2-19-21
It feels like it’s been years since I wrote anything. And today was a good day to return. The hardest part of writing is often feeling secure in what it is that we want to write about. Today I wanted to write about this…
“If I could give you one thing in life, I would give you the ability to see yourself through my eyes.” - Bindu A. (a fellow parent)
As I was scrolling through my FB feed this was the sentence that stopped me in my tracks. There. That is the essence of a parent’s love. I have never known it’s equal. And it got me going on thinking about all the lovely sentiments that I have read about or by parents, on what it is like to be one.
I have known love in its many forms. I have been on the giving and receiving end. But it wasn’t until I became a Dad that I understood the notion of unconditional love. I tell my girls now that there is nothing they can do that would change the fact that I will love them always. (Pushover Dad alert!)
So, I understood my friend Bindu’s quote completely, accompanied as it was by a photo of her looking at her child with a mother’s love manifested. We have hopes and dreams for ourselves, which then become our hopes and dreams for our children. We aim to be good parents. We perseverate, we yell and then feel guilty about doing it, and we give time outs and count the time down quietly in our minds. Through it all we give of ourselves, willingly. Through all the mistakes, ups and downs, and disappointments. The moments of love, whether brief or prolonged, make everything else worthwhile.
Another friend from work, Pragnesh, jokingly says that being a parent is like being a heroin addict. You spend all your effort and focus on one goal, and you are willing to neglect your own life and body just to experience those moments of high, when the children are at their best, and shower you with a moment of love. Bit of hyperbole, but it is funny.
Years ago when I read ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ for the first time, I was not a father yet, only a son. Still this part of the story stayed with me. When Mitch and Morrie are talking about parenthood, Morrie gives the most objective answer, as he is prone to do: “Whenever people ask me about having children or not having children, I never tell them what to do,” Morrie said now, looking at a photo of his oldest son. “I simply say, ‘There is no experience like having children.’ That’s all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.”
There’s another definitive declaration of parental love – there is nothing like it.
I thought too of a moment from the movie ‘Interstellar’ when Matthew McConaughey’s character Cooper is preparing to leave Earth for his mission, and he wants to reconcile with his daughter before leaving. In the course fo their conversation he says, “once you are a parent, you are the ghost of your children’s future’. As the story unfolds, it keeps coming back to the notion that in all his travel through space and time, Cooper was just trying to get back to his children, even though for them he was as if long gone.
We could probably keep going on this search. But, arbitrary as it may be, I am choosing to stop. And the paragraph that is most apt to end with, sadly also marked the end of a young life full of potential. If you are a parent or a child, I encourage you to read the story by and of Paul Kalanithi. He was a young neurosurgeon, who succumbed to cancer just as he was finishing his medical training. But before he passed, he and his wife had a baby. In wanting to leave some measure of meaning for his child, who would grow up without him around, he ended his book with a paragraph which surpasses all in its quiet yearning. This then is how I hope my children too would be able to understand my love for them and what they mean to me though I could not have said it as elegantly as Paul did to his newborn daughter.
“There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.
That message is simple:
When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.” – When Breath becomes Air
Being a parent is, simply, nature’s blessing to help us understand a part of ourselves.