The depths of conditioning

A few days ago Natasha Badhwar wrote a beautiful article entitled "Does Your Child Feel Safe With You?"  She describes an incident from her early childhood, in which she and her even younger cousin get lost, and how the younger cousin is soundly thrashed. Please follow this link and read what she says.

The concern most parents feel for their children is often expressed in such negative ways. The child may grieve for the hurt she has caused her parent, and also for the hurt and injury to her self esteem.
Anxiety is infectious. A mother worrying about the late arrival of her spouse transmits that anxiety, willy-nilly, to her children. For those of us who grew up in a world without cell-phones, or without any phone at all, (perhaps a neighbourhood phone where messages might or might not be delivered home), the lack of communication could lead to extreme anxiety if a family member was unreasonably late. It took years of worrying (most pointlessly) and a wise friend's counsel to learn that "No news is good news."

Having grown up in Delhi, and having braved the nastiness of several men on the street and in DTC buses, I was obviously concerned when my older daughter moved to Delhi for her college education several years ago.The general advice we gave her was the same that I had received in my youth: to try and be back home/ in the hostel before dark.
One day last week I spent most of the day out of my house, minus the spouse. I went across Delhi to meet a friend who was here from another city. I had lunch at a restaurant on my own. I went to several stalls at the book fair. I attended a talk I had been wanting to attend. But as evening fell, I was struggling to concentrate on the talk while suppressing the voice within me that insisted that I should be home. The voice was summarily shