Becoming a Mother at 18

When I returned home from college, my mother told me how my neighbor and friend, Joanna, sponsored a child and created awareness for child sponsorship on her Facebook account.

“When I saw what she did,” my mother said, “I thought of you, because you always used to tell me that you loved to adopt.”
I immediately went to Joanna’s profile and viewed her post. It was touching indeed. She had sponsored a girl named Karina and World Vision, the NGO through which she was able to help the child, had recently sent her a brochure. 
“She’s all mine,” Joanna said in her post. 
My mother said she was proud of her and said that she would be blessed and rewarded in due time. 
Why am I telling you about Joanna? It’s because she unknowingly helped me do something I’ve always wanted to do, which is to help a little child in need. 
My mother was telling me how I could wait for a few more years—when I’d have sufficient money—to do likewise. 
A few years is a long time to wait, so I decided to go right ahead because why not? I’m working after all. So I visited World Vision India’s website and acquainted myself with who they are and what they do. I then went on to create an account and search for a child.
I ended up picking an adorable six-year-old girl from Mumbai, Maharashtra, and I can’t even begin to describe the joy I felt when I sent her what I could. Just like Joanna, I was so excited to have someone who is not a part of my home become a part of my heart. 
At the table, just before we sat down to lunch, I announced, “I got myself a daughter.”
Needless to say, my mother and grandmother were proud of me and my mother reminded me that it was a commitment I’d made to the little girl and she asked to see “[my] little baby”. 
We unanimously agreed that she was an adorable little munchkin. 
Later that night when I lay down to sleep, I thought of how I always wanted a boy and a girl. 
I went back to World Vision India’s website and found myself a son, a nine-year-old from Jorhat, Assam. 
When I broke the news late the next morning, my grandmother said she was happy to have “two great-grandchildren” from me. My mother asked me to send their pictures to her so that she could commit their little faces to memory and remember them in her prayers. 
Like a new mother who is enamored of her newborn infant, I had fallen completely under my children’s spell. 
Why did I write and publish this, you might be asking.
I’ll tell you why in case you never understood.
I want to tell everyone who reads this—whether you searched “child sponsorship stories” on Google or stumbled across this post by accident—that reaching out to a fellow human being in need is one of the most fulfilling things you can do. And no matter how little or how large your contribution may be, it will hearten you to know that someone you can’t see is probably a little happier and a little better than he/she was yesterday because of your love. 

World Vision serves in 100+ countries. If you feel an urge in your heart to be a part of someone’s life, don’t worry about thinking twice. Just go on ahead and do it. You won’t have any regrets. I promise. 
World Vision: https://www.worldvision.org

• India: https://www.worldvision.in

• France: https://www.visiondumonde.fr

• Canada: https://www.worldvision.ca

• UK: https://www.worldvision.org.uk

• Australia: https://www.worldvision.com.au

• New Zealand: https://www.worldvision.org.nz

• Spain: http://www.worldvision.es

An Open Letter to the Two Kinds of Teachers

Ask anybody who a teacher is. Either, you will end up hearing the stock definition of the word, or the character profile of a person. 
From the compendium of traits used to describe teachers, I choose two for the purpose of a little taxonomy. 
Subject-oriented and student-oriented.
These traits, while not mutually exclusive, carry their own individual import. 

To the subject-oriented teacher,
You know that your job demands dignity, prestige, respect. You want silence to enter the classroom with you and stay there until you’re gone. You have expectations. You want to prove to your peers that you’re primo. 
Those people who listen to you, you appreciate their respect because you know you need it. Your foursquare refusal for your class to be second to any other is evident in your methodologies. 
You’re particular about not letting a minute unpunctuated by all things academic slip by. Those people you teach need to get it right down to the last comma and period. 
Your knowledge is awed, your instruction is flawless, your evaluations just, your admonishments firm. 
Small talk narks you, tangential discussions nettle you. 
For you, teaching is a revered profession that should not be subverted by feelings of affection and attachment. 
You’re concern for your subordinates is limited to their ability to fill those blanks right, conjugate every last verb flawlessly, and to show them the way to go on the scholarly ladder – up, up and only up. 
You know where to draw the line, you know what is expected of you, you know what can varnish and what can vitiate your repute. 
You are plumed when you are complimented for your professional conduct, your top-drawer classes.
You give your job your all. You’re satisfied with how you do it. You pride yourself in being a good educator. 

To the student-oriented teacher,
You know that teaching has an ambiguous meaning. You have your string of degrees, you have a comprehensive knowledge of your subject, but for you, the former isn’t what you use to get respect and the latter isn’t the only thing you are meant to impart. 
You want your “kids” to listen to you, and so you bring yourself down to their level. You listen to them. You tell them about yourself. You let them know that you’re as human as they are. Mature, astute and seasoned as you are today, it has not slipped your memory that you were once like them.
Your knowledge commensurates with your humility; the former blows your kids’ minds, the latter touches their hearts. You’re someone who dispenses advice like a therapist, who understands the soup of teenage feelings like a mother, who unabashedly high-fives your kids in the corridors like a friend. 
You want to make sure that they know their spellings, articles and prepositions, but what’s more important to you is to you is for them to know they are valued not by the number or the letter on their answer scripts that attests to their performance, but for who they are as people. 
You don’t see your kids as workers in a mark-generating factory. They’re not just names on a roll, faces you see thrice a week.
You know that that being a friend isn’t a requirement for the job and the monthly paycheck, but that’s who you want to be to those children because when they lay themselves down to sleep at night, you know they’re not going to think about the right usage of l’imparfait and le passé composé, but about what made them smile, what disappointed them. 

