PLANNED PARENTING
I am not a big fan of beginnings or new things, of starting up and out, because that usually means they’ll all come to an end someday. I think I’m even less of a fan of endings. Or maybe it is change I really dislike — that movement from start through a middle to an end. I like to sort of just exist in the moment. I’ll begin here, though, with a tale of a beginning—hehe, I do have to start somewhere, no? I like this one though—it’s quite a lovely beginning.
Nebo was seated in that pristine environment, but he so badly wanted to stand and pace. The knots of tension in his belly demanded it but his head, cowered by the stern look of the matron, forbade it. And so, he sat, next to his very pregnant wife. She was calm, but then, she was always the brains of their operation. All he’s done since it began was love her and say “I do” when the time had come. Soon, the young doctor belted out her name, and he helped her up and into the cubicle that served as a clinic. After routine questioning, she was admitted for the remainder of the pregnancy until birth, a proposed 12 hours.
The next few hours took Nebo first to the ward to get Adamma settled in, and then, home to fill out an assorted order of meals (cravings, she called them). He was only too happy to leave that suffocating environment until he wasn’t. “What if she went into labour prematurely?” “What if she stood up to go pee and fell and...” He couldn’t find the wherewithal to finish that thought and just flitted about the house gathering all she asked for before dashing right out, exactly 9 minutes later.
Everyone talks about the happenstance, or not, of having children, but I am not sure how many think, really think, of that moment of childbirth, when the person that had taken refuge within another sees the world and its light for the first time and cries out. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and amidst the flurry of activities that follow, and there is often more peace and joy than ever for the mother. At that moment, there is arguably no one else in the world who is loved as terribly as that newborn.
I often also wonder how many go further still to think of the child — and the adult — the infant will eventually become. I wonder how many parents realise how crucial their parenting is in determining how well-adjusted, or not, that child and adult, turn out. Much more exhaustive writings exist about the science and art of parenting which I can hardly add to or detract from, so I won’t try.
I think, though, that many of us today lament the kind of parents we had(ve)—manipulating, harsh, cruel, cold, absent, all the negatives—while simultaneously ignoring the possibility of becoming just like them because we do not prepare not to be that. "Me? A parent? Nah, I have time. I don’t need to worry about that now". Don’t we, though? Right now, in our twenties or thirties, still single, still dating, don’t we need to sit with our lived experiences and unpack whatever trauma and baggage we may be carrying over from growing up in the environment we did? Shouldn’t we start preparing now to be the kind of parents we wished we had — to, in a manner of speaking, put our money where our mouths are?
I have not lived for such a considerable length of time as to have become a parent, so I’m not writing from a place of great epiphany or as one who “lived in the dark as a child and only saw the light as a man”. I was, in fact, brought up in what was the brightest of homes, on most days, and beside what was the warmest of fires, on most nights. Growing up, I knew love — I knew its scent; I tasted it, felt it, saw it. So, maybe I write from a place of privilege and, therefore, cannot lay any legitimate claim to feeling or truly understanding the kind of pain other children felt. But a friend would say this, and I paraphrase here: We must take care that we do not become the first link in a cycle of damnation for those who have entrusted their hearts to us, for those whose only crime was loving us. In this case, I guess that would be those whose only crime was becoming our children.
In a way, therefore, whatever paths we may have taken to get there, at some point, we all stand at the threshold of deciding whether or not we want to do parenting at all. And if at all, whether or not we will do all that is within our power to get it right. The child who was raised in a loveless home and the other born to the kindest parents—each drawing from their own life lessons to realise what to do and what not to do, to become a parent long before a child comes along, to step into that consciousness of what it is to be a good parent. It is nothing foolproof but sometimes, I imagine how positively different the mental health stories of many generations of people would have been if a more genuine effort at good parenting had been made by their fathers and mothers and guardians.
One thing I am a fan of are reminders. They’re like little lamp posts that come on as if on cue, to call our attention. I hope I have mostly written this as a reminder—not as a treatise on good parenting (Pfft. I’m an unmarried, childless man; what the hell do I know?) but as a lamp post of sorts.
Infants grow up to become children, and children grow into adults. There’s no essence of well-being — mental or otherwise — that is infused into people magically when they cross into adulthood; we all become what we are because of nature and nurture. We may not have much control over nature, but nurture, we can largely control; with nurture, we can be a bit (or a lot) more intentional with learning how to wield it and mould it so that we do not become the horror we condemned or, heaven help us, worse.
Nebo is holding his little girl in his arms. She’s so tiny, and all the dread that filled him for the past few months, of what fatherhood would bring, melt away. His path seems clear — to love and to cherish, to protect and to be a refuge, till death do them part.
