How Can We Be Better Parents?
I’ve never truly understood how life would be better with kids. It is probably one of those transformative and exclusive cases that you’ll never know till you’ve experienced it for yourself, pretty much like enjoying exotic fruits. However, the paradox seeps in when we realise how irrevocable our decisions can be and we begin to offer justifications to validate ourselves at the expense of others. If it is something minor like having the first taste of durian and realising that we absolutely hate it, we can always choose to stay a bus length away from it. However, when it comes to having babies, there is no 14-day trial package. In fact, the experience of having kids is so wholesome that there is no end to it than the completion of our own lives.
The decision to want to have kids is not one of those circumstances where we can hear someone explain the facts clearly, building a convincing enough argument and we’ll be enticed to want to have kids.
However, the decision to not have kids can be. We’ve already been living on our own for quite some time. We know how it is like before having kids. Isn’t it more ideal that we have an obscene wealth of free time at our disposal in search of ways to distract ourselves from the emptiness of our lives? The endless search for money is an activity that we naturally crawl towards, not necessarily the case that we need that much more, but it provides sort of an existential reassurance. We seemingly elevate from one stage to another by getting bigger cars and houses only to discover the same room of emptiness within us. It is at this point when we begin to flirt around with the idea of having kids after being tempted by numerous good friends around us. It is crazily tempting to read other people’s lives as fables we’d like to be in as compared to seeing them for what they really are.
Ask any parents about parenthood and they’ll share with you the symptoms of being burnt out: constantly frantic and exhausted.
There is a paralyzing terror in being familiar with what is about to come tomorrow of appalling filth and unquestioning obedience of our mini-lookalike. Not only do we spiral down to the worrisome mortgage payments and college funds, chances are we’ll be buying our kiddos stuff for the rest of our lives. To be fair, the reward truth of parenthood is exclusively intangible. It is incommunicable to outsiders, the same way we give a disgusted look when we see couples kissing on the public train. Yet two days later, we become that very couple after experimenting with some public display of affection.
However, having kids is not something we can simply experiment with. There is no do-overs.
Perhaps a motivating factor to want to have kids points at a life we didn’t lead, the path not taken. It is like putting Lebron James in for the first two quarters and withdrawing him out in the last two. Despite his age, we know for a fact that it is potential left unfulfilled. Granted that reproducing is, evolutionarily speaking, in our nature to do so, it is still something I cannot begin to imagine myself daydreaming about being a dad. Whether we choose to have kids or not, we ought to be cautious of idealizing parenthood. It is not necessarily the case that being married and having kids would mean that we’re any less alone. A wedded life or a family does not solve an individual’s existential crisis. It is also not the case that being single is more fun. It is up to us to be brutally honest with ourselves to dig deep and figure out what is meaningful for us. For most parts, I believe we’re not missing out on the purported completeness of a human with a perfect harmonious family together with a dog or two. I believe we’re missing out on what makes each of us, the unique snowflake that we are, fulfilled.
