Parenting: you and me half the life away.

Two days ago my parents left to my hometown, after spending a week with me. Now I have started seeing my Grandpa’s face in my father’s. I feel he is not my father but someone else, there are few decades to live together, the set of parents change with each generations.
Before it used to be Daji and Baa, then big brother and Ben, for me its Momy and Papa, Few others call Mom and dad, may be again that original address might come back but Maa, mama or momy will never change. An ‘elder’ is the word for parents. Their roles and importance changes based on country and time. Parents used to be on the top of the family pyramid, now in nuclear families, FAMILY is a different reality.
Mother’s role is exaggerated and expanded to almost God, but there are two females leaving in same body, mother and mother-in-law!!! The enthusiastic ladies see daughter in daughter-in-law without knowing they are different creatures with separate genes and nerves. Being parents, being parents of grown up children is a complex matter. Lewis Carroll had written in one poem: ‘A clean kid with straight brows, with tomorrow’s dreams in his eyes, time is running, you and me are at the distance of half of the life’. After the child comes out from mother’s tummy, there are two separate destinies. There was a short story in which dead father talks to his son, in front of 3 yrs old sleeping grandson. Son is telling his dead father, ‘we could have understood each other better if we had lived this age together’. Dead father asks son, ‘Did you cry’? Son said, ‘yes… in dreams’. May be my father will also ask me ‘Did you cry?’
By 1993 Grandpa had no teeth, upper joint fracture, 2 heart attacks, all white hair…I had gone to see him burnings after his death, my father set the fire and I thought so much of love & such a little time…he had the color of the night. We will keep on dying by pulling the chain of the same blood. Our ‘us & we’ will go on forever…but grandpa doesn’t have the shadow even.
Unable to be measured, Parenting. Every kinsfolk have their own style of carrying their ancestries. There are tough fathers and mothers, who want their offspring to leave the nest and fly away … ‘Putrat Shishyat Parajayet’ is a Sanskrit proverb which says ‘our victory is in being defeated by our children’. Parenting brings it’s own responsibility, Fathers need to make lot of money to create the sparkling future for the children. Life is international in 2009, competition is cruel, roughshod hard work and number one hasn’t any alternatives…then there is a little home, Loving mother and a father whom you can protest silently, and you feel like growing small again…

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"The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."

-Victor Hugo