From bearing the pain of childbirth to sacrificing her interests and career, mothers are always projected as a divine being next to god and true it is. But in all earnestness, we conveniently forget dads in the picture. Yes, they don’t go through what we mothers had to go through but their anxiety, heartache, stress and pain is of a different kind. They stay strong for the sake of their families and look all confident and fearless while panicking on the inside…
Fathers, just like mothers, carry the child in their heart instead of womb for the nine months and not only that, they carry the weight of the well-being of the mother and the child on their shoulders while trying to work and earn enough to make a comfortable home for them.
Fathers do get the advantage of playing the good cop when the child grows up a little and starts seeing his mother playing Hitler to the hilt all day long, telling him “No” for everything until dad enters the war zone and hugs the kid he has not seen all day and says “of course you can dear”….and there goes the best parent award, just like that!!!
Yes, I do resent fathers a little bit for that but, we all need a little perspective check once in a while and fathers provide that balance needed in a child’s life. For all the situations life throws at us, small or big, we need to look at the holistic picture.
As we are the ones watching the kid throwing tantrums for a silly thing, we often get so wrapped up in the whole situation with our full blown ego against our kids that the holistic picture gets blurred somewhere down the line and all we can actually see is how to make sure the kid doesn’t get his way or show who has the upper hand. Sounds silly doesn’t it….But we do end up in such situations more often than we would liketo.
So when a third person comes in and tells you, “Why couldn’t you have let the child have one more piece of candy?” “Did you just put yourself through all the crying, temper-tantrum and not to mention ruining a whole afternoon to this bitterness followed by guilt; all this for that one piece of candy?” And suddenly you wonder at the absurdity of the whole situation but all you could manage to say is “But you didn’t see the way he was…..”
By now you know who the third person is. And though you wouldn’t want to admit it to his face but he is right…isn’t he?
Sometimes we need to pick our battles with our kids, let them win some now, so you can win the bigger battles later….
And that perspective is brought in by none other than our unsung heroes…..fathers.
