Skip to main content

Effective Age

Watched Riding in Cars with Boys recently and found more than a few epiphanies there. The one thought that stayed with me for several days was one about the effective mental age of a household. This is not a standard concept but something that the movie got me thinking about. There was this scene where Bev and her son Jason have an argument about who has it worse - he has his litany of issues and she has hers. 

They each try to outdo the other until Bev tells Jason that they are team and he contradicts her by saying he is the kid and she is the mother - so infact they are not a team. While my circumstances were nowhere as dire as Bev's but I was single mom and this notion of pulling in the same direction as a team was very much my operating model. I did not hesitate to explain this to J when she was a kid - we work together so things go well for us. I each do our part and do it well. 

Unlike Jason, J did not loudly protest the idea and demand her right to be a kid because she had for the most part the privilege of being one. However, it was far from the experience of a kid growing up in a stable, two parent household where the parental unit does not need the kid to pull their weight as part of the team effort. In Bev and Jason's household, the effective age was lower than it might have been in demographically comparable household where there were two parents. 

In a mentally "immature" household the conversations are different - the parent is expecting the child to act more responsible because they are at the wits end and can't go the distance alone. The child is resentful because the parent is not acting mature enough, asking for teamwork when there is no team. This is not the conversation that would be needed where the parental unit has the resources to do the job and therefore does not need the kid to pitch in.

Comments

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...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...