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Family Matters
A Bundle of Joy – 2

"Oh! please take him to the doctor first", I said ... as if on cue the nurse left immediately ... I saw her moving out clutching my little baby ... as my child faded out and went down into my memory ... the only time and the last time I ever saw him ... I did not know then ... but ... if only I had known ... I would have touched his tender skin and kissed him ... held and hugged him closed to my bosom for that just one time ... one time in Time ... and bid him farewell... a warm, loving and a teary Farewell. 

Children ... a gift from the gods ... learn to love and cherish them. Let them grow, flower, and bloom on their own in a mentally free and an open atmosphere. Growth is the essence of life ... and the day we stop growing we stop living ... we may exist but we stop living. Most of the time I see parents stifling and smothering their children with their own thoughts and trying to make them exact replicas of themselves. They try to own them, force their will on them, fulfill their lost and unfulfilled desires through them and in the process they stunt their growth as an individual thinking being. With their own inherent nature suppressed, they become nothing but a Xerox copy of the previous order. It is like clipping the wings of a beautiful lovely bird ... which may never know what it means to fly in the air of freedom of unburdened and an unprejudiced mind ... what it is to glide across the blue sky ... touching the low lying clouds ... or breathing the air of discovering the unknown, untraversed territories of their mind.

Khalil Gibran a famous author and a poet has said in beautiful words of how we should deal with our children, He says in "The Prophet" :

...Your children are not your children .
They are the son's and daughters of life's longing for itself .
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
Which you cannot visit not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life does not go backwards nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are set forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, 
and He bends you with His might that His arrow may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archers hands be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, 
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

No, I do not say that we should unleash them like a free unbridled horse to roam around wildly without responsibility towards the family or the society. Our duty as parents is to strive to make them good human beings and instill in them the basic moral code of conduct. We should respect their individuality and at the same time make them alive and sensitive to every situation and aspect of life . With a little nudge here and there, they should be allowed to move out into the world on their own , commit mistakes and realize, fall down and get up, experience everything for themselves , discover, invent, learn and grow with an unbiased and an unprejudiced mind. Only then can they become mature, sensitive, thinking individuals, who can deal with adversity or prosperity, misfortune or success in life with pliability and resilience and can create and constitute a better world to live in. Imagine a world, full of sensitive and thinking individuals, wouldn't it be a better and a happier place to live in? Would not most of the problems we are facing today like corruption, excess commercialism, materialism be abated to a great extent and a more congenial' sociable atmosphere and milieu be the result? Where Reason and Passion could co-exist with a balance, "cause reason alone is a force confining and passion unattended is a flame that burns to it's own destruction" so said Khalil Gibran . 

–  Uma Tiwari Tariang
November 26, 2000