Tag: parenthood

  • No kidding!

    In my long-running Twitter thread on Malayalam movies, I posted this after I watched Sara’s.

    https://twitter.com/manuscrypts/status/1414114394179473408

    It also reminded me of a post I had in drafts. I had left it unfinished because I wondered if it was too preachy. But hey, what’s a blog for?

    Every now and then, I find myself in conversations with women in their late 20s and early 30s on the subject of parenthood. Stop! Rein in your imagination! These only happen because I am in my early 40s and they see me as someone who seems to have survived a couple of decades of being one half of a DINK couple. And no, I obviously don’t initiate the conversation! So I thought a little primer would be a good way for me to structure my experiences and perspectives.

    It’s that time of life: Evolution has programmed the gene to make sure it transfers itself to the next generation. And the gene, through the body and the chemicals within, has some amazing ways to get aggressive and passive aggressive when it senses that it’s time for you to do its bidding. Its fingerprints can even been seen in societal architecture but we’ll get to that in a bit. A book I can recommend to get an understanding of the gene’s machinations is Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal. The phase, I think, lasts from the late 20s to the mid-late 30s, and is definitely a crossroads.

    This is also the time when you will be interrogated by everyone who thinks they’re either family, or an employee of the Census Commission. I initially got irritated, and then started using everything from lack of knowledge to erectile dysfunction to traumatise people. That finally stopped all questions. Giving different reasons to different people at the same time is a nice side-game too. But seriously, “reproduction as a way of validating one’s existence” has been around so long that most people don’t even realise there is an option!

    It takes two and has to be talked through: These days, three is also common, but I’ll stick to basics. If I have to be honest, I was always sure about this but didn’t have that conversation with D early enough. To this day, I think I did wrong by her. I just kept kicking the can down the road until our early 30s. She is most definitely happy with the decision now, but I could have probably saved her some heartache if I had been proactive. I believe it’s better if it is a conscious decision by both parties. A discussion that includes the reasons. It could lead to a postponement and not a complete cancellation. And probably a review of the decision every couple of years to see if you still feel the same way.

    I know that makes it sound like a business review, but it probably comes from the original reason for my decision – having kids has zero ROI. Yes, I acknowledge that there might be intangible and probably tangible emotional benefits, but I was (and continue to be) skeptical. Even about the unconditional love of motherhood. It is the nature of the mind to have expectations, and parenthood is not exempt from this. I wouldn’t want myself or another human being to go through this. My other big reason is a potential loss of my perceived freedom. I didn’t like the trade-off.  Most importantly, I am conscious that there really is no undo button once you embark.

    It is important to think through implications: Over a period of time, civilisation has created a life script that includes a family unit with kids as one of society’s principal pillars. This is the societal architecture I mentioned earlier. When you step out of the script, you will notice a difference in the structuring of groups you were once part of. People change with life stages – after getting married and most definitely after becoming parents. Their social circle changes too, as they become parts of communities that have similar routines and schedules. The conversations will shift too, to include kids’ education, and extra curricular activities. Travel tends to get planned around school vacations, and the residence is adjusted to be near the school. And yes, there will be birthday parties. From experience, being adults without kids at a kid’s birthday party is a reasonably good torture method. Thankfully, if you behave appropriately, the invites will stop. But seriously, there is a definite impact on your social life, though I think that might become less of a problem now with the increasing number of couples delaying or choosing not to have kids.

    An apprehension I keep hearing of is the “who will take care of us when we are old?” Usually this is a quick conversation when I point out how they (we) are taking care of our parents. I am also reasonably confident of retirement communities becoming a norm in the next couple of decades as a generational cohort with money retires, and also understand that their children have their own lives. Yes, you do have to plan your retirement well, and if your plan involves being dependent on your child, well…

    No, you won’t automatically get bored in your 40s if you don’t have kids. And no, you don’t even have to be a pet parent, although that is something I increasingly see. But yes, it’s good to cultivate interests.

    A last point, and it’s actually a couple of hypotheses. Becoming a parent, I think, makes one more empathetic, because of the daily challenges. These daily challenges also provides the confidence to handle unpredictability. No, you don’t have to become a parent for either, it’s just an observation.

