The title of this piece today is so obviously a take on William Wordsworth's famous quote that it indeed needs no recounting. Vastly different, however, are the foci. If Wordsworth's poem talks of the beginning of a new era, the title of our blog today is the exact antithesis of the feel.
Actually at times in our life we are indeed the parents of our parents. The best example of that phenomenon currently would be the way the computer native Gen-Next guides the computer illiterate parents and their parents, making them rather tech savvy in the process.
Every Gen-next most often is wor(l)d w(e)ary as well. Our elders try to protect us from the ways of the world thinking we know nothing. In their own way, the children, however, are better judges of the contemporaneous reality. In other words, children are parents of their elders, too.
When, however, your mother or father feels feeble and fat-uous due to the frailties old age is heir to, the emptiness of such cliches stares you hard in the face. To begin with, it is soul scalding to see your childhood idol/ideal, whom you once considered invincible and your ultimate protection against every possible problem, inch by inch enter the other world. You might think of yourself as Savitri incarnate. In your mind of minds, you know that there is no cure to old age. No senior citizen versions of either Arunima Sinha or Sudha Menon, right?
Much worse are the reactions of others. Forever judgemental, they are dismissive of the agony of the elderly relative. It infuriates you, your ineffectual anger cannot, however, ignite the spark of life in the dimming eyes and dulling years. When your best intentions thus meet mockery, meaningless appears your care-n-concern coz wearying you out is the worrisome thought, namely, am I merely pleasing my own vanity trying to thus enact the Fedora myth? What exactly is that she would want? Does she feel a loss of dignity, obeying the orders of the child whose tantrum she may have tempered once?
Does Cordelia indeed know what Lear cares for? Much more scorching is the searing honesty of Simone de Beauvoir's memoir of her mother dying of cancer. I wrote a piece on it in Menaka some years ago. Neither the author nor the editor was without a jitter regarding its reception, especially given the unmistakble mother glorification in our very ethos.
Much water has thence flown under the bridge. Even in the Bollywood imaginary, a suffering Mother India of the Nargis variety is replaced by a 'cool' Reema Lagoo version. And, yet, a daughter can never mother her mom in the real sense of the term. It is more a process of `other'ing her and your own self, your fury for multiple causes adding up, scalding you more. Well, no heart leaps up when one beholds the evening shadows gather in their folds the origin of one's own species!
To sum up, the following lines suit our filial relationship as well:
Tere bina zindagi se koi shikwa to nahin
Tere bina zindagi bhi lekin zindagi to nahin.
pratima@(m)othering
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