The Namesake - Ashima's Struggle

Ashima’s Struggle
A wise man once said, “change is difficult”. Moving to a new country is difficult, and successfully adapting to one takes a lot of hard work and perseverance. In The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri shows how Ashima Ganguli struggled while adapting to America.
Ashima has been trying to get used to America. She tries to stay calm while she is in the hospital, about to give birth, “But she is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare” (Lahiri 4). Ashima wants to go back to India to raise her son. She is extremely nervous about having a child in America, but she has not told Ashoke about it yet. In India, her family would help raise her children. In America she is going to have to struggle and raise her kids in an unfamiliar environment.
Living in an unfamiliar environment forced Ashima to adapt. Even her own children do not help her after Ashoke passes away. “’It’s not such a big deal,” her children tell her, ‘Everyone should live on their own at some point’. But Ashima feels too old to learn such a skill. She hates returning in the evenings to a dark, empty house, going to sleep on one side of the bed and waking up on another” (Lahiri 161). After Ashoke passed away, Ashima had to adapt and live on her own for the first time in her life.   Ashima becomes depressed, but she realizes that Ashoke was teaching her how to live on her own when he left. Ashima still had a tough time, but she persevered and adapted.
Although Ashima struggled, she ended up adapting to America. Ashima started to do some work before Gogol was born.
She begins to pride herself on doing it alone, in devising a routine. Like Ashoke, busy with his teaching and research and dissertation seven days a week, she, too strength. Before Gogol’s birth, her days had follows a visible pattern.
Ashima started to adapt by doing what people usually do. She tried to replace the chores she would...