Growing pains

There was one trying and interrogative question that relatives, teachers and to some extent, if you’re lucky your parents, always asked when we were young; “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  I can still hear them, in their monotonous tones, you'd swear they were related! 

Very often there was some form of expectation attached to this question. I guess the inquisitors wanted aspirations that would lead the uncertain into an “upstanding” member of society. The list of expectations was limited to teacher, nurse, doctor, policeman, teacher, nurse, doctor, and policeman. This was a closed directory. Whether what was in the catalogue suited us or not picking one was a must!

Anyway, the point of the matter is, then adults placed so much burden on our little shoulders with their expectations, and we thought of that as torturous, yet when we think of it now, we know they cared!. Sadly enough, the same "cruel" mindset is still prevalent (guess who are parents now:-) -  and the trying question is still the essence of the inquisitors’ frame of mind. These days however, the inquisitors have become aggressive. Their fallen dreams are to be lived through their young. The often sung tune these days is that “my daughter /son will be a doctor, lawyer or engineer”. Does the poor child know about this? Not really. Does this optimistic individual know if his/her child has the ability to be? Nope again!

The truth of the matter is that parents believe that this is the right thing to do. Coming to think of it, it does make sense, parents are merely looking out for their young. Unfortunately, parents are seldom right about their preferences because often  there is some soul out there crying over what could have been. 

Anyway, because parents take no prisoner to get what they want the poor devils have no alternative but submit into what is desired. Unfortunately they end up walking in a limp, since what they could have been was cut off. They will go through life in borrowed robes and when it is their time to be parents they start seeing reason; their parents were right! The cycle begins again.  It is a chain-reaction!

Unfortunately this is every child's fate. Out there lurks some adult who is ready to chisel some child into something conventional, because  it is their duty to knock some sense into the idle mind. 

When I’m confronted with this I get to think about my childhood. Were my circumstances the same” Yes, and more! Did I know what I wanted to be when then? Not really but somehow I knew that the inquisitors wanted answers, and I always told them what they wanted to hear; a teacher. They would nod in approval. Well it was easier for me to say that because my parents were teachers! I’m also lucky somehow because despite the little fact that I got socialized into becoming a teacher, I ended up loving it..I wonder though, had I told my inquisitors that “I am my hair” Lord forbid; I would have been branded a trouble maker. My parents would have admonished the worst of punishments.Read this as a metaphor, that I really didn’t know what I wanted to be.  I was really my matted coils of hair that have their own personality! Every child is like that - some form of a mystery! A jigsaw puzzle! As they grow older, they reveal themselves in snippets to parents and to themselves. Are snippets trustworthy? It depends! Some complex matter!