Over last few years, I have been very vocal about my reservations against current-day Indian youth deciding to get married at an age between 25 and 30. I consider this age to be a little too small for a person to be able to make the best, or maybe the least painful :), choices for his/her life. Unlike people holding back expressing such un-social thoughts in front of their kin who are getting married, I do otherwise. I don't simply congratulate them. I question them - "do you really understand what you are trying to get into?". Quite expectedly, they neither understand my questions nor my intentions. They start doubting whether I am really one of their well-wishers. They start trying to figure out if something really bad has happened in my life. And finally they use their "Brahmastra", they say "you survived, we will also survive". They don't realize that in actual they are trying to cover these uncomfortable questions with the same wrapper which their parents used to first pack and then suffocate their free thoughts, when they said "Beta! We survived life like this, so will you..". That's a really smooth way to murder the thought of "thriving" life instead of "surviving" it.
Of late, people in my circle of influence have become comfortable with this rogue side of me. However, as is life's characteristic of not letting this war of thoughts and opinions to be put to rest, a new domain of disharmony of thinking has sprung up in my circle. Recently, I heard two "good" news - one from my friend from college and the other from one of my close relatives. Both of them planned second childs, of course in their respective families :). While the reactions of my other friends and my wife, in their respective cases, were the default "congratulations", my reaction was "Why?" in both of them. The answers that I got were interesting.
My friend said "do bacche toh hone hi chahiye, family complete ho jati hai" (two kids are a must to complete the family). He said that in his typical middle-class, "educated" Indian Baniya tone. Baniya is a caste which majorly comprises of business-doing people in my country. Being a Baniya myself, I gave him a typical Baniya i.e. money perspective of his decision. I recently read one of the research articles that told that the average cost of bringing up a child upto18 years, in an averagely educated middle-class Indian household, is 1.25 crore rupees. When I told this to him, he was spell bound. He had not even considered the money part in what he claimed as "family planning". I asked him if he felt confident and secure that his current job would last for another 15-20 years, and will be able to continue to pay him the average good salary which he is getting right now. His answer was an obvious No. And I could make out that a question about his happiness quotient would make him even more sad and disturbed, so I avoided it. Well, the beauty of friendship is that such conversations don't spell a bad cast on the core relationship. As I generally say these days, intent is more important than the act. I believe that my friend did get my point, but he could not accept it or express his acceptance. He knew all these unconventional thoughts hold a strong logic, but he was also aware that it is too difficult to break our own casts of conventional thinking which have been conditioned and made strong over all these years of our upbringing.
My relative's reply was a bit more interesting. This relative of mine is in his late 30s and has a nine year old daughter. He also has these common existential issues of job insecurity, work related stress coz of holding a senior position in company, and not-so-good happiness score. I refined my monosyllabic "Why?" and asked him what was the thought process that went behind planning the second child. He told that he and his wife thought that the second child will be a talking/sharing companion to their daughter once she gets married. Their daughter will have a sibling to talk to when they won't be there. The answer left me thoroughly perplexed. I wanted to argue but in a feeble manner, to respect the sensitivity of our relationship. At our individual levels, he and I have complimenting personalities. But in terms of the societal relationship that we share with each other, I always need to be a lil submissive in the cases of ideological contradiction. In my feeble opposition, I asked him how can he (and his wife) be so sure about the circumstances in which their daughter will be after maybe 10-15 years from now. The answer was abstract and a try to evade the question, but I didn't pursue it further. The conversation ended, but I decided to elaborate on my feeble opposition inside my head. I continued to think that if my relative's daughter will get married in future, she will have her husband to share her feelings with. If not husband, there will be some fast friend built over all these years. If she will not be married, she might be busy exploring her life in realms that we might not be able to even imagine in our conventional view of life. There is a chance that she might not have any confidante, but that will mean that over all these years her upbringing must have made her an introvert or some other type. If that be the case, this planned companion in the form of her sibling will also be subject to the similar cast as she was, in which case I believe that the kind of sharing will anyways not help make the situation better. In my social circle, I have seen many close relatives and friends who are so hooked on to sharing everything with their siblings that there life outside of the act of sharing looks dead.
