Dominant love?

Devdutt wrote a good piece titled ‘Right to kill my child’. It correctly questions the demands we make on our children and more importantly exposes our true motivations. He wrote the article as “the newspapers are filled with reports of parents wanting to kill their children”.
The key point he makes is “Love is to allow children to grow up, be independent, take their decisions and be responsible for the consequences. Power is about control, dependence, domination, and the demand for obedience and subservience.”
It’s a very pertinent point that he makes. Over the last week I happened to be agony uncle for a few people. One lady wanted to marry someone her choice but not same religion and the other wanted to stay abroad and work but had to come back to get married on parental pressure. Makes me think of the stuff I too might have done under parental pressure.
But more importantly or selfishly, makes me think of the times I might have been motivated by power and not love. I try and let Jispa talk to me straight. Some times I think I let her talk too straight, and I might be actually spoiling her. Like my mom always thinks that I am teaching Jispa to argue. But I don’t see harm in having conversation. I do not want domination and subservience or any other unspellable word. I like the relationship to be healthy and equal.
The other day somebody was at home and Jispa walked away in some cranky voice. I imitated her. She came back and gave me a knock on my head. What on earth. That was hard. “but why are you imitating me? I don’t like it.” Ok. Point taken. “but you also hit me hard. That’s not fair. It’s not right. I am papa” “ok sorry” “ok sorry”. Kiss and make up. That I wonder how much liberty should I give hr. I don’t mind it as I realize that in the end I have the final upper control. If things go out of hand I can immediately scream and shout and get ii back. At that time also, it’s about respect.
I really try to ensure that at all points, it is never about dominance. It shouldn’t be about that, but parenting is something that you do without too much thinking. You hope you hone it over a period of time. And when you have only one child, thats all the chance you can get.
We keep telling Jispa how lucky she is. What a great school she has and stuff like that. Recently she has started telling us how lucky we are. We don’t have to go to school and we don’t have to wake up and stuff like that. Its just a general tit for tat. One dialogue was – you are lucky you don’t have to do math. Hey, do you not like math. “I do, but it’s the subtraction that’s boring. I like addition.”. “Hey, subtraction is addition – just reverse” “How”. ‘How do you minus 7 from 12. You take seven and the go like, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. You just added 5 to 7 to get 12.” “but I hate borrowing” “arey that’s simple. Hello uncle, please give me one. I have less. So if seven uncle gives one, how many are left?”
That was some fun in the morning. But the banter continued. She went like, you are so lucky mummy, you don’t get to…” Jasmine went back like “you are so lucky that you don’t have to cook and then someone makes a face, you don’t have to wash dishes, you don’t……” I let the final one in “Jispa you are so lucky to get papa and mama like us. We could never scold our parents the way you can” “I don’t scold you” “sure you do. The way sometimes you get angry at me I would have never done like that to my dad. Ask mom if she could ever talk to her dad the way you sometime scold me or get angry at me?” She then asked “you couldn’t scold your dad because he was always building?” My dad was a civil engineer, you see. “No, I just couldn’t scold dad as that was not the done thing to do. It was just different”. Awww. I love papa and mama… awwww…. Banter ended. Poor thing should have hit back saying that we were lucky to have someone like her. That would have also been another irrefutable one.

On a completely different note - This is how I taught jispa and her friend to handle a heavy bag while at the bus stop.