WHY IS PARENTING SO HARD?

Nandini Vaidyanathan
I think every parent knows that the report card is only in hindsight. If your child turns out into a responsible citizen, earning well for himself and his family, you can pat yourself on your back and say you did a damn good job (even a jig dance in front of your mirror to the tune of the song, ‘Bach gaya ribaba, bach gaye re', may be called for).If he turns into a serial killer, you can invoke all the 33 crore Hindu gods and beat your chest asking, "I did everything by the book, how did it all go so wrong?" Proof of the pudding and all that.
While we are on the kitchen metaphor, I might as well flag it here. Output is not necessarily a function of the input. Sometimes the best of ingredients produce a disaster. The daughter of a friend of mine had amazing skin and features. Everything about her, from head to toe, seemed produced to a master craftsman's specs. But they all came together to create a canvas that was repelling.
So why doesn't the baby come out of the womb with a detailed user manual? There is enough time and more for it in-utero. Yeah, nine months or thereabouts. One hell of a long time for Brahma to write the installation and operations blueprint. Of course, with danger zones and restricted areas clearly marked.
I say this because of an incident another friend told me. She said she always thought she had done well by her daughter as the latter was now a highly-paid executive in an IT MNC, happily married and didn't seem prone to any kind of extreme behaviour. One day, she participated in a Miss Rose contest organized by her company and she was crowned Miss Rose (it was based on who received the maximum number of roses from hercolleagues).
In her acceptance speech, she said, "This one is for my mother who always thought I was a thorn and not a rose!" Her mother, my friend, needless to say, was distraught. After shedding copious tears, she confronted her daughter. "When," she quailed, "did I ever say you were a thorn and not a rose?" The daughter looked her in the eye and said, "Remember when I was five years old, you took me to the Rose Show in Lalbagh and you pointed to a thorn and said that was me?"
So my friend, who is not a lawyer, but circumstances such as this made her into a litigative one, demanded, "How do you remember I was pointing at the thorn and not the rose?" To which the daughter triumphantly responded, "Because I remember the thorn pricked your finger and it bled!"
These days, on every show on TV, any antisocial behaviour is squarely attributed to a traumatic childhood, so one can't be too careful. May be as parents, we should shoot and save all the recordings of the formative years, just in case we have to defend ourselves in court some day.
When I had my daughter, my mother was my reference. I wanted to be everything that she was not. So I brought her up, you could say, more strategically than motherly. And it worked. Or so I thought, up to a point. But when she thrust her chin one day and said, "If you don't like him, you don't have to come to my wedding," my chin wobbled.
May be technology will come to our rescue? One, will the baby, once it stops bawling after seeing the world upside-down, be inserted with a chip that programmes its behaviour? And two, will there be a smart kid out there who will create an app or a wearable device that calculates your parenting quotient real time? Maybe then parenting can become a science.
Yours truly is waiting for technology to validate her hypotheses that she was a good mum indeed.
The writer teaches entrepreneurship and is the author of Entrepedia, a guide to starting your own business in India. The views expressed are her own