Parental Blues

No parent can constrict or even restrict the parental instinct to offer advice and guidance even on trivial matters to the children long aft...

No parent can constrict or even restrict the parental instinct to offer advice and guidance even on trivial matters to the children long after they have outgrown the stage! Isn’t that because our offspring remain our children, no matter how grown-up they be?

I hear my mother-in-law advising her son to put on his sweater some winter mornings. He mumbles something inaudibly and for sure goes to office in his shirt. This leaves the old lady grumbling and groaning about his “childishness and senselessness”. Mind you this about a man who’s the father of twenty-year olds! Had he been twenty-five years younger, she would have got him to dance to her tune! Or perhaps not, on second thoughts, going by experience. You see, every time my sons leave for hostel after vacation, I’d be vociferous in reeling out the oft-repeated `Do’s and Don’ts. “Don’t burn the midnight oil at the eleventh hour,” “Bathe in hot water” “blah, blah……” My elder son would diplomatically nod to everything; the younger would chant “shant”, “shant” just to irritate me. Now, with big brother on the other side of the Atlantic, the latter seems to have sobered down. He replies cutely, “Okay mummy,” and I choose not to see beyond those words and take them at face value.

Nevertheless, now each of them is undisputedly the architect of his own designs. One sends hair-raising accounts of his experiences, skiing near lake Tahoe or trekking in the Grand Canyon, nearly breaking his bones. ending with the comforting line, “Thankfully I’m back – all in one piece.”

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The other comes cycling from Mumbai to Pune in fourteen hours sending shivers in me at the imagination of the worst possibilities!So I’ve realised it’s goodbye to those days when I held their reins. I had imposed some unwritten daily rules when they were kids – “No water after oily stuff,” “no cold water, oranges and ice creams at night”. When my younger son joined the hostel, it seems he refused an orange at night and sure enough became the butt of ridicule. He’s not forgiven me for the ragging he faced at being a delicate darling. With a vengeance he started having milk-shakes and ice creams at midnight to prove me wrong. And when he does catch a cold, he turns the tables on me accusing me for his poor resistance.

Once my junior was punished in school for not applying oil on his hair and in all innocence blurted out, “Mummy says, I get a headache if I apply oil….” The habit stuck on and now he blames me for – you know what? “No thanks to you for being teased `coir-hair’,,

Sure enough my sons’ rough and tough ways are now rubbing on to me and I can claim to be a tough-cookie-in-the-making. But still they feel I have major worry over minor issues! But what they fail to realise is that `their minor’ is `our major’ and vice versa. Generation gap you see!

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