The Weak link

The ever-evolving relationship with parents as an ‘adult’ seems like a complicated dance where you never seem to catch the rhythm, the step changes with every beat, and even after all your efforts you just aren’t able to co-ordinate. It becomes an awkward, under-practiced routine without any cue to follow. Every step is a possible misstep or an overstep. Every fall, trust fall. The matching of pace is the matching of expectations. A constant assessment, constant alignment, one that takes effort and energy.

It was through my teens that I started to see my parents as beyond just parents, humans. Fallible and fragile, humans. With their own insecurities, compulsions, and complexes. With their own strengths and worldviews, neither absolute nor beyond question. And I had the space to question. It wasn’t actively encouraged but respectfully accepted. Begrudgingly, their lack of answers was acknowledged. With patience and grace, on most days at least, they underwent the barrage of skepticism I threw their way, the intensity of which has only multiplied over the years. It is their response to me, that has taught me the grace through which one can accept questioning while standing firm in one’s own beliefs. To make space for examination of the principles one has spent their whole life with, by those closest to them, by those they have instilled an upbringing in, is difficult, to say the least. And while I might never be able to articulate it to them, I am beyond grateful for their effort.

Thus, I grew up simultaneously in awe of and still in question of the way they live their lives. These are the lives I have spent the most time observing. Of course, it hasn’t been an objective observation. It has been loaded with lenses that these same people have molded into me. While I know from a distance, because I have always been good at analyzing from a distance, all that goes right and wrong with their ways of being, I find myself limited in my ability to replicate into my life all that I admire.

Now, as a twenty-three-year-old ( the number still does not seem real to me ) this feeling I have had for a while only seems to be consolidating. This feeling that I am the weak link, the clumsy one who forgets the routine, is always a step ahead or a step behind, the one breaking the formation, the one who hasn’t practiced enough and it shows. The one who cannot wake up or sleep on time. Cannot remember to lock the gates at night, keep the parking ticket safe, turn the geyser off, or spend money responsibly. I tell myself that they have had more time to learn the choreography, to sync with each other and with life. But that doesn’t make me any better. I still remain the one who is unable to catch up. And when your parents seem to be effortlessly performing the routine for years, the inability seems that much more evident.

In multiple moments, when this inability seems to become the most visible thing about myself, I externalize and question the need to catch up to this dance, and the meaninglessness of these repetitive movements. It is their dance, not mine, I fume, knowing full well that it is an inevitable dance, where I need to make space for my own moves, teach them to sway in the way I do, introduce beats that I can groove to. And I have over the years. Tentatively, hesitantly, unsure of their acceptance. Most times they have taken only a beat’s time to accept, finding ways to incorporate whatever wacky step I introduce into the routine.

To be able to reorient the choreography, I need to let go of this constant urge to keep up.

It will be a mess. Uncoordinated and not in sync. But I guess that’s okay because it is not a performance. There is no audience, not the one that matters anyway.

All we need to do is understand each other’s rhythms and make space.

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