there is no such thing as a simple answer while you are parenting

Life is more predictable once Jispa’s school starts. Waking up on time, sleeping on time, yoga on time and swimming on time. The whole thing is getting the routine as an integral part of the biological clock. I don’t know whether the routine is good and I like it or I get bored by it. It cuts both ways. The vacations allow for a far more relaxed and impulsive behaviour. Here the action only starts on Friday night and is necessarily over by Sunday afternoon. Sunday is an early to bed night.
The last week we were at our friends place for a house warming party. We stayed up till 2 am playing the popular party game – mafia. Getting home by 3 and then into bed to wake by 10. That is the perfect way to end the vacation. As a result of that late night, the house was all asleep on Sunday night by 9.15 pm. I get very excited when I get to sleep this early. I was cranky all vacation thanks to the late nights.
Early nights have been a bit of a jinx for me. There will always be something or the other disturbing me. Invariably if everything else works, Jispa will come in at night on some pretext or the other. But luckily that Sunday we slept well and through the night. Monday morning was a breeze.
The week though that followed was a mix with Jispa behaving like any kid and taking time to get up. Five minutes please, last five minutes, ok ok one minute, last minute…. And so on. I have to every time physically life her and get her to the bathroom. If at this time she makes one cranky sound then she is done for. After all the cuddling and waking and the lifting, the last thing I want to hear is the cranky sound. She knows that. Invariably she lets one slip and she gets a sharp reprimand. It will last a few days and then the cycle begins all over again.
But as I have blogged about before, the great thing is the quality time I get while I drop her off. Time to talk, have fun, enjoy in the car till the school bus comes. Today she generally popped one question of India and Pakistan were once great enemies? Were? I asked her. India is still at loggerheads with Pakistan and China. She then wanted to know how come. I thought that was an innocuous enough question with a straight forward answer. I was so wrong.
Luckily Jispa is not the type to keep asking stupid questions one after the other. But her ability to understand, grasp and relate is so awesome that it puts pressure on you to think through and talk. And so I kept talking, and talking, till just about when the bus came in. I think the story took a full ten minutes. How Muslims and Hindus were in India, then the moghuls came in and then the jazia tax, conversion. The Moghuls helped establish a large ‘Indian’ kingdom which was till then divided into many small kingdoms, then the British came in, they wanted spices, then they stayed on to rule, then they had this divide and rule policy, the dominion states and then independence, the great partition, the Kashmir issue and how we forever remained enemies. And then how we interfered in their East Pakistan issue, Bangladesh, a few wars….
Blah blah blah. It was so tough. Especially since I am not a history student and I know that what I know is a stupid one sided version that was taught in our text books. I try and be objective about the whole affair.
Sure there were conversions, but also the Hindus did not treat the poor too well, the ghettos developed and it brought about even more divisive force. It was quite a task trying to explain history and be objective.
I also realised while talking that how we talk about how we helped “Free” Bangladesh. Since when did interfering in your neighbour’s house with force and imposing your solution count as a noble cause? But then you had millions of Bngladeshies who were worse off as East Pakistan with little development and lots of poverty. I would never know the truth. What really happened? History text books were so dam bloody one sided to start with.
I want Jispa to do her own research and form her own opinions. I want her to contest text books and see things in a larger context. Understand the two sides to a coin. On man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
So the problem is - not knowing the whole truth, trying to balance what you know, impart a lesson, a story, make it interesting and simple for a kid and teach them to form their own thoughts. What a freaking difficult task. What ever happened to ‘daddy knows it all and you cant dispute it’ parenting?