Skip to main content

Captain Fantastic

 Watched Captain Fantastic recently and could not help thinking about parents including myself try so earnestly to do their best by their kids and end up missing the mark wildly. We come into parenting with our own traumas, baggage and ideas about what perfection means. The people we are raising are not attached to any of that. More often than not what we feel the need to over-correct is not an issue for our children. I was very vacation deprived growing up because my father had a job that kept him on the road a lot and when he was home he just wanted to rest and recover. Travel for fun was not a concept that came to him readily. Visiting ailing grandparents was the only travel we did regularly. 

The rest was considered overboard. Based on such experience, I made overzealous efforts to fit travel into J's life once she was old enough to enjoy and be able to recall the trip. It turned out that J had a very full and complete life in school and outside of it. Fitting a vacation in required her to give up something that she was quite passionate about. So I felt I was putting all this effort and it was mostly in vain. She enjoyed the time out but I never experienced the kind of satisfaction I was hoping to get out of it - I gave my child something wonderful that I did not get myself. The whole process was stressful and underwhelming. We traveled until the year she left to college. I hope she recalls those trips later in life with fondness. 

Any overzealous parent is guilty of what Captain Fantastic does in this movie, He well-intentioned and gets many things rights as a parent but some things end up being way off kilter, It's only a matter of degree.

On one hand, Ben has clearly raised his children to be respectful, bright young adults, but he’s also guilty of sheltering them in his own way, withholding how to interact with others when and if they ever decide to leave the bohemian forest life. It’s as if he hasn’t factored actual adulthood into his parenting plan, giving them each names as unique as their respective intellects, with the socially awkward result that they all sound like characters from “The Lord of the Rings”

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

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
6 comments
Read more