Tips to the daughter I never had #6

Tips to my daughter #6

Some interesting Before-After scenes: have some more to add?

Before-After lines: add your own

These are some of the lines that one gets to hear – across borders and categories. If they are here to stay, why not have a little laugh about it. Feel free to guess who says it to whom, and add some of your own: whether you are at the receiving ed or giving!

All relations eventually mature, if at all, into friendship

And that is what we keep working at, if we are not regressing or stagnating into ruts of roles carved out by some faceless society.

Today is a day when back home sisters tie a thread of cotton on the wrist of their brothers. This custom keeps alive a faith that a woman’s prayers will keep a man alive in the battlefield. In return, the brother safeguards the sister from the evils of the society – ironic, isn’t it? Are our societies more treacherous than the war-fields?? Think of it.

I have a lot of time to think today because the brothers to whom I would tie rakhi are not in my town. Then my sons do not have a ‘real’ sister either, so I was tying rakhi to them as well – but this year both of them are also away from home. I am now also thinking of a couple of wonderful men whom I met either as a classmate or as my husband’s friends but eventually came to wish well for them just as I do for my brothers or sons.

Well, just as one can start from any relation – brother, cousin, son, friend – and travel to a juncture where one wants to push one’s energies to blow the powerful winds of destiny in their favor, I feel the ultimate test of the strength of the bond is not in documenting the success of your wish or his. It is in the knowledge that whatever point of relating we started with, we evolved and grew to be friends.

When this realization welled up in my heart, I also noted some kind of light lurking around.

First – for many relations, we have no choice – like brothers and sisters can’t choose each other, or son and mother can’t. But since we started out of a biological or social reality or inevitability, do we have to forever be confined to it?

If I am older by 7 or 9 years than my brother, do I have to have that gap haunt me for ever? And forever so with my sons? They grow and evolve and so do I. If we cannot tie the threads that safeguard the relationship, will it not be weak? The thread that will renew the bonds would be the possibility, opportunity and openness that can allow that brother, son or friend to grow our of that label, be a full-fledged human that he is and then relate to me as a full human I am.

And I would want to do the same towards him. I might be his sister, mother or whatever, but when I relate to him, I want to relate as a person. Whole, thinking, feeling, expressing and sharing person.

Such a pleasure that it can be, and yet such a daunting task! Can I take my relation with my son to a level where he and I can be friends without forgetting that we are mother-and-son? If I succeed, my life indeed will be a rainbow where the light of friendship falls on various relationships and they shine in their own way, with their own hues given by the substance they have.

This can be extended to all relationships.. I think that some never make it, some die an infantile death, some freeze as monuments from the past. Only some relations make it to living maturity in the present where the people relating are friends..

Intense Persons and Dragons

Every dragon is a lizard, but not all lizards qualify for being called dragons.

Now you are wondering what kind of a blog starts with the creepy, ugly creatures.

But I am not looking at their looks. I feel what makes a lizard a dragon is the intensity of qualities or features that both have.

That is where I connect the intense persons with dragons. “Normal” or ordinary persons have the same qualities as the intense ones, but the intense persons have them in measures that make them unusual.

In a world where everyone loves, the ways in which or the power with which an intense person can love is so… sweeping! Or, the anger of an intense person would be so different though all of us get angry once in a while.

And it is because of this intensity that the intense persons get misunderstood, disliked and isolated. Their loss is twofold: very few people can understand them accurately – an intense person’s observation can be seen as a criticism, their display of emotion ‘over emotional’ and their expressions ‘saying too much’.

Secondly, there would be very few people who can respond to their intensity with matching frequency. So, if an intense person wants to belong, each attempt to belong is likely to lead to a compulsion to watering down the expectations – or so it would seem to the intense person. Else, the thing is just not possible. Take it to any format of relationship and the associated qualities: Loyalty, commitment, frankness, freedom, love, and much more..

So, all this while the problem is with no one – neither with the ‘normal’ people, nor with the intense people – but the intense people would find themselves kind of alone – just like the Komodo Dragons on their islands.

What would the dragons do? They have two choices: reduce themselves to lizards and they would find a plenty of matches. Another, accept a lifetime of lonesome existence on the islands of their convictions – not frequented by many, and rarely inhabited by those who visit.

Have you met a dragon lately?

Does the Snakes-and-Ladder Game Creep into Relationships?

I have always heard that there is no status in close relationships. I believed it in the beginning.

Now I feel that it is impossible. What is status? Status is the relative position each member has in a hierarchy based on what the participant brings to the relationship. If the relationship is alive, growing, or simply bringing to the participants what they value, each participant must – consciously or otherwise, intuitively or otherwise – bring something to the table.

Sounds mechanistic or mundane, but is it not how things are?

While in healthy and valuable relationships everyone brings something of value, the form of contribution differs. While both partners might bring care, concern, protection, reliability and freshness, the areas in which these are brought and the manner in which they are brought, the frequency at which it occurs, the combination with other elements in which this contribution occurs … there is a world of difference. So, there is always a hierarchy, because I am I, and simply cannot replicate the patterns, intensity and frequency of someone else. No point.

So, if I am different from my partner, there are obviously contributions from both that are more/less than the other.

So, why do people begin to judge one to be better than the other? How is the dependability that there would always be warm dinner with relished, matched-to-season preparations on the table inferior to dependability that someone will just be around and will lend a name and reputation? How is cautiousness and calculated risk better than spontaneity? How is convergent thinking and synthesis better than analytical thinking? How is withholding superior to giving away? How is a specialist better than a generalist? How is a focused person better than not focused one?

There is no ‘always’ attachable to any of the apparently contrasting pairs of states of being.

These are better treated as the givens and enjoyed as per the beat, tempo or rhythm (set by so many factors) to which a pair dances. Or, like kayaking when sometimes someone else is behind you and telling you, and some other times you are in the driver’s seat – take turns, recognize when it is time for you to follow and lead when you are in charge, because after all,  a relationship needs the stocked refrigerator as much as (at times at least, say when 5 unannounced guests are coming over and when this is frequent) cash in the pocket- because, while at the time of shopping, cash is more important, but cooking emergency breakfasts and elaborate dinners requires more than just money and grocery.

But then, why do people believe that they should be forever in control? Why do people not like the other to question, differ, be different? Why can’t relationship function in the face of contrasts whatever the relationship is – love, friendship, work??

Yesterday suddenly the Game of Snakes and Ladders came to my mind. Isn’t that the game in which climbing is always better than sliding? Isn’t it the game where if you are not winning, you are stuck or losing? That is where you need to climb and outclimb the other. While sliding in inevitable, it slows down your winning and completing the game. So it kind of disappoints, and irritates..

So – just checking: are you mentally playing snakes and ladders when functioning in a relationship?

It need not be so. When you acknowledge that a partner’s contribution is more valuable at some time or in some situations, you are not getting swallowed by snakes. And if you have climbed one ladder, that is not the ultimate: someone else has climbed ladders too, and it does not end with one doing it faster than the other, because you do not run in a straight line. It is more like a cycle and what goes around, comes around.