In one of the idle afternoons, I brought up my views on these "good news" with my wife. Like a wife of 7 years, she started with a strong opposition to my thoughts, and the temperature of our tones gradually started to rise, as usual :). She told me that I cant expect everyone to be as mentally detached from family and relations, like myself. This was followed by some random arguments to augment her general disgust at my thought process. Like an experienced husband of 7 years, I retained the context but shifted the subject this relative to ourselves. This changed the overall perspective and we started thinking, and talking, in terms of what would be the impact of mothering a second child on her "personal" well-being. The smart move worked :). I told her that with our first child, she already lost her job, her career came to a halt, her health and physical appearance changed for what-seems-to-be forever, and her mental health is no better than before with all the marital, relationships, and social interpersonal misunderstandings, and the related emotional chaos. I told her that with great difficulty and after a span of 5 years she has started, though very sluggishly, on the path of recovery from the side effects of her pregnancy. Now, if we were to plan another child, in her personal perspective, her non-family life will be pushed back by another 2 years. Postnatal recovery might never come in her remaining life, coz of age and other psychological factors. Add to it the practical burden of financially supporting a family of four people, in a higher middle-class social atmosphere. Instead, in the next 2 years, if she focused on picking up pace in her recovery, attain some contentment and associated relevance in her non-family life, she will feel more happy about her life from an individual perspective. Agreed that if we planned a second child our child could have enjoyed the un-interrupted company of his sibling, but he could have also miss out on a lot of other possibilities of life coz of restrained mental and financial health of his parents. A bad mental health of parents would have in fact had an overall negative impact on his life. I told my wife, that 20-30 years back, our parents existed in a much simpler and less stressful world. There was manageable amount of stress from societal existence, and practical existence was much easier with lesser distractions and equally less aspirations. These days, if we compare to the times of our parents, we are under exponential levels of stress. Times have changed, not for the good. Its imperative for us to break our casts of conventional thinking, for the good. We need to assess ourselves, understand our limitations, aspirations, and capabilities, and then decide on such big decisions as planning a second child. When things were seen in her perspective, my wife concurred with my thought process ;).
In current world, a feeling of personal relevance is of utmost importance. Today's women, with a mindset of empowerment, cannot just be contented with the feeling of having parented "educated" children, or having given the lifelong support to their families. I have seen women who try to make themselves feel that way, but I have also observed that they are shattered to the core when they are brought to a rendezvous with their actual reality. The reality in which they are actually consoling themselves every day that you gave yourself up for this family. I believe that a family should never suck any of its member's relevance and importance as an individual. A collective decision which inflicts hurt to any member(s), is a fault of the entire family.
All this thought process does not mean that I am against a second child in principle. I am just of the opinion that such major decisions of life have to be taken from a more realistic perspective of oneself and ones life, instead of just being taken out of an ageing and unjustifiable convention. We boast of our culture being so open, modern, and accepting, yet the noble and very practical deed of adoption feels like a taboo to most of us. Adoption is a very nice and available option in a populous country like ours. It can help the lady in the family to not go through the physical and related psychological pains of pregnancy, and also give her an opportunity to attain another higher level in womanhood, that of mothering a cute, little, lovable, motherless soul as her own child. Yes, she won't become Mother Teresa, but she won't be any less in her own little world. And that also gives the family an opportunity to have a member with a slightly different DNA than the boring one, which the existing members are already tired of and trying to decode and change for the better :).
So we ought to be very pragmatic and not get carried away by unthought-of traditions and conventions. One bad decision can ruin the life of our family member(s), and that is one thing that we should avoid to respect the scarce humanity. For the "good news", they are floating in the world around us, in very simple and beautiful ways, we just need to tune in to the right news channel :).
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