Someone told me at dinner recently, that a woman I had met a few weeks earlier (and disclaimer: happened to instantly like) was "a bit weird." It wasn't said in a particularly callous manner, although even typing that I get the irony of that statement - and the irony irks me. But it was said more as a throwaway comment, in the way people slip these judgemental observations into conversation as if they were passing the salt. Slipped so casually as if to renounce the comment from their own being. I said nothing, as if the silence were a signal that I had zero desire to launch into a wild debrief about this woman's personality / behaviour / history - and I changed the conversation.
Situations like the one described are alarmingly frequent. They are so frequent that we almost stop to actually recognise how much judgement is casually thrown around that is both purely unwarranted and also just cruel. Let's call a spade a spade. Additionally, my view of 'said' woman has not moved at all. Ten years ago it would have. I would have quietly filed the comment away and pulled it out the next time I saw her, unconsciously scanning her for the weirdness someone else had planted in my mind. I would have become a slightly less generous version of myself around her. Then at some point, I would have decided the person who tipped me off was right.
I don't know whether this is growth, getting older, or becoming a better person, or learning to trust my own judgement, or a combination of all four. It sounds small that shift, but is not. It is the sound of something I have been doing my whole life quietly beginning to stop.
I am no longer the woman who thinks it is fine for someone to pass judgement like they pass the salt, however frivolous the comment may be. Since when did that become acceptable? To hand out a verdict on another human being as an aside over dinner. To weigh a woman we barely know because someone else did it first.
There are always too many opinions in the room. Not just about the woman we have just met but about how we should be raising our children. On whether we should be working. On what our marriages should look like. On how we should be spending our money. On whether we should be softer or louder or more available or less. Modern life is a great many voices all speaking at once, most of them convinced they know better than we do. And women, in particular, have been trained since childhood to receive those voices as more reliable than our own.
I recently read an essay by most talented friend, Anam Sufi that has stayed with me, called "Deferred Answers (read here)." It is about the way meaning arrives quietly, often decades later, for questions you asked so long ago you had forgotten you were still carrying them. But underneath that, is a life understood as a slow series of learning and unlearning. She was told as a child, that her freckles were something to be ashamed of and then spent thirty years hiding them. In her own time, a set of small moments began to give her back what she should never have been asked to give up.
Which is what most of us are actually doing, I think, whether we name it that way or not. Adulthood is the slow work of unlearning what we were told to feel. Unlearning what beauty is. Unlearning that other people know better than we do. Unlearning that in order to be considered as "good" you have to follow what other people definite as "good". Unlearning that the outside read is the accurate one. And here is where it gets really uncomfortable - our children are doing their learning right now.
They are absorbing the version of the world I am handing them, whether I intend to or not. The parts of me they are watching most closely are not the parts I have curated for them. They are the ones I do not fully hear in my own voice. The tone I take when I am tired. The way I speak about myself in front of them. The things I say on the phone when I think they are not listening. The way we dissect people, situations, life events over conversations they are carefully unknowingly listening into. The moments I trust my instinct and the moments I let someone else's opinion overwrite it. All of that is going into them.
And a lot of what they are learning now will one day be what they have to unlearn. I have no way of knowing which parts. If Anam Sufi's story is any guide - and I think it is - some of it will feel very small at the time. A comment. An expression. A pattern they absorbed without realising. Some Tuesday afternoon thirty years from now, one of them will finally understand a question they had been carrying without realising. And the answer will lead them back to a room I was in when they were seven.
I do not think that is a failure of mothering. I think it is the inevitable shape of it. There is no way you can escape this facet of motherhood, no matter how stellar you feel your parenting choices are and your emotional intelligence is. My own mother did her unlearning while she was raising me. Her mother did the same before her. Each generation quietly puts down some of what was handed to them, keeps some of it and passes on a slightly different version to the next one.
I used to worry about this part of the journey. I've seen the meme on Instagram more times than I can count that mocks that you're child will inevitably end up in therapy any which way. But when I sit with it honestly, I fully accept that this is not one I can solve. There is no way to give my children a version of me without edges and a version of life without all its nonsensical, weird, wonderful nuances. I think having an awareness of their tiny perceptions is critical, and to do that you have to cultivate a self-check on your own behaviour. To keep noticing when someone else's voice is trying to overwrite your own. Model, in whatever small ways they are catching, what it looks like to trust an internal read. Show them a woman who is quietly doing her own unlearning in real time while raising them and actively rejecting things that just do not sit well with you. I have come to believe that the most useful thing I can hand them is the habit of keeping their own counsel. And to be unapologetic about it.
I still like the woman I met at the dinner. She is not weird. Perhaps she is a little. Perhaps I am too. That is the sort of thing you get to decide for yourself quietly, without asking anyone. And I would like to raise children who know they get to do that too.
With love,
Roshni
0 comments