THE LAST TWO LINES AFTER MY PLAY

Pic.: Aditi Chakraborty

Last evening, Shirin*, a very dear ex-student, and now a good friend, had come to enroll her nine-year live-wire son to our under-15 PD course. She had brought along one of her friends, too, to enroll her son.

The two kids, as I told you, were ‘exploding’ in my office – simply two massive bundles of energy. So, one of the obvious reasons why Shirin and her friend wanted their ‘brats’ to be here was to find out how to minimize the high-voltage of these two transformers… “Sir, they are excellent in every respect… very confident, very expressive and very creative. The only thing we want is help them to ‘sit in one place’, do one thing completely without being distracted. In other words, focus and concentration, if persistence is too hard a word for their age.”

I was smiling. “They are just little kids, full of energy, and they are expressing it the way they have to,” I tried to calm down the mothers, “with just a little help and direction… and, yes, with loads of love, faith and patience, they would learn to be focused, less distracted. They do not need any classes and courses to teach them that.”

“It is not about them, it is about us, the parents,”  I, always, remind every over-anxious parent, “If we work on our own anxieties and insecurities, if we get in touch with the space from where our anxiety and desperation come, if we learn to relax a bit… just let go of our fear, just once, and see what happens… yes, if we do so, we will be surprised to find that our kids would be perfectly fine and emerge as rich fruits - as Mother Nature intended them to be, not necessarily as we wanted them to be.”

For many parents, it is difficult to accept. “How can we just ignore the problems of our little-ones,” they, often, ask me, “How can we be just passive, helpless spectators?”

“Who asks you to be so?” I try to explain, “I am just asking you to get in touch with the space from where your own anxiety and restlessness – the lack of focus and concentration – come.”

If our little kids did not come into this world as ‘polished kids’, we, parents, too, didn't arrive here so – as ‘polished parents’. Did anyone prepare us to be great parents? Did we do a course in parenting or did we pick up the lessons here and there, along the way, as we went about raising our little-ones? How much of it has come into us from our own childhood and how much of it has come into us through the social mirror? So, why can’t we, parents, learn to be a little more compassionate and kind to ourselves…“Hey, it is okay, it is okay”… yes, why can’t we learn to say this, more and more often?

Last evening, Shirin pointed to me this. Her nine-year-old would sit down to do the homework and do it happily. Shirin had succeeded in containing the little-one’s restlessness in this respect. However, there was still a problem. The little brat would refuse to complete the last two lines. “Mummy, I will complete it after coming from play,” was her son’s argument. “No, you should complete it and go to play,” was his mother’s argument….

So, this was an issue… “Sir, I want my son to learn to complete those last two lines… learn not to leave anything incomplete… I want him to have that kind of simple focus, simple concentration.”

And, the ‘simple’ thing was simply not coming… “If ‘You-should-complete-everything-and-then-go-to-play’ it is your way of asserting, the ‘I-will-do-last-two-lines-only-after-my-play’ is your son’s way of asserting,” I told Shirin. Then, I told her this: “Just for today, you let him have his way… Tell him, ‘Honey, don’t worry, go now and play… Complete the last two lines after your play... Just see what happens!”

The only way to conquer our fear is to do what we are afraid of… When we befriend our fear, we become peaceful…

So, you see, it is not about ‘them’… our little-ones. It is about ‘us’… their parents!

*Name changed

GERALD D’CUNHA