Gabbu Singh Diaries 4 | The Toddler Strikes !

When I was a kid I was a difficult child to parent. This is not something that my parents have told me about but this realization has come in after I have become a parent myself. My mother however, maintains that she has had a really tough time managing and handling a plethora of complaints against me ranging from breaking glasses to breaking heads and running around girls to make the teachers run around me for some mischief or the other in the classroom and for a 100 other reasons. And these complaints were addressed not just from my teachers and friends but also from my friend’s parents, neighbors, close relatives, distant acquaintances and strangers as well. Although with time, the volume and magnitude of these complaints have softened up but I have hardly paid any heed to them until recently when I got the first taste of what my mother has been going through all these years.

It was few weeks back when I went to pick Avyaan from his nursery in the evening and his care taker pounced on me as if she has been waiting for this moment all day long. She started with the routine updates on what all he ate, how much he slept for and what all activities he did during the day and then paused for a bit before saying that I need to tell you something. I was taken aback for a while thinking that have we not paid this month’s fees or much worse, are they closing down the nursery but she dispelled all my doubts and very soon came to the point. She said Avyaan is not even 2 but off late he has been pushing guys aged 4  & 5 years, time and again and they come back crying complaining about him to us. When we try to make him understand that this is not good and you should not do this, he looks at them, laughs out loud, remains idle for some time and then repeats it again. I was clueless on how to react to this 1^st official complaint against him, whether I should laugh on his laughing gesture after manhandling guys much bigger then him, I should say sorry for not being a good parent or I should feel proud about my son being a menace for all the other kids in his group. I chose to stay mum for the moment.

She went on saying that you should keep a check on him at home and teach him to not indulge in such things even if he does it unintentionally, in a way telling me that I have failed as a parent to impart him right mannerisms. I replied with an ‘Okay’. She continued saying, you should ensure a right environment at home so that he stays away from such unparliamentary gimmicks, I took it as, tell it to his mom to stop pushing me and bossing around all the time so that he doesn’t pick such things at home J. Though, I again replied with an ‘Okay’. And lastly she advised me to teach him to not laugh if someone is reprimanding him for something wrong that he had done, now I couldn’t reply to this one as I have myself not been able to manage this all my life J. She mellowed down after her well-rehearsed speech and concluded by saying there is nothing to worry, as these are his transition years and hence these changes are normal, but we just need to be careful not just here but also at home.

As we set out for home, I jocularly told him ‘ you shouldn’t do all this, this is bad habit’. He responded with a wicked laughter to which even I couldn’t stop mine J. But all along our journey back home I was amazed on how dumbstruck I was (very unlike me) ,when his antics were escalated to me. That night I called up my mom, shared the entire story and told her today I realized that what you have been going through all these years attending and addressing heaps of complaints against me. She laughed out loud and said ‘this is just the beginning beta, but good that you realized it on the very first occasion’J. This small but important incident was enough for me to foresee a large number of speechless moments that are lined up for the next few years, added with a measure of self-realization on what my parents would have gone through during my childhood and much later J.

Now such things are part and parcel of every household that is blessed with a toddler. Though, there is general belief that as the child turns 2, it becomes terrible 2 for the parents. Howsoever, cute and lovely and beautiful your child might be but the kind of tantrums he/she throws on account of the terrible two syndrome, the apparent public embarrassment makes him the most difficult child in the world J. Having said that, these memories are the ones that makes your kid all the more dear and  lovable for you J. And also makes you realize on what all your parents have done and been through all their lives.

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kin…

Why not, let go the EGO.

Ego. Ego is a noun that more often than not rings negative alarm bells. Although, oxford dictionary defines it as ‘ a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance’, which can be as much taken in an assertive vein too but that is hardly how we perceive it as. And there are reasons to it, not just those big ticket arguments or altercations that leads us to talking about the ill-famed ego but even the innocuously silly bits in our day to day life. In fact, these bits contribute more towards our ego driven behavior.

For instance, how often it happens that we stop calling a dear friend of ours just because apparently it was his turn to call us next. We take it so much to our self-esteem that we forego that beautiful relationship just to satiate our senseless ego. And what makes it worse are the conclusions that we derive about that one time dear friend of ours just because he has also not called us back. Whose loss is it anyways? Certainly not just that friend’s.

How often it happens that we are driving our car on a busy road clogged by bumper to bumper traffic and some maniac barges in from behind and wrestles his way cutting past our lane, also forcing us to indulge in an impromptu slug fest with him. And we easily fall into this trap and engage ourselves in that acerbic altercation, with a single point angst that ‘how dare he did that to me’. Now in the hindsight, not quite sure what good can be achieved in those 30 odd seconds gained by brushing past some moron on the road or by getting into a bitter argument just to placate our ego. But in the longer run what we gain through that ego driven action of ours is just a Cipher.

We get into fights of various magnitudes with our family, friends, spouses and girlfriends, mostly on mundane issues. Issues, which we ourselves laugh upon at a later stage. But after every such fight, whosoever be the reason of that fight, we often get stiff and relatively resistant in getting things normal from our end. What stops us from normalizing things or making the first move is nothing but our inflated Ego. Those fights are inevitable and are an essential ingredient of any healthy relationship, but that post-operative ego blocker is the poison that makes things unhealthy.

With the heavy influence of social and electronic media we often get into discussions with our friends on a variety of trending topics ranging from politics to sports to everything. Many a times these discussions turn into arguments and we indulge in a race to prove that our point of view is the right point of view. Irrespective of who is right and who is not, the barrage continues with an unsaid mission of I should be the one delivering the concluding punch. Needless to say, there are no conclusions to these discussions but the ego driven ‘I’ that drives such arguments makes it very sad and murky.

Ego in the wrong vein always hurts and does damage that could be very detrimental and self-inflicting in the longer run. We often get stuck with things as we could not see anything beyond ‘I’ in them and that then becomes the breeding ground of a vicious egoistic behavior. It could be as simple as not liking or acknowledging posts from your friends and families on Facebook for no reason to not talking to your best of your friends because of a silly argument. Only if we could take things easy and on the go, as the word E GO also suggests, we will be a tad more happier in life. As after all, there is more to life than just the I.

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kin…