PARENTING/RELATIONSHIPS
Maybe It Isn’t Fun Being My Daughter
Professional hazards spill over into parenting
As dentists we don’t get involved in patients’ personal lives. However, today, a patient came in with his story. Shall we call his 13-year old son, Vijay?
On 20 March, 2020, at 6 p.m, Vijay was playing marbles, कंचे, with an 11-year old. The 11-year old lost his marbles. In the game of marbles, if you lose, you don’t lose-your-marbles-go-crazy. You literally hand over your marbles to the winner, like a gambler who’s lost a bet.
The sore loser went whining to his 15-year old big brother. The brother attacked Vijay with a rock, killing him instantly— and is now in juvenile jail.
Such stories leave me shaking. My first reaction used to be, to come home and hug my kids. Thanks, Corona!
My 17-year old daughter’s reaction was different. She said, I know! Now you don’t want me to play with marbles anymore. Well, Mom, guess what, I never did! So go away with your moral true story already.
In her defense.. is there a defense for such talk? I do pounce on her whenever I hear anything about anybody. She didn’t cry for a dead nephew of my husband’s once, a man who died on New Year’s Eve, survived by his wife and two toddler girls.
I was so anguished by her lack of emotion that I called up Sister, at the convent. My daughter was 13 then.
Sister is the principal of my daughter’s very strict convent school and I expected her to give me quotations from the Bible to make my daughter feel a stranger’s grief. I wanted a religious solution, even if it wasn’t Hindu, and I have Sister on speed-dial.
Sister said,
Grief is nothing but the loss of love.
She didn’t know Vikesh’s nephew. She cannot be expected to grieve for him.
Sister encouraged me to go ahead and send my daughter to our housing society’s New Year party that evening and even engage in dressing her up. My fashion sense is awful and daughter #2 stepped in and saved the day there.
The thing is, it took a while, for my daughter to grow up enough to recognize the patterns in my parenting, the ones that didn’t suit her.
Have I harmed her by mollycoddling her, with a mollycoddling spike whenever a patient came in with a tale?
A 9-year old boy ate 3 idlis together. He choked to death. I reacted by cubing her idlis and sending them with a fork. Before the incident she’d been comfortably eating her idlis, bite by bite. Her friends had laughed their heads off at her. She was 10 then. What the hell, so what if they were cubed? Why do such trivialities matter so much to kids?
When a patient braked his bicycle abruptly at a speed bump and broke three teeth, we drove to the site, stopped the car at the speed bump and recreated the incident for our daughters, explaining the trajectory. The girls had squirmed, and pointed out that they didn’t bicycle that far.
Ditto for when some guy broke his teeth at a water hand pump. Of course we have no hand pump.
Again when somebody broke his teeth at a sugar cane juicer — his teeth smashed like Tom’s in the Tom and Jerry cartoon. We don’t even drink sugarcane juice.
Even apart from the people we normally see, because duh, we’re the tooth doctors– we hear a lot of sad stories. India has very few psychiatrists maybe? Everyone weeps on everyone else’s shoulders and there’s a lot of head shaking and upper lip biting and lower lip curling.
Many people don’t even say dentist here, so that’s why we’re the Tooth Doctors. दाँत के डॉक्टर।
I’m sorry kids, if I am screwing you up, it is the only way I know how to be a mom. Your dad has no choice but to back me up, we work on the accident cases together. If you stay alive, the rest can follow.
If you don’t immediately feel grief, maybe you should pretend a little, or learn a phrase to say? That way you won’t come across as cold and unfeeling.
And stay away from the moving machinery! That lever can land on your chin with an almighty thump!
All photos by author.