IT IS LIKE the flow of water. Parents have this unqualified desire to see their children’s pursuit of happiness is constant and incessant.
One of the major milestones is to ensure that they are happily married at some reasonable point. There is little so devastating for parents growing into their winter years than to have their children walk the shards of shattered wedlock and come home. Although broken marriages are now part of the social fabric and better understood (not always a good thing) the pain and the guilt and “what might have beens” don’t actually go away.
For an expat generation of parents who have imparted a hybrid value system they euphemistically call “universal” their children and allowed them to function in a more liberal environment the fallout can bring with it much disquiet. This is all fine so long as “showing off” the children is concerned but when parents jerk the chain and want children to come to heel because now it suits them to be conservative there is this sudden confrontation between the parents and children and within the parents themselves. The lament of “why did we deserve this, we gave them everything” becomes a redundant wail, drenched as it is with expedient hypocrisy. Having given the children the right to being “worldly” in its best sense, parents are now torn between their traditional roots and the awful fear that their children have no such bonds to tradition.
Marriage becomes the first fallen jump and probably the largest. For parents per se, the wedding of a son and daughter is the acme of their investment in love and other more material tangibles. Along comes the son or daughter and cheerfully wrecks the planning with a mind of his or her own and the parents are aghast. They must now either shriek their indignation or, for the sake of appearances, dredge for virtue in the alien find and discover much to approve, even as they fervently hope their child will see sense.
It would all be very amusing if it wasn’t so serious. Children are suddenly made aware that their free thinking parents are not all that global in their attitudes. Parents are caught between the satisfying glow they felt dispatching their young ones to foreign lands for the best of education and now they have to contend with this complete outsider with whom their child is smitten. Parents know that life in the married lane is pretty tough, they have been there, done it and even lost out in much more supportive environments. Now, there is a need to protect the child from this foolishness not because they are prejudiced but because they know the dice is loaded even before the phase begins. Children don’t understand that and having been brought up in a system that allows them the right to fall in love with anyone they now want to make their own mistakes and not settle for the socially acceptable choice.
Certainly, there are enough such marriages that have succeeded and stand as testimony to the fact that they are as likely to succeed or fail as marriages between families from a common background.
What does a parent do? If you prattle on about families marrying each other and not the individuals you might as well read Sanskrit for all the sense it makes to children. Then again, your plans, your dreams, your concept of what a marriage must be to maintain your standing in the community is now a relatively selfish premise even though that does not reduce its legitimacy as a factor. As far as the children are concerned they don’t want to marry the whole flipping clan and the word ‘happiness’ shuttles between the two sides. Parents warn that once the gloss has worn and reality sets in happiness becomes a hostage. Children says, yes but that is up to us, we know what we are doing.
It is an endless war and for this generation of parents an increasing realization that having let go of the umbilical cord they cannot keep trying to reinforce that attachment. Most certainly it is a very real fear and one that we, as parents, can never overcome. We send our children thousands of miles away, a gigantic leap in one single generation for people who won’t let their daughters cross the road. We do it with all good faith and trust and suffice it to say that the trust is not betrayed if they do fall in love or meet someone for whom they care. It is our own parental response, based on history and custom and propelled by our own inadequacies, that we are fighting when we show resistance.
We don’t say no because we mean no.
We are saying no because we want to protect them, warn them, make sure they are not hurt.
As parents that is our right.
Which is why if I find myself in that position, I’d rather fight hard and then give in with grace, comforted by the fact that I could not do more and now I wish them happiness.
If only we were articulate enough to get that message across.
