I Have Not Been Truthful to Myself and My Daughter…
I was happy living a lie… All this while, I thought I was a single parent, and told my daughter that too.
I wrote blogs about it, and brainwashed myself and others into believing that such a concept exists…
But, the fact is, there is no such thing as ‘a single parent’, and never will be.
It takes two parents for any child to be born. I realised it was important for my daughter to understand this too… Otherwise, she may just start believing in stories of being born magically, or falling from the heavens.
So, I conveyed my thoughts to my daughter recently… I spoke to her about how I was incorrectly using the term single parent, and that both her mother and father were part of the process of bringing her into this world.
Branding myself as a single parent can adversely affect my daughter and me...
There is a sense of ego that starts to develop, as one gets attached to the label, and falsely prides oneself on being solely responsible for the child… But, it is delusional to believe that my wife does not exist in the equation.
The fact is, it took two of us to bring my daughter into this world.
It’s just that the situation is different now… We are no longer conventional parents who live under one roof. We are divorced, and my wife took the decision to let my daughter be raised by me.
And, that does not make me a single parent…my wife still exists, and meets my daughter occasionally.
I may be raising my daughter as a father without the mother present, but there is another parent who was equally responsible for birthing the child, and is also taking care of her needs, even if remotely.
In some separations, either spouse may not have visitation rights, or perhaps one spouse has passed on… The fact still remains that there is/was another parent, and, the child should always be made aware of this fact.
If this fact is hidden from the child, the child will develop insecurities…
It may also play out in their lives later, and they may think it is the norm, and develop an unhealthy approach to life and relationships.
Life is brought into this world only with the union of two… Situations may pan out differently, but you still cannot fool yourself into believing that you are a single parent.
When I explained this to my daughter, she smiled and said, ‘You and mamma will always be my parents.’
It takes two to tango… In parenting too, it’s best we acknowledge this fact.
Only when we acknowledge it, will the child also acknowledge it, and feel secure in the fact that she has two parents to take care of her, and not just one.
To say you are single parent, and brag about it to satisfy your ego is foolish…but you can definitely say you are raising the child alone.
Moreover, the tag of being a single parent can work in harmful ways — It can either needlessly boost your ego, making you feel extraordinary, or it can add more pressure, making you feel depressed.
The tag of a single parent limits one’s personal growth, and especially that of the child’s, who can develop insecurities.
Moreover, when you get identified with the tags of ‘single parent’ or ‘divorcee’, you take away from your true personality, and the fact that you are so much more than those labels…
Labels prevent us from exploring our true potential.
We are anyway identified by our nationality, religion, family, wealth and education…and to brush these off takes a long time. By adding more tags, we will only regress further, and move farther away from discovering our true selves.
The single parent tag is not just a falsehood, it is a crutch…
So let’s do away with it completely, and work toward realising our own potential, and that of our children.
The single parent tag is not just unfair to the other parent, who is still alive, but also to the child who will have to live with the tag of being from a ‘divorced family’.
Should we not just be known as parents? Because, I’m still a parent, without the word single in it!
Also, if I get remarried sometime later, and the mother is still around, does that make me a double parent? Perhaps, we come up with another word that is more inclusive and sensitive…
I often flip the coin and ask, what if my ex-wife was raising our daughter, and kept calling herself a single parent, how would I feel?
These tags are used as marketing tools by companies to target our profile, behaviour, and decisions. The less we brand ourselves and get identified with tags, the freer we become to make our own decisions.
Right from birth, we categorise and sub-categorise ourselves like computer files…
We have to identify our religion, caste, nationality, education, employment type,etc. This list gets longer as we grow older, and soon we have to tick, ‘single, married, divorced.’
As a result, not only are we judged externally by society, but also begin to judge and penalize ourselves internally. We soon create barriers between those who are ‘like us’ and ‘not like us’…
We find ‘our tribe’, stick to them, and diminish the potential to grow and expand in any situation.
This approach then filters down to our children, who become as limited in their thinking, unable to move away from the tags society has forced upon us.
We needlessly complicate our lives and theirs!
The idea is to discard all these identities, and develop the potential to see life as it is, responding with full awareness…without a coloured vision in our hearts or minds.
It is a spirit of inclusiveness that the world desperately needs…
As parents, it is our primary responsibility to honour this spirit in our beings and in our children… This will help them grow into more sensitive and compassionate citizens of the world!
Are you passing on any biases or needless identification tags to your children? Are you watchful of the terms you use around them, and how do you correct mistakes you may have made in this regard?
Write to us about your stories of parenting and self-growth in the comment box below…
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