    It’s personal and not a crusade: Back in 2016, Indigo’s “quiet zones“, where children under the age of 12 were not permitted to sit, made several parents fume. Having been at the receiving end of several kicks mid-flight, and jolted out of sleep/reading by kids who thought I was part of the airport “playground”, I was quite happy about this. I do understand parents might be under a lot of stress, but there are limits on how much consideration they should expect from others for a decision they made!

    Having said that, if you opt not to have kids, you don’t need to crusade for making this everyone’s choice. After all, remember how irritating it was to be at the receiving end of the opposite crusade? It’s a decision like any other – marriage/single/live-in, invest in FD/MF/land/stocks/crypto, buy/rent a home – and different people choose different things. So long as one is happy, understands the implications, and does not inconvenience others, all’s good.

    In essence, it is an important decision1 and though that it’s near impossible to predict happiness later in life, you might want to put a regret minimisation2 lens on it too.

    1 How People Decide Whether to Have Children

    2 7 Reasons Not to Fear Regret About Not Having Kids

    Further Reading

    Voluntary Childlessness

  • In the beginning…

    Over on the other blog, I had discussed one of my favourite 2012 trend decks – by Ross Dawson. Within that, my favourite trend was #4 – Institutions in question, in which he talks of political situations (Arab unrest), and the change in status of financial institutions leading to movements like Occupy Wall Street. The last slide is titled “Transformation not apocalypse”, in which he mentions the significance of 2012 for several reasons – from the Mayan calendar’s end of the word prophecy to it being hailed as the year of the Singularity – a subject that keeps popping up on this blog. 🙂

    I, for one, believe that we’re in for a transformation. But it’s not just the political, economic or even technological changes happening around us, I think we’re fundamentally going to change as individuals and how we relate to others – society. So it’s not just the economic and political institutions that will be transformed, but even social institutions – marriage, family, parenthood, friendship and so on.

    As the average human life span increases thanks to medical advances, the ‘rational’ reasons underpinning these social institutions will be under scrutiny. I have a feeling that technology will soon allow us to find surrogates for each of these, one way or the other. It isn’t as though the institutions themselves will disappear, but their importance and the solidity they had thus far enjoyed would diminish. What exactly the changes would be is something I’m still trying to imagine, but the effect of social networks on relationships is probably the beginning of this transformation, and we are likely to be known as the generation under whose watch it all began.

    until next time, a happy 2012 to you 🙂

  • Parenthesis

    Sometime back, I saw this relatively unknown Malayalam movie called ‘Calendar’, starring Zareena Wahab, playing mother to Navya Nair. Zareena’s character is widowed at 21 and she refuses to remarry since she wants to give all her attention to her child. The movie worked for me, despite it being built on the cliched “kid grows up, and gives more importance to her own life than her parent’s feelings”, thanks to a tight script and some neat casting.

    On the day I’m writing this, 3 works – one news item, one article, and one short story – appeared in my reading stream. The news was about a 107 year old woman left by her children, one of whom stays nearby, to fend for herself in a cowshed, the article centred around the topic of divorce and its impact on children, and the fiction work had to do more with marriage and infidelity, but with a neat twist in the end. Speaking of the end, I will link to them there, so you don’t escape this early. 😉

    I really didn’t need these prompts to write on the subject, since parenthood has been a source of constant debate recently, thanks to our parents aging and showing the first signs of serious aches and pains, even as we grow older and realise that the body also believes in keeping a low temperature of revenge for sins committed on it during the last three decades. 🙂

    Parenthood is one of those things that seriously lacks an undo feature, just like death, and is hence treated as a decision that merits serious thought. In general, the parents want the child to have a happy life and make choices on its behalf. Choices the child may not like/appreciate, but the parents believe to be the right one. They also make sacrifices for the child, in terms of time, money, and so on.

    But at least for debate’s sake, do you think these acts are always completely selfless? Isn’t brewing underneath it all a set of expectations? Sometimes parents see children as a way of fulfilling their own aspirations, sometimes they see them as support mechanisms in old age. Even if it’s none of these, or others you can think of, they at least get some pleasure out of seeing their child do well in life.

    But what blows me has always been that the parents get to make this considered choice of having a child and the child who is brought into the world and is the recipient of this and later choices, has zero say in the matter. It’s a serious product design flaw, and the only non-utopian remedy is for everyone concerned not to take each other for granted.

    As promised, the news, the article and the story.

    until next time, apparent traps