AN AYE FOR AN AYE!
The best punishment for your children is- children! Their own!
Just as you fight fire with fire the only way to conquer an ailment is with a
dose of its own germs. Sorta like homeopathy. Give small doses of the toxin to
negate the ill effects of the same. You catch my drift? All we parents need to
do is bide our time, cease the nervous drumming of our fingertips, stop the
question that reverberates in our head ‘Do you even know what sacrifices we
parents make?’ and just wait.
Time will pass slowly but surely and the cycle will be
complete. The relentless march of time will be unstoppable and the clock will complete the circle. And then you will have closure because what
was done unto you will be done unto them. First, by those little hands and
later by invisible fists of fury in the form of hurtful words. “You just don’t
get it”, “As if you care”, “You are irrelevant”, “STOP INTERFERING”- all the
angry blah blahs hurled at you like pointed arrows which stabbed your maternal
heart will reverse trajectory and find its mark.
Like a postcard without enough postage and stamped ‘Return
to sender’- parenthood is a complex route where the goal is not the destination
but the journey. Many times the parent does not know that the journey has come
to an end and it is usually when your ‘kid’ has become an independent adult.
You just have to LET GO. Whether it is anxiety that spurs the advice or love
that goads the action, if you find that the postcard is being returned, STOP
and do not RESEND.
Take a good look and withdraw. If you persist in breaching
the perimeter you are likely to be shot down. The hardest thing for a parent is
to be a mute spectator while their flesh and blood self-destructs. Whether it
is their physical health they are abusing, their fiscal health they are
callously decimating and their lifestyle choices- we have to be like the third
monkey and seal our mouths. Look, listen but do not speak. At least that way no
one can make a monkey out of you!
Nimmou Nilakantan
