Skip to main content

Defiance


Between age three and four, J had gone through a period of defiant behavior. She simply did not want to follow instructions and would do her best to annoy me. It was a little game of testing boundaries to see where the yield point lay.
I started off by ignoring her hoping that things would resolve themselves that way. Instead she upped the ante some to ensure that she had my attention. I changed strategy at that point and decided to talk through it (as difficult as that was given her age at the time) - being mad at her was just making things worse. So using a variety of ways ranging between halfway sensible and downright idiotic, I was able to rein J in - for the time. I did not want to push too hard fearing that she may clam up completely or would have no spirit left.
Defiance is back again these days. It will be over small things. I view it as her way to assert her identity as different from mine and one she wants to define independent of my guidance - and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Whatever methods worked four years ago, do not any more.
One morning while walking her to the bus stop, I asked J if it was tempting to annoy me and do things I would not approve of just because. "For no real reason". She grudgingly admitted that was true. Sometimes she was just annoyed about it having to be my way and not hers even when she knew mine was the better way. I told her it may be a lot more satisfying and interesting for her, if she chose her battles well - not just with me but with anyone she intended to defy. Some things are too trivial to do war over - it is wasted time and energy for the most part. If she was smart, she'd not concern herself with those but really stand up for what she believed in when it actually mattered.
I explained to J that there is a difference between being mulish and having determination. Defiance just for the sake of it was more former and less later. In the long run, it made the person hard to like and get along with. Besides, they may have made some really poor choices because they were not using their brains and defying everything instinctively. Determination on the other hand is what it takes for a person to beat the odds in their life and come out successful - it is a quality worth cultivating. 

By when I had reached this point, the school bus had come. We did not continue this conversation in days that followed. From what I know of J, sowing the germs of an idea in her head is often the best way to get her to think about it - and hopefully react to it. She will tune off quickly if I belabor it.
This is merely round two and she is all of eight years old. Makes me wonder about what is yet to come and if I will know how to deal with the bigger challenges that lie ahead.

Comments

Ananth said…
Liked this post and the way you tackled it is very very interesting. BTW.. I have read a lot of posts but never commented. I come to your blog daily to read. Keep writing..
poulami said…
Shop flowers online with us, your preferred local florist in Hyderabad, to send online flowers to Hyderabad and fascinate your loved ones. Create a thrilling surprise at the celebrations of your dear ones in Hyderabad with our lovely flowers, exclusive gifts and delicious cakes. For details, visit www.gifts4hyderabad.com.

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...