To bare all or to keep some things to oneself: that is the question. In public life, revelations in autobiographies are the current talking point and an issue for much debate and discussion.
But everyone has secrets. Everyone has something about themselves they do not want revealed even when they are long gone. And if it is made known in their lifetime, they would rather a more favourably tinted and positively coloured version be known: namely, theirs.
In our everyday homes, we want to remain the ‘perfect’ (is there such a term in this context?) mother or father for our children.
Therefore, our childhood escapades – when we stuck that bead in a nostril and couldn’t breathe; or squeezed through a barbed wire fence and came home gashed and bleeding profusely; or brought rabbits and other pets into our beds at night and disregarded all the norms of hygiene being instilled into us – are not referred to when we are bringing up our own children and trying to keep them out of harm’s way and attempting to make them into model citizens.
As for the wild teen years and the demands we made of our parents, the risks we took by hitching rides with strangers because we didn’t want to spend our meagre pocket money on bus fare, the times we said we were going for innocent ‘picnics’ while actually sneaking off for the entire day to another town to watch dirt bike races of attend a music fest – we try to wipe them off the slate of our own memories and are sometimes so successful that when we meet old friends and fellow conspirators of the time, we have to be reminded of some of the incidents!
From the moment we become parents, we definitely do not want to be the adult versions of those rambunctious children and rebellious teenagers.
New persona
We become entirely new people – and though we spend the rest of our lives working at the new persona, we cannot sugar coat our pasts.
Eventually, our children, who develop super-hearing when we get together with our friends to reminisce about bygone adventures and misadventures (which, however major, become minor to us in hindsight), get a whiff of what we were.
It opens their eyes to us as people – not parents – and we begin to let down our guard a little and often share and laugh over some carefully selected and edited confidences.
But as parents, are we as lenient in our leanings? We too develop super-hearing when our children get together with their friends to plan future activities.
We go many steps further and also develop super eyesight and other super senses and often imagine what is not happening.
With our now heightened parental consciences (which we are quick to discard when we are rifling through our children’s lockers and diaries, FB posts and blogs, to find out what is happening in their lives), we over-react unnecessarily and however innocent their plan, we read a huge amount into it, consider it the equivalent of the Gunpowder Plot or something that could cause irreparable damage to our children’s future.
Amazing how all our own fumbling, our wrong choices, and our blunders were all ‘learning experiences’ – something we would probably repeat if we had the chance to go back and do it again – but those of our children are not.
Private lives
Thus, in our ordinary little private lives, far from the clamour of revelations of those in the public eye, seniors’ true life tales are acceptable for the younger generation – but it highly likely that the truth as told by our children does not get the same acceptance from us.
Instead it would probably stir up a ‘where-did-I-go-wrong?’ and ‘how-do-I-save-them-from-making-this-mistake?’ and ‘what-will-happen-now?’ emotional storm for us.
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