You’re concerned about the child whose life isn’t rosy, you talk to the one who seems aloof, you boost the one who doesn’t know what she’s worth, you make them all feel special in their own way. 
It means something to you to mean something to someone. You cherish your kids’ love for you and you’re not loth to reciprocate it, well aware that life is shaped by all the love a person received or didn’t. 
You know the unspoken principle of being a teacher which is not to prepare kids for examinations of some import, but to prepare them for the long road of life that lies ahead of them. 
You know that you’ve done your job right not when you see that perfect score, but when your kids let you know they’ve learned something from you to last a lifetime. 
In all the ways you’ve taught by example, in all the times you cared to look beyond the textbook and the answer leaves, in all the memories you made with the kids who weren’t yours but whom you treated like your own, there lies the nobility, the true passion, the real essence of your profession. 
(Dédicace: Prof, c’est pour vous, ma source d’inspiration, mon enseignante préférée. Je t’aime tellement.)

Sullied Lily

In the looking glass is seen a sullied lily 
From the threshold of whose sable orbs liquid pendants cascade: 

Each fraught with one poignance of a myriad. 

How could one’s pain the other’s pleasure be? 

Whiteness was wrung from the depths that now tell a scarlet story 

That none can be privy to save for the undead, asthenic prey and the daily hunter 

And the wasted shadow camouflaging itself in what it is made of. 

Vice, like poison ivy, overwhelms virtue in the convoluted mind’s vortex, 

Its pernicious seed having taken firm root 

Burgeon strangling tendrils that render the friendly iris limp. 

Yea, what is dead is refractory to the hope renewal. 

The sullied lily has naught but a deflowered chassis and a deadweight core: 

The bud was forced to open before it was willed to bloom. 

Benumbed, the wilting flower remains in the bosom of velvet darkness, 

Waiting on the half-brother of sleep her soul to take lest her body should die yet again. 

She is a stranger to light and her own reflection. 

Circadian rhythm thrown out of kilter, 

Sacrosanct hollows forcefully invaded, 

Innocence’s membrane rent. 

In the looking glass, all she sees is what was an unsullied lily in the lang syne. 

Illegitimate

Fusion of binary opposites forged us -Design of a non-earthly will albeit 

Preceded not by hallowed vows. 
Two gilded annuli sprinkled and symbolic 

Set you in merit supposedly apart from us,

Products of unsanctified congress.
Coincidentally, however, we are all

Begotten in sin and born in sin,

The Creator creates no difference there. 
The golden eye that shines on you 

Burns us not to cinders and ashes

Because it recognizes no otherness.
The dust below that holds you

Neither swallows nor sinks us like refuse

Because it knows we were all fashioned out of it. 
Feeling flesh, pulsing hearts, knowing minds –

Created alike, but conceived differently –

Some within, some without that hallowed shroud of wedlock. 
Creation, Conception, Consecration.

Who is he to question – he that willed not those three?

Who is mere mortal to question the “legitimacy” of the Maker’s makings? 

Who is man or woman to mete out wasted Marks of Cain? 

2 Incidents Accounting for the Misrepresentation of Children

In the lap of a futon sits she with her lips painted the shade of a rose in full bloom, peep-toe stilettos grace her petite feet, a mild couple of accessories adorn her while her seductive, asymmetrical evening gown, the hue of aging parchment, splays itself across the vacant side of the couch to meet the floor.

Meet Thylane Blondeau, now thirteen, then ten, whose shoot for French Vogue fomented much of an uproar among the Mothers’ Union and Labor MPs who condemned the disturbing “sexualization” of a minor in a magazine that saw the likes of legal adult models.

Born to Patrick Blondeau of Premier League fame and Véronika Loubry, a fashion designer of French origin, Thylane was accustomed to seeing the entrails of the fashion industry, partaking in numerous pageants and shoots with her mother.

As the tornado of controversy was spinning, Véronika took to a social media platform to convey her opinion on things. Stated in the English she was capable of relaying, she said, “Something’s wrong at the moment… I want to protect her from the deepest of my heart… She’s so young, so we are going to close this account for a while…”

Her statement was met with consequential negation as to her heightened concern over the overwhelming critical response rather than her daughter’s actual participation in the suggestive shoot.

Thylane’s modeling career has since skyrocketed positively, her fanpages and social networking accounts having been reactivated with quite a considerable fan-following.

Hemmed in by iron bars, alone except for an unshaven, unwashed alpha male, she roars, she flexes, she dances. Supple and elastic in her every movement. Clad in a one-piece suit that calls for immediate scrubbing, she allows herself to be touched, sometimes picky, sometimes conceding.

It’s not like The Nutcracker or Swan Lake. No. We’re talking electronic music and idiosyncratic vocals accompanied by a ballet routine by a twelve year old who, as the clip implies, is being pursued by her male “counterpart” in a cage.

There is no two ways that the male is dimwitted but persistent at getting what he wants. This video triggered an outrageous response that cited undertones of pedophilia, drawing from the nude costumes donned by 28-year old Shia LaBeouf and 12-year old Maddie Ziegler in Sia’s “Elastic Heart”, with the physicality and the chastisement expressed.

Maddie Ziegler is a veteran dancer in the making who has been training at the Abby Lee Dance Company since 2004 in various forms of dance such as in tap, ballet, lyrical, contemporary, acro, jazz and aerial dance. She is of Polish, German and Italian descent.

In the face of heavy criticism, Sia took to her Twitter account to say: “All I can say is Maddie and Shia are two of the only actors I felt could play these two warring ‘Sia’ self states. I [apologise] to those who feel triggered by ‘Elastic Heart’. My intention was to create some emotional content, not to upset anybody.”