I started my ‘web’ career with my first article entitled
‘Setting it free’. It was quite well received- naturally, since it was based on
a universal emotion- about parents undergoing acceptance to liberate kids from their
constricting familial bonds. When I wrote the article I smugly thought that the
‘dealing with this difficult situation’ was over. I thought I had succeeded in
finally ‘letting go’. I was wrong.
Parenting is a round the clock job. And parents are like
the two hands of a clock that patiently carry on their endless duties of
ticking and talking. The frisky but indispensable ‘second’ hand is the constant
discomfiting factor that keeps moving incessantly in the background, marking
off a father’s concern or pointing at a mother’s angst. And this I realized,
when one night my daughter gave us a call from Delhi.
It was way past our sleeping hours. Being a NIFTian with
workloads of projects and backbreaking assignments, this was her usual talk time.
Only that night when she spoke there seemed to be a lot of pandemonium in the
background. When we asked her casually what the commotion was all about, she
(even more casually) replied that it was probably because she was speaking from
a Discotheque.
I have never been to a disco, but I do have an imagination
so dramatic and vivid it can beat all the blinking disco lights. And being a
mother of a teenager, who happens to live in a very ‘happening’ city, I also
happen to possess a very traditionalistic and protective mind. So naturally I
wanted to know what the hell my little girl was doing after ten, in a
discotheque. ‘Don’t get psyched, Mummy’ was her casual reply. ‘Psyched?’ I
repeated. ‘Chill Ma’ she said, ‘Cool’.
‘Chill?’ I repeated. ‘Cool?’ I said, yet again. And even
with all those freezing qualities, this alien language somehow did nothing to
lower the pressure in my blood. My daughter was sounding like a chirpy
nightingale. And I was beginning to sound like her echo. ‘What are you talking
about?’ I finally managed to blurt out. ‘Why are you in a Disco?’
As far as I could remember, she was always complaining about
how the students were forever being taxed, often going for nights without any
sleep. Was attending Discotheques one of those insomniacal reasons? ‘No, Mama’,
she chirped, ‘we are just having a fresher’s party, tonight’. She then went on
to sweetly elaborate on the fact that almost all the students of the Fashion
Institute, the seniors and the juniors were also present. Were there any
chaperones, I wanted to know. She had never heard of that Victorian word before
and did not even want to know what it was. But why so late in the night, I
repeated. Delhi, after dark, I had heard was not such a safe city. When even Swiss
Diplomats could become targets of demented demons, how open to attack would a
teenaged student be? And from Hyderabad, with my sweating palms helplessly
clutching on to the phone, the prospect looked even more menacing. Did they
have any proper means of transport? How would they all be going back home?
‘Don’t worry’ was her reply, ‘there are a lot of boys too’. And mind you, that
answer was supposed to reassure me. Sort of a placating declaration that all
the ‘boy’ friends in the world were supposed to be capable creatures that would
take care of the situation, should any emergency arise!
I don’t know how I spent that night. Lets just say, my
head and heart had morphed themselves into a mini Discotheque, where all sorts
of kaleidoscopic emotions flitted across their dark chambers. I had read
somewhere that a human being is like a parachute- functional only when it is
open. But I lay there, with my closed canopied mind, refusing to retard my fall
of thinking, by tugging at those strings of reason.
My husband lay quietly beside me, wondering God knows
what! Earlier he had seemed casual enough, whispering sweet endearing
statements to his daughter, asking her to enjoy herself at the party and not to
worry and to let us know the moment they reached home etc. etc. And also making
me feel like some neurotic puritan who had never heard of harmless
entertainment before. Then suddenly he turned to me. ‘Maybe next time she is
here, you should have a talk with her’, he said casually. ‘About what?’ I
asked, pretending to ‘chill out’ like my daughter had advised me to. ‘It’s
nothing’, he said. ‘I know we can trust her and all that but still, you know’.
Yes, I knew. I knew a parent’s inexhaustible list of
alarms and anxieties, right from the time a child is conceived. I knew the painful task of having to ‘let
go’ again and again and again. In so many different ways- sometimes from home,
sometimes from the country, sometimes from their hearts and sometimes from
their lives. Bitter facts that applied to mothers and fathers all over the
world!
The next time my daughter was home for the holidays
I had a talk. The whole thing seemed so silly then. I knew she could be
trusted. I had that much confidence in my upbringing. What I needed was to
trust myself to trust her. But it is easier said than done. Sometimes the
basics of modern parenting can squeeze out the spirit from within you.
Seldom had yesterday seemed more appealing to us- when
we wanted our reluctant kids to mingle with the multitudes of faces in our
lives. Seldom is tomorrow likely to be more joyful- when our kids want to
mingle and lose themselves in the crowd and we are the ones who seem reluctant.
Seldom will life be as it was- because now we would always be engrossed in a
never- ending game of snakes and ladders. Our children wanting to climb those
ladders that take them to their tomorrows. And we, desperately wanting them to
slide down the snaky routes, hoping it would somehow aid in connecting them to
our yesterdays. I don’t know when we as parents will realize and appreciate an
important universal truth. That ladders spell success. And snakes spell
disaster.
And no
matter which way the dices roll, if the bonding is perfect, another important
factor will forever stand out. After scaling the top, a caring child will
always look below, wanting his parents to share in with his every success in
life. Needless to mention that parents will forever be present to help their
child, if ever they slid down the routes of failure.
Nargis Natarajan.