps, for the first time. I say, “first time” here because before British colonization, India was a collection of small kingdoms ruled by individual kings, chieftains and tribes. It was never a single large entity as in a country before this time. Then, after the British left, all of India formed into a single whole country, and I am proud to say we still are. (more…)
Purnima Ramakrishnan is an UNCA award winning journalist and the recipient of the fellowship in Journalism by International Reporting Project, John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Her International reports from Brazil are found here . She is also the recipient of the BlogHer '13 International Activist Scholarship Award . She is a Senior Editor at World Moms Blog who writes passionately about social and other causes in India. Her parental journey is documented both here at World Moms Blog and also at her personal Blog, The Alchemist's Blog. She can be reached through this page . She also contributes to Huffington Post . Purnima was once a tech-savvy gal who lived in the corporate world of sleek vehicles and their electronics. She has a Master's degree in Electronics Engineering, but after working for 6 years as a Design Engineer, she decided to quit it all to become a Stay-At-Home-Mom to be with her son! This smart mom was born and raised in India, and she has moved to live in coastal India with her husband, who is a physician, and her son who is in primary grade school. She is a practitioner and trainer of Heartfulness Meditation.
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