This post is a continuation of yesterday’s. If you haven’t read that one yet, you probably should. Unless of course, you are a big fan of just randomly reading stuff and not particularly keen on following along.
Now that I’ve given you substantial motivation for all of this, I return to our topic of immediate interest — the argument. After the Egypt leg of the journey, my parents had planned to (and did) proceed to other parts of the world so that they could catch up with some old friends. I don’t see the point of catching up, or even that of old friends, but I knew this sort of thing is important to them, so I encouraged them to go ahead and do whatever made them happy.
And so were sown the seeds of confusion.
When I was later talking to her about how the trip went, after all the details about Egypt had past, I began to get annoying information (slowly at first, and then turned into a flood) about random people — like where they are in the world and what they’re doing. Since I knew some of these people as a kid, it was implicitly assumed I was curious to know where they are in the world at the moment.
No, I am not the least bit curious. In fact, I had forgotten the existence of most of these people, and haven’t wasted a moment of my life thinking about any of them. So at some point in the conversation, rather abruptly, I said something like “Would it bother you if I told you I honestly don’t care?”. And when she said something like “No, it’s not a problem”, my obvious response was, “OK, please stop. I don’t care”.
It’d have been cool if I’d shut up at that point. But nooo.
“Don’t you get it? I don’t know these people. They are not my “friends”. I haven’t maintained contact with them in over 10 years. The ONLY reason I ever got to meet most of them, and play or whatever, was because they were your friends’ kids. I do NOT WANT to waste my time listening to details pertaining to where they are in the world today or what they’re doing. Or how happy they are. Or whether they’re intellectually capable of handling their uni. Or whether they’re married. Or…
Because, quite frankly, I just don’t care. And I don’t even see why I should.
Catching up was important to you, and I didn’t object. I was happy you were happy getting to meet them. NOT CATCHING UP is important to me, can’t you see you’re forcing me otherwise?”
At which point things just started rolling even more downhill. Come to think of it, it wasn’t really as much of an argument as me getting terribly annoyed and venting. It sort of reminded me of the other such times. Times when I’ve blown up hearing stuff like so.
“Oh H, why don’t you go work out or hang out with your friends or something?”
Hello, as easy as that may sound for you folks, it is FRICKIN’ HARD for someone like me. I just don’t “make friends and hang out”. It is an arduous process for me. It takes time, years. And even then, there is a good chance I might not get near the point you apparently reach within minutes.
The moral in all of this being, parents, if you have a kid who sees the world from an extremely different perspective from the way you do, please don’t attempt to mould him to what you know. Just realise he’s evolved past you and bow to his glorious way of going about things. For his way is definitely better. That’s what evolution is about, isn’t it?