The New Normal 5.0: Being the fall guy

Parenting a child with anxiety

How long can you go on working at a stretch?

A bio break, maybe two, otherwise at your desk with your eyes fixed on the monitor.

Sketching, typing, ranting, fidgeting, breaking down, pulling yourself together, always making up for the procrastination to meet a target. 10 hours? 12? 16 or 20 may be? Without getting up for a glass or water or a trip to the washroom? 10 or 12 hours? How long have you been able to sleep at a stretch?

Your tryst with continuity might never have extended that much. You might have been a slave, or a master (not much difference, really!), of routine all your life.

Will you not then, get worried, even scared, if you have to live with someone who can work in a stretch for 36 hours and sleep in a stretch for 16? Will you think it is ok? Will you not try to reason with the person, especially if he happens to be your only son, about the effects of such inhuman schedules on the human health?

So what if he ignores your concerns first, then laughs it away and finally, gets wild enough to push you out of his room and slams the door on your face. The door doesn’t open at your pleas, or your wife’s reasons.

When you are a novice at the sweatshop of mental health, it is very difficult to take the heady concoction of concern and ignominy. You are hurt at body, especially the right shoulder as it had hit the showcase. Worse, you are hurt at mind. Your pride is shattered as you have never been treated like this. Ever since you graduated from the college and began to earn you have always been the king at your workplace and the master of the household.

You instant reaction is to scream, “Stop blaming me for everything. Did I tell you to binge watch that TV series and draw just five lines for the last 2 weeks? Did I stop you from starting early and finishing the project? Why should I always be the fall guy?”

You suddenly feel a whiff of air making you realise the door is open now. Your son, all of 1.7 m, towers above your fallen body.

Your spectacles are broken, t-shirt torn into shreds and for the next 3 days, you sport a Band Aid on the top of your left cheek to conceal the blue marks from being hit by a badminton racket.

The door closes again. The two of you do not dare to call him out. Your parents, the spent force that they are, do not miss to mention that they had raised you much better, with much less means to sustain than you have raised your child.

You cannot handle those remarks right now. You push your parents inside their room and close their door with a bang. Ironic, I know!

They keep cursing and shouting at you but you have no energy left to argue and finally you shut yourself up in your study.

You begin to weep with no restrain. You have mastered the art of wailing silently. It’s often the bathroom, and sometimes your study.

Your mind flashes through a maze of wormholes.

What if you let him get dirty in the rains on his way back to school and not arranged for a car to pick him up? What if you had let him quit the coaching class when he had asked? What if you had let him have a free, unproductive year after his debacle in the board exams? What if… ?

You keep clicking through the memory links to make your way out of the temple gate of guilt. The monster of the past keeps gobbling on your present.

After your guilt and shame has been washed away with the tears, you clean your face with the remnants of the shredded t-shirt. A whale of concerns overwhelms you and, despite the warnings from your wife, you knock at the closed door,

“I am sorry, beta. I didn’t mean to upset you. Let me in please. We have worked together before on many of your projects. Think of me as a project partner. Open the door, the submission is tomorrow, please don’t let anger get the better of you.”

You keep whining, pleading… to no avail.

What you didn’t know in that moment is that, on the other side of the door that replica of yours had been weeping as well, just as bitterly as you.

His mind and body doesn’t allow him to get out of that bed after such bouts. What you couldn’t see in that moment is that sleep has engulfed him again.

For now, all you can do is to pray, wait and settle petty scores about the past 20 years of your marriage with your wife.