One morning the big children were in school and the toddler was pottering around the house. By ‘pottering’ I mean that she was sweeping a jharoo around, tunelessly humming what I think is ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’. My mother watched her for a while over her cup of tea, and then remarked that this is what most children were probably up to back in the good old days when they didn’t go to school before they were five. She’s right. My grandmother never followed any of her children around waving flashcards in their face. Nobody had a dedicated nursery with ABC runners and educational cot-mobiles. Kids wandered around their houses, getting into mischief and just hanging out with whichever adult was around. There was no hysteria about pre-preschool and fine motor skills and food colouring because the newspapers wouldn’t print articles about them, there were no computers to access all kinds of random studies on and most importantly, everyone was equally relaxed about what their children were up to. Nobody was making faces and asking pointed questions about the gluten content of the cake because nobody knew about gluten and frankly, nobody cared.
It is exhausting to be a parent these days. One is still under scrutiny from everyone around oneself, from random acquaintances at weddings to your dadi’s sister. Did you deliver ‘naturally’? Did you get an epidural? Are you nursing? No? What’s wrong with you? Who is looking after your child while you are here at this dinner/wedding/tea? The litany is never-ending. To add to that is the blasted internet, and Facebook, and All.The.Links. Recently I read an article about how the brain of a three year old that was properly cared for by its mother was twice the size of one who had suffered neglect. The article failed to qualify what ‘neglect’ meant—a drug addict mother who would forget to feed her toddler for two days, or the mother whose toddler likes to dig in flowerbeds and eat dirt? Did the neglect of the child’s father have any role to play? There are the annoying, smug Huffington Post articles about how shouting at children makes them sad little losers, about how you should say other words than ‘no’ because it damages self-esteem. Stories about the fathers who take their little daughters out on dates, so they know how they deserve to be treated by men. Missives on how dangerous it is to give babies water or how their intestines will turn purple if you wean them before six months. The studies about how breastfed babies are smarter, how vaccinating them will turn them into wolves at a full moon and so forth.
Cut from that to Real Life. Real, desi life where even if you aren’t shouting at your kid the maid talks so loudly that it cancels out any salubrious effect your gentle dove coos were having. Where you have to vaccinate for every disease under the sun, because it is quite plausible that your five year old could get Hepatitis A from an ice lolly or typhoid from the swimming pool. We live in a country where polio still exists and brain-eating amoeba is an actual, real thing, not just a crazy storyline from a 1950s pulp comic book. In our real-life world no desi father would ever be caught dead taking their daughter out on a date. Fathers in this part of the world can barely string two sentences together to talk to their children, let alone buy them a flower and take them out to dinner.
What happens when we are presented with this relentless deluge of information? One reads all the articles and studies, most of which don’t mention fathers or their role in the size of their mutual children’s brains, and frets. The average upper-middle-class mother who reads all this proceeds to worry about the hormones in the chicken causing early-onset menarche in her daughter, about sourcing organic vegetables, about toxic chemicals in the detergent being the reason that clean laundry smells nice. Now you can’t even have the pleasure of a crisp, scented pillowcase to rest your head on because now you know that’s not perfume, it’s some poisonous fume that will melt your brain. No father I know ever reads anything about this, or cares. It’s the sole domain of the mothers, who are already feeling guilty about too many things, and then have another apprehension heaped on their plate. After all, good mothers should be concerned about the link between eating Oreos and reduced cognitive skills. Only bad mothers let their children eat fish crackers (MSG!) and Jet Sport lollies (food colouring!) and don’t check the shampoo for Sodium Laurel Sulfate (cancer!) or parabens (mimics oestrogen, early puberty!).
I long for the simpler days when it was perfectly all right to just let your children be, and to be able to just get on with parenting. When you could eat a chicken nugget and not have all those hormone warnings and images of the weird KFC mutant chickens echoing in your head like the raven’s ‘nevermore’. When you weren’t bombarded with information you can’t verify, but makes one uncomfortable to know regardless. Coke can get rust off iron? From now on every time your kid sneaks some at a birthday party one will panic a little thinking of their tender little childish insides being eaten away by that corrosive, delicious poison-water. McDonald’s burgers never decompose? A Happy Meal has not passed my children’s mouths ever since Jamie Oliver talked about that pink sludge. And the irony is that most of these pious studies and articles exist to sell you an alternative lifestyle or line of products you didn’t know you needed until you read about how shampoo is evil, ergo one must use an organic concoction that is free of all nasty chemicals, and twice the price. Or organic meat, or organic cotton clothes, or what have you. It’s all too much information, and sometimes I think I’d rather not know.