I Took It As An Instruction

Sunday morning. We finish breakfast by 7:30. My younger daughter and me watch the last two episodes of the Tata Titan series. Nothing else planned. That’s the point of Sunday.

At 9 I go for my nap. She goes to her room also. Before going she tells me, wake me up by 10.

At 10 I go in. I ask her politely to get up.

“I will after sometime.” I left the room without saying anything.

I took it as an instruction. Nudged her again at 11. That’s it. Nothing happened.

I’ve been trying all of July to write about what goes on in me when I’m dealing with the world outside. And it keeps coming back to small things. This one is about being a parent.

If you had asked me at 10:01 what I was thinking, I would have said nothing. I had no thoughts. I walked out, went back to bed. I even forgot about it for a while.

But that’s not true. Not fully. Because there was a sentence sitting there. Fully formed. I just didn’t say it.

She will end up wasting her day.

I didn’t say it. I also didn’t decide not to say it. It just didn’t come out- unlike in the past. My parenting has been simple. In retrospect, anyway.

Care, give what is asked for, and as the child grows, give logic. Stop worrying about the effort of building a rapport. Genes are there. I’m the father, these are my kids, no formalities. What is wrong is wrong.

There was a time I was told I neglect my kids. I had a defence ready. They’re watching, I said. Subliminal observation. A father who is available, self-driven, who reads, who writes, who exercises, who is hardly angry. They pick it up. I don’t have to teach. I still think that’s mostly right.

But the defence was a little too easy. So this month I did what I always do. I went and read.

There’s a lot. Styles, four boxes, warmth on one side and control on the other. The authoritative one is supposed to be the best. There’s newer work on my daughters’ generation specifically. Mine are Gen Z too.

And I kept reading, expecting to find the thing. The theory. The one that explains a child. It isn’t there.

I don’t mean the research is bad but for sure much smaller than any parent wants. Genes do their part. The child is doing their own thing. Parenting sits somewhere in there and matters, but not in the way we like to think it matters.

What does hold up from the studies done is that guilt does damage. Making love conditional does damage. And watching your child closely does not make them tell you things. Only a child who feels safe tells you things, and you can’t make that happen. You can only stop being the reason it doesn’t. So the science only tells me what not to do. I found that comforting. Then I found it uncomfortable. Because it means my defence was wrong somewhere.

I didn’t have “no thoughts” at that door. I had one. And it was probably correct. She did lose most of that Sunday.

What I had was a gap. The thought came, and it didn’t turn into a sentence.

That gap isn’t the absence of a mind. It’s not effortlessness. It’s not some peaceful father who has stopped caring how his daughter’s day goes.

I don’t know what to call it. Something that got practised for years without me knowing I was practising.

And this is where I’ve been fooling myself, I think. I kept calling it passive. Kept telling myself that as a drishta none of it is mine anyway. She’ll do what she does, the day goes where it goes, I’m only watching. No control. No interest in control.

But a man who walks out of a room without saying anything is not a man with no interest. He has the interest. He just didn’t hand it over.

Different thing. She woke up at 12:30. I served her lunch on her bed.