The complex position in human society, of being a parent.

Someone once said to me, it’s a matter of bravery to get into the system of politics and fight for social justice when you’re a person of family. Because then you have too much at stake, fighting for the truth has serious consequences on the life of an individual. As sad as it is, you are and will be at constant threat. But if you’re a person, a breadwinner, a contributor, a handler, a caregiver of a family, you my friend are in deep waters.

A similar idea was shared to me by my father when I got into the student body of my college. If you’re around 18, a fresh adult you’ll slowly figure out that you as an individual are pretty thick and dumb. You’ve literally walked your whole life on someone else’s footing. The foundation of your thinking is just a generation of consumed and conditioned ideas that you have been blinded to. And so suddenly and subtly you begin to see everyone in a very different light. Your quiet friend has a deep relatable conversation with you and your preconceived simplistic notions about their identity are challenged. They’re no longer just quiet, they’re incomprehensible. But this is too basic an example. I think around this age you begin to see people as people and not as the roles they or you or society assigned for them. Suddenly the basketball which looked a mere brown sphere from afar, whose only role was to go into the basket appears much more. As the many dot like protrusions on a spherical surface, as it materiality, as its symbology, its history, its histology. And you go like, well shit.

Objects aside, you begin holding very changeable and fluid opinions about things. Simply because with the amount of information that you suddenly are able to see and hear, you cannot fathom a formal ideology of opinions for yourself. As teenagers we hold a very high ground for our idols. As teenagers we assume ourselves as a very disadvantaged unit of the human society. We hold our experiences as the judging ground of our misinformed opinions, we selectively empathise only with ourselves and growingly become self-involved in hormone and media induced-enforced fallacies which we consider issues.

>>Warning, I tend to talk in “we” and “you” positions, that does not mean I’m trying to generalize or patronize. It’s just a way of not seeming too self involved by talking about everything in my own context consider this blog largely runs on that. <<

But lately I’ve been exposed to this wide platform of knowledge and it makes me realise how I’ve made a glass house full of shams in and around myself which has prevented me to see the real deal beyond myself, even in this transparency. If you ask me what I believe in, I will tell you that as of now I don’t have beliefs, I do not have opinions. Because as I try to revisit and question all I know in order to understand myself and my surroundings, I slowly shed off all the layers that made my identity. And that leaves an empty vessel for absorption of ideas. I’ve been talking about myself, when this is supposed to be about someone else, I’m trying to give you context in the hope that you see what I see too.

You see your parents from the day you’re born. What you don’t realize is that the day you were born, their life, their goals, their individualities and their relationship changed forever. What a lot of us do is disregard the sheer importance of us as a child in a parent’s life. The immensity with which our existence hits their life force is simply unfathomable. Even though they’ll always treat you as a kid and you’ll get used to it (with protests and tantrums), at a point in life you begin to see this basketball side to them too. It didn’t hit me as it should have. As much as I analyse the world and its people, I realize the amount of analysing I do towards my own family is very less. It comes with the assumption that I know them so I don’t readily need to.

But in a world of constructed identities, is it possible to know someone fully, in the course of your life while you live under the same roof. Ask yourself, isn’t the way you behave at home sometimes very different than how you are among peers? Fundamentally our identities are driven by who we’re engaging with. That applies to your parents too. They also have many constructed identities, the most well maintained around you. Some days I have these very out of time conversations with my mom and dad that leave me stagnant in wonder. When I say out of time I mean, when you do not have a sense of the time dimension. When it’s just two people talking, exchanging ideas, with no motive, intent or impact. It’s a moment of existing in one’s mind and letting out. As much as you surprise your parents with what you say in such moments, they surprise you too. It’s a “did I just have that conversation with my parent?” at first to “I never imagined that they have thought about this” to “how has something so important to me never come up?” to “do I even know them” real quick.

I’ve started seeing them beyond a parent role. I’ve started seeing them as two very different, complex, deep, interesting and sharp people. We romanticize the idea of ‘humans are complex’. We obsess over the minds of outsiders whom we meet a couple of times in our life, or maybe read about or hear. But we fail to look into our own living rooms and credit the ones whom we’ve grown up next too. These are people who have been part of the system longer than you can imagine. These are people who have been sucked into the havoc and chaos of society and learnt to derive their own methods to survive. To cope. To adjust. And after years of layering themselves, building themselves as fully functional wheels driving to catch up with this system, they have sacrificed their ambition in order to feed yours.

Can you as this point imagine doing that for anyone? It’s big. Bigger than we’ve credited all our privileged life.

Our parents have discovered and observed patterns of how the world works in their own lenses, but they only share the necessary information to us when we need guidance or warning. That’s one thing I love about my parents, they have never enforced their ideas upon us, in ways maybe even hidden them from us, leading to a less conditioned mind set. But that makes me think, I don’t know them at all.

How much of their life have they truly talked to you about? (Outside of you and your families interests)

Sometimes I notice a weird lingering individual-ness about them. Like they are as lost in their head as I am. And suddenly my notions of being a different person than them gets challenged. This is a person who has gone through way more conditioning than I did, who lived in a even more unfair world than I did, did not have half the luxuries I have, seen more shit than I ever will, managed to climb up the ladder and not be dragged down as society’s pawn and is still standing. With all of those gained layers of years and experience. This person has shed it all for you.

Yet as children, we only see them as – a parent. Only as the granted role that they play.

And in this framework, will you ever know them?