{"id":978,"date":"2016-04-24T03:41:03","date_gmt":"2016-04-24T03:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=978"},"modified":"2016-04-24T03:41:03","modified_gmt":"2016-04-24T03:41:03","slug":"mother-mothers-day-india-mumbai-parenting-school-mom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=978","title":{"rendered":"Confessions of a Backbencher Mom"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><span class=\"dropcap\">I<\/span>walked in slightly late and mildly hung-over for my son\u2019s first day at school.\n\nMy son was two and it was parent orientation day. I slunk in shamefacedly into the backbenches and tried earnestly to understand \u201cthe benefits of structured play in activating hand\/eye co-ordination and enhancing motor skill development\u201d, even as my head throbbed. I looked around at the electrically charged brigade of motherhood (and fatherhood) around me and felt like scum. Pencils poised for notes, big bags perched on tiny baby chairs, they listened with a raptor\u2019s attention for tips on how they could \u201ccreate conducive learning and disciplinary environments at home to ensure that the child\u2019s passive acceptance doesn\u2019t overpower his developmental need for independence and create lasting inadequacy issues\u201d.\n\nWhat the actual fuck, I wondered. The kids had barely lost their milk teeth. Shuffling through my orientation kit, I saw a list of extra-curricular activities that the playschool was offering: Environment Sensitisation, Spanish for Toddlers, Science Whizkids, and Baby Yoga (Boga?). Alongside most of them, \u201cbatch full\u201d was stamped authoritatively, mocking lesser parents who hadn\u2019t had the foresight to anticipate on birth that their child would be in dire need of Spanish lessons before he turned two.\n\nA few non-competitive and essentially redundant classes like Dance Movements and Summer Fun were still open for enrolment and I wondered if this is where the duds went. My kid was two and he was already hanging out with the losers. The winners would be kids with the frontbench, fundamentalist mothers. The ones with all the questions and pens. These women weren\u2019t kidding around. They were raising an army of gifted and talented all-rounders, who would play the violin while simultaneously playing polo and solving world hunger. I sat, frozen, with a sinking realisation that I was\u00a0going to be an epic failure at this motherhood thing.\n<\/p><blockquote class=\"quote--center\">Somewhere in the last two decades, we\u2019ve gone from being a people fairly interested in our children to being wholly invested in them.<\/blockquote>\nA friend recently took her elderly father on a nostalgia trip to the place where he started his job as a young, government employee with a young family. As they walked through the heartland UP town, miles away from the nearest internet cafe, my friend looked aghast at the kacha roads, distant jungle boundaries, and stray dogs sunning themselves in the school courtyard and asked her father how could he possibly raise his young children here. What kind of life were you giving us? What kind of opportunity? Her father looked at her quizzically and said, \u201cBut we weren\u2019t thinking about you. We were building our lives.\u201d In his mind, as long as children had good parents, a decent school, and hot food on the table, they\u2019d grow up just fine. And they did. My friend went on to have a successful career as a senior journalist in a major television network, and grew up into a fine, substantial human being \u2013 with a sea-view flat to boot.\n\nSomewhere in the last two decades, we\u2019ve gone from being a people fairly interested in our children to being wholly invested in them. My hyperactive (and now muted) Mommy WhatsApp group pings all the time, with videos of their child\u2019s violin recitals, swimming championships, abstract drawings, and ability to sing to pitch. It\u2019s not a First World thing. All of us, including middle-class India, have gone after our children, all guns blazing. Nearly 60 per cent of parents spend considerably outside routine school expenditure and nearly 50 per cent want to send their child abroad for studies when they don\u2019t have a refrigerator at home. Upper-, lower-, or middle-class India, everyone is parenting the hell out of their kids.\n\nIt\u2019s a confounding phenomenon. Arguably, we have less time than we ever did. Ergo, it should make for an appropriate reduction in energy devoted to parenting. My mother certainly spent more time with me than I do with my child and she had three kids. I, on the other hand, have very little time with my only son, but I go into parenting him with a vengeance. I parent his schoolwork, his activities, his friends, his relationship with the outside world, his empathy levels, his knowledge, his exposure, his growth in independence, and his consumption of fibre. And to think that my father asked me at dinner one day, \u201cSo, what class are you in?\u201d\n\nI\u2019m not saying my parents were perfect (hell yes, they were!) but my childhood involved long hours of contemplating how much cheese I could get onto a slice of bread without it running over in the oven. I remember hours of night-time ludo, more hours of chor-police, deathly long relative visits, and constantly being sent across\u00a0the road to buy bread. All of this did absolutely nothing in terms of contributing to my \u201cdevelopment\u201d and less than nothing in making me smarter. But all the nothings added up to something. I had an indolent and non-skill developing childhood, even if I really didn\u2019t go on to shake the world.\n\nMy child isn\u2019t getting one of those childhoods. He has more packed in one year than I did in a decade, in terms of languages, skills, abilities, holidays, new experiences (he went for an overnight star-gazing trip and a cycling trip), even though he\u2019s not taking any of the classes that modern motherhood demands he signs up for. There\u2019s no chess, robotics, horse riding, guitar, capoeira, and still no Spanish, but he will have done more in the first 15 years of his life than I had done in the first 30. And that\u2019s enough.\n\nNow, eight years after that panicky kindergarten moment, I know that I\u2019m not an \u201cepic failure at this motherhood thing\u201d, but I am what I\u2019d call a \u201cbackbencher mom\u201d. Today, when I sit through an orientation day, I try vaguely to summon the initiative to ask questions that cover every contingency and take notes that mothers do. But when a mother asks if the nature campsite has been swabbed with antiseptic, I do what I should have done back then. I walk out.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have I failed as a mother if my son is not acing every single life experience just because I chose chor-police over chess mastery?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":979,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[439],"tags":[19,242,1772,1773,80,471,1739],"class_list":["post-978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-modern-family","tag-india","tag-mom","tag-mother","tag-mothers-day","tag-mumbai","tag-parenting","tag-school"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Confessions of a Backbencher Mom<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Have I failed as a mother if my son is not acing every single life experience just because I chose chor-police over chess 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