My Father’s Son to My Son’s Father …

A few days back, I saw a beautiful sight, a father and son running together. They turned a corner and they both started sprinting. With the father being my age and the son around 14, you can guess what happened. As the son crossed me and the father ran about 5 meters behind him, through the sweat and effort on his face, I could see a proud smile. The father was happy that his son had beaten him.

And it reminded me of meeting some of my son’s friend’s parents just outside his school gate. It was one of those Saturday exam things and I was waiting for him to finish and drive him back. We were standing in a circle and there were some parents there that I did not know and I introduced myself to them as my son’s father. I reflected back to that moment and how many of them laughed at what I said and clearly felt the same way. Not one of them felt that they needed to be known as anything else.

This brought back a third memory of my dad and mom talking about me to some of their friends a long time ago and telling them exaggerated, blown up versions of my so called exploits. While I felt that they were bragging and later picked a small fight with them on the topic, I look back and can clearly identify with that moment when they felt proud enough about me to talk in that fashion. I do too, on many occasions, talk the same way today. And I brush it off as a parent’s pride, no longer calling it bragging now that it is me in the dock.

That got me to thinking. What parent does not want his or her son or daughter to be a bigger, better version of their selves? Which one of us does not see their children beating those very same challenges that we could not overcome? Which of us does not want to prepare them for meeting all those challenges? And hold them over every step or stone on the way and take out the thorns from the path they are on. Many reams of paper have been written about parenting styles now and every such action of ours is dissected to death by psychoanalysts. All I can say is that while parenting styles might have changed with the onset of nuclear families and may have adapted to the changing needs of the new generation who question more than they accepts and choose to follow their hearts, there are certain home truths that have remained.

Which of the boxes in the 2 x 2 matrix do we fit into? Who wants to be labelled an authoritarian parent or an indulgent one as we stand in front of our kids and ask them why they did something or they didn’t as the case maybe? Do we fall into the bracket of Asian rooted parents who are so driven for their children to succeed that they either control their lives completely or are we extreme parents who abandon our careers to be part of our children’s lives? The answer is a difficult one for me at least as subjective as I am in the decision making as I don’t think I fall into any one style. I am a convenient mix of styles depending on the situation and my desired outcome out of my son! Now that we have got that complex bit of psychoanalysis out of the way, let’s move onto the actual matter at hand.

We feel happy if our children grow taller than us and rejoice when we lose a tickle match to them. We are floating when we are unable to beat them at arm-wrestling or football. We want them to excel at extracurricular activities as well as academics. Grades are scanned and tuitions arranged in subjects which are less than exciting. The kid probably goes through a Spanish inquisition each time a grade card comes, a second one after the one at school! Of course all this may mean performance pressure on the kids and therefore pushing and prodding and raising the bar with all its frustrations and psychotic facets that might manifest when the kid is an adult. But, hey, that is the kid’s problem to deal with, right?

Does it mean that we live our lives through our kids when we are too old to chase our dreams on our own? Do we force our dreams on our children and does this prevent them from having dreams of their own? In any case, this whole thought train was not at all about the pressures that we put on our kids, though I would be an elevated parent who was into more wholesome upbringing of his kid if I did. But that is another chapter for another day perhaps. The point is that I am still one of those parents whose heart seems to swell up impossibly when their kid does something they could not. When he is playing football, I want him to be able to run faster than the next kid, shoot harder and aim truer too. And when he is playing his guitar or trying his hand at a quiz where I have no clue of the answer he has just spouted, that full feeling comes back again. It is seemingly irrational and baseless, but always there.

How do we see ourselves as parents? I remember my own parents, busy enough with their lives making a mission out of being able to provide better options for us as children, putting every demand of ours before their own. Is it our mission in life also to provide bigger and better options to our children and encourage them to follow their dreams? Or do we all want our children to be more independent and stronger versions of ourselves who can beat our records and our achievements hollow? Is that what we consider our achievement, to create a better us and rejoice in their victories and celebrate their successes, shielding them from bitter storms and harsh deserts? Is this the legacy that we hand down to our children, the learning that supposedly passes through the DNA which results in the salmon swimming upriver to where it was spawned? Are we born our father’s sons and do we die as our son’s fathers?