A conversation in a group about infantilising elderly parents by withholding medical information and making crucial decisions of their treatment without their involvement made me think. Keeping things from someone out of a misplaced concern is something that I don’t agree with. But it happens a lot over here.

Parents infantilise children, and when they are old, the children return the favour. It is all a ‘we know what’s better for you and are the ones to keep you safe’ fest. Do you know what’s surprising about the whole thing? No one thinks it is anything worth losing your sleep over. It is love, they say. It is concern, they say. And what do I say to all this? That it is nothing but bullsh*t.

The first time something of the sort happened was when the L&M had a minor scooter accident. This was when we were still the ‘newly married couple’. He kept the fact from me. You would unnecessarily worry, he casually told me months after the incident when he came down on leave.

I didn’t go all doe-eyed and melt because he showed ‘concern’ for me. Instead I was livid. ‘Unnecessarily’ worry? What does that even mean? I am the one entitled to know and to worry about you, not some stranger’, I told him. He was truly taken aback that day. I don’t think that line of thinking had ever occurred to him at all until then because he and his siblings are used to keeping their mother, my mother in law, worry-free!

My children though are different. They tell me things as they are. They know they can. Once the First Born had to go to Chennai for a week, to attend a class. He was fifteen or so at the time. While there, staying with his cousin, he fell sick one day. Naturally there was no need to hide the fact from me, and so he told me about it during our call.

This news had also reached my mother-in-law and she kept it a secret from me because, yeah, she thought ‘I would worry’. Pray tell me, if a mother cannot worry about her children who should? The next door neighbours?! Or the strangers on the road? By the way, it gave me absolute pleasure to tell her I already knew about his fever, that my son had called me up and told me so himself.

Then there was the bike accident the Second Born was in. Did he hide it from me? No. I was attending an engagement party at the time when he called up to tell me that the driver of the vehicle that caused him to fall had taken him to the hospital. He had a hairline fracture in his wrist and once the doctor had seen him, the man would drop him home. ‘I know you wouldn’t freak out Amma, that’s why I called you’, he said. ‘And you needn’t rush home!’ he added.

This is not the last word on this. Someday I’ll write more on the topic.

©️ Shail Mohan 2024