Hi!
So I know it’s not my place to tell you all how to bring up your children. You guys have done it for twenty more years than I have. However, I am a child of this generation and this is something I think everyone feels they could tell their parents.
Mom, Dad, I love you.
I will never stop loving you. I am who I am because of you and what values, what sanskar if you will, what experiences you gave me. Everything I learnt, I either learnt from you or from schools you sent me to or media that I consumed because of you being able to get that media for me. You made me who I am. And I can never re-pay that.
But as much as you would like me to, I am not your baby who can wrap in your pallu and keep safe anymore.
What worked you might not work for me. I live in a different generation, with different values of my own. They make me who I am, living according to them makes me happy and you want me happy right? I know you tell me that you did not do these things when you were my age or maybe you did and regret them and I should learn from your mistakes or maybe you did these things and therefore so should I, but Mom, Dad, I am not you. I cannot live under the shadow of your experiences and mistakes, I should be able to make my own. I value your advice, I really do.
But every generation does something that is foreign to the one before it. Whether it’s a woman studying or a setting up a start-up or getting married early or not getting married at all, adopting children or colouring our hair or burning our bras, we all do things that our parents are uncomfortable with and hurt by. You did it. I will do it. That’s how we grow.
Call Grandpa and Grandma right now. Ask them if you ever did things that they disagreed with. I bet you did but it worked out for you didn’t it? It will work out for me and if it doesn’t, I know you’ll take care of me but I cannot not live my life.
I may have different opinions from what you have. I may support a different political party and subscribe to a different ideology. Instead of straight-up condemning it, maybe understand it first? Who knows we might find common ground.
I am not against you, I am just me. If after everything you have said, I still feel something is right, don’t invalidate that? Trust me? Maybe it’ll turn out to be the best thing for me. Or you’ll be proven right and I will come to cry in your lap. The experience will teach me something. Some lessons need to be learnt the hard way. It’ll be my choice. Who knows where you failed, I might succeed? Or where you succeeded I might fail. It’s worth a try, right if I think it will make me happy in the long-run?
You have taught me the difference between right and wrong, the difference between safe and unsafe, you have done your job. Now trust me. Trust in your upbringing and let me go out into the big bad world and play by my rules. I will return home to you. Please, let me be me? Accept me?
As to my peers, no matter who you think you are, your parents probably love you and want the best for you. Talk to them, if they really love they’ll get over their prejudice and accept you. Whether’s it’s your career or chosen gender or sexuality, if they love you, they will accept you even if they hate the thing or the person you are doing. Value their opinion, they know more than you do.
And in the end, know it’s your life. Own it.
Whoever loves you, will stay, and even if they say I told you so, they won’t turn you away.
Just don’t threaten your parents. They don’t owe you anything. They did for the first eighteen years of your life. Now they don’t. You can’t put a gun to their head and get them to pay for your “vices”. They are being there for you because you are family and that is what family does. Respect that and be there for them too. A family stands by each other. Fights for each-other. No matter what the disagreement.
Parents, please hear us out as adults and not your children. Be family, man. Stand by us, you don’t have to support our mistakes- you can voice your agreement- but don’t actively discourage us. We cannot grow unless we screw up. Experience is the best teacher. We aren’t going out to commit a murder by living our own lives now, are we? You have taught us that much. Keep aside your prejudices and we will set aside ours. We aren’t that foreign to you, are we?
