My friend observed that I had become an anxious person. I think I have always been so! My children complain about how I am always displaying negative emotions of worry and anxiety for the future. It’s strange my anxieties are opposite for each of my children. When they were young I would ask my son to read books and ask my daughter to not waste so much time reading books. Now I ask my daughter to get married while explaining to my son he needs to reach a more comfortable place in his career and personal goals to be able to welcome someone else in his life. I noted in one of my older blogs too how I was Consultant parent for one (the one who helps when ansked) and helicopter parent for the other (the one who hovers), an instinctive parent at one time and authoritarian next!
Looking from the outside I seem to have nothing to worry about. I too try to tell myself that, but we all build a perfect picture of how our lives and lives of our children should be, in our heads. Needless to say my kids think very differently from me. I am learning to not dish out free advise all the time. Having them around, playing games with them, socializing with them, cooking for them, arguing with them, watching stuff together....its all been very soul satisfying most of the time in spite of clashes of will and wit!
For instance my son recently picked up all sweets and snacks from the house and put them in his car admonishing us on how we are jeopardizing our health by indulging in these sweet and trans fat packed goodies. I realised how the tables had turned. This is a conversation I used to have with the children when not buying chocolates and aerated drinks for them. Now his diet is protien packed with no sugar and processed food! I still keep pestering him about cooking and eating daal, plant protien! Its not easy to give up the planning and advising, when you have been planning meals and packed lunches, weaning foods, treats and parties for most of your life for them.
He has also asked us to start lifting weights and going for walks. I am planning to follow his advice, but again I don't stop singing praises of yoga to him! Now he asks me what my plan for the future is! I am allowed to not have a plan, aren't I? Someone please tell him, I have done my bit for the world!
My daughter, the eldest child, who has always carried the burden of being the sensible one in the house. The one who worries about and looks after everyone, the one who dissipates tension, resolves arguments and gets along with everyone even when they are biting each other's heads off! She has been telling me how she lives in another time and hence cannot get married after 2 meetings like her parents did! Listening to her makes me wonder if we would have got married if we had had a longer engagement or whether we would have got engaged at all if we had gone on half a dozen dates! Ajay only discovered my militant feminism after marriage!
Well, our parents hadn't even seen one another yet their marriages worked! Marriages worked because you didn't expect finished products, we knew it was impossible to find perfection and we had faith that we would grow together. Now people are marrying later, have stressful careers and lives and need a certain level of growth to start with to be able to cope with their own lives while building one together. It wasn't easy before and it isn't easy today but the intention to want to be married and stay married is what is waning!
People have always said kids are challenging at every stage of their lives. Its true. Having adult independent children comes with its own set of challenges. But I think the anxiety is our own creation and doesn't help at all. It didn't when they were choosing careers, giving exams and pursuing extracurriculars and it doesnt help now when they decide how they want to live, what they want to spend their time and money on, who they want to meet and live with, where they want to go to work or holiday!
Khalil Gibran's words are my lived experience
Your children are not your children
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts
You may house their bodies but not their souls
For they have their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams
You may strive to be like them but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth
The archer sees the mark upon the infinite and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness
For even as He loves the arrow that flies so he loves also the bow that is stable
