What a peculiar topic to choose, isn’t it? Some would deem this very relationship to be of the highest order in our lives. “There is no bond as beautiful and intimate as that shared between a child and its birth-givers”, they’d say. I speak not to oppose this perception but to throw some light on the darker, lesser explored aspects it encompasses. The aim is not to demean this glorified bond, but to present a different side to it, my side, straight out of my life.
Parents, indispensable, irreplaceable. Yes, they are, to me too. I happen to be the trunk of a banyan tree, with them being the roots that keep me anchored and supported. But is that all there is to this majestically enormous tree? Are the roots just enough to help it survive? No. Just like me, and quite a few others, who share a story like mine. So what do we do? We grow out other roots, supplementary ones, to keep us running the race of life. The support that our roots, our parents, provide may not always be sufficient or the kind of support we need. So we branch out, push our boundaries, widen our horizons and spread ourselves into a wider area, seeking what we need in other people, exploring and settling.
But what is the difference in what I’ve got to say then? Isn’t this everyone’s story? Well, I’m not even close to a wrap to this. What happens if this tree catches a fungal infection? What then? They cut the main root off the trunk and leave it to thrive on its “supplements”. This is what happens in a decayed, slightly hollowed relationship too. You don’t cut them out completely, but you’re detached and disconnected, from what was earlier your only support.
This is when you begin to discover how far you’re capable of going without your very foundation. Sounds strange, yes, but you learn to live with it.
You begin to find solace in friends, people, things and even certain emotion for that matter. Now, talking to absolute strangers isn’t unnerving anymore. You begin to find comfort in the smallest of things, some book that you relate to, some fictional character, anything! But what is this all about? It’s all about how it makes you feel. You fall in love with the emotions that these things and people bring along. It’s reassuring to find yourself feeling the same fuzzy feeling that warms you up from within. And you get addicted. Addicted to your independence. This is when you start growing away from your parents when you begin to realise, you’ve got your own back. You let other people become your pillars, your support, which you can fall back on. And this is your new toy. And your parents become that old teddy bear you have, you love it enough to not let go of it, but it’s just there. Not being used, no time invested in it, whatsoever.
But I don’t mean this in a negative sense. Even this teaches you something like everything else does. Above self-sufficiency, it teaches you how to trust people you don’t share the same blood with. You learn to nurture and value what you’ve got, not only with others but your parents as well.
Coming back to the fungal infection, how does that happen? That is where the society, our biosphere to the tree, comes in. They push you into doing things you don’t want to do and hold you back from some, which appeal to you. They mould us like clay, slowly and with care, yes, but more often than not, what they fail to realise is that they’re sculpting themselves, all over again. And sometimes, we don’t want to be them, or anything like them, so we try to retaliate. That’s when the rebellious ones take birth. The ones that just don’t want to fit into the same old mould, to become all, but a replica.
I agree they do this keeping in mind our future and think only for our benefit, wanting us to be equal competitors in the rat race, if not the best. What they fail to realise is that the approach that they follow is not always ideal. And not all of us are rats. We don’t fit into the picture. We’re turtles taking our own sweet time to achieve our goals and setting our own pace to follow our dreams. They don’t realise, that in this game of push and pull, that they (maybe unintentionally) are willing to put our happiness at stake. This creates a wall between you and them, a wall that you can’t hear past and nor can they. The wall built on hints of ignorance, and many a time, on the idea of a ‘generation gap’.
Our little family picture is perfect from the looks of it. Well, not everything is outright perfect, and nor are we. We’ve spun ourselves a web of emotions, indulgences and attachment, which makes you feel both integrated and trapped. This web, scientifically called a ‘symbiotic relationship’. This could be your comfort zone or your living hell. It could be something that you can just try to get out of, all your life, the biggest hurdle of them all being communication. Some jump this hurdle, some find their way around it and some, stop in their tracks, right there.
Imagine yourself being a piece of a puzzle, or let me put it this way, you find yourself as a part of the wrong puzzle set. You feel out of place and pressured to fit in. To be ideally cut out, but you aren’t. You can’t change that. The same concrete of life, they’d once imprinted while it was still wet. The concrete that has taken ages to harden, take a shape and form, is now brittled by the very same people. This pressure, this very pressure, forms the first cracks between you and them. And even the smallest of blows that follow, can make them deeper and bigger, till it all falls apart.
So, in this book of life, not all chapters are beautiful gardens with colourful flowers. Some have dungeons, some caves, and some, just lonely, empty roads that seem to lead you nowhere. But that is what makes it interesting. We are the authors of our own lives, and our parents, our editors.
Regardless of what I’ve said so far, there is something unique that we share with them. The way our faces light up when we do the smallest of things to make them proud, the way they try to spin out something beautiful from every emotion we feel, beading it in into beautiful neckpieces.
Our relationship may seem to have lost its foundation and we still look for connections back to them at times, but what we haven’t lost, are those moments that cameras can’t capture, those beautiful memories that words can only fail to do justice to, those emotions that take birth at the sound of their voice, the comfort that only their touch can bring.
Although this may appear as a bittersweet mess, down the line, as our thoughts are muddled up, in a world full of confusion and chaos, this clarity is what we will seek.
– Anusha Misra