A CALMER YOU

Of the negative emotions that rob us of calmness from time to time, ‘guilt’ would rank quite up there. The feeling of having wronged someone can sap inner strength and confidence rather badly, and it’s only worse if that someone happens to be a parent who is ageing towards ill-health by the day.

I’ll tell you why I’m talking about this serious yet pertinent stress this week. It started with a friend’s Facebook post. He mulled over the guilt of pursuing a career in a fastpaced metro over being with his retired parents who live in a smaller town. My first impulse was to feel sympathy because he’s an only child, and therefore, the only one responsible for taking care of them. But one look at how people related with his post and I realised that this stress is all-pervasive.

You could be one among the many children, a son or a daughter, or you could be living with or away from them – at some point in life, the guilt of not doing enough for parents is bound to strike. To a child while growing up, parents represent all that strength stands for. They mostly are the heroes of your childhood journey. The first realisation that age has caught up with the same two people to turn them frail and weak is quite a jolt.

Adding to the declining health mostly is the increased gap between their thought pattern and yours. “I start every day promising to myself that I will spend time talking to my dad. But he’s turned cranky because of his health problems. He’s forever critical of the way I’m living my life. We always end up arguing, and my guilt the next day is even worse,” says a colleague.

Hmm. Toh kya karein? Firangs have a fancy name for this condition – caregiver’s stress. But their stress is mostly about whether or not to have their aged parents admitted to a nursing home or a senior citizen’s home. Our value system, on the other hand, allows for a much deeper emotional bond, and most of us place the comfort of parents before our own. Despite this, the stress of not being with them doesn’t go.

Now frankly, being a guilty party myself, I didn’t quite have a grip on this calmness trick. So I decided to ask, well, the aged parents of some friends who keep cribbing about the guilt of not doing enough for their parents.

The answers turned out to be quite simple, as I realised that most parents think quite opposite of how we think they think. Confused? Here are a few nuggets of wisdom I got from people who made us... literally and in every other sense. Quoting them as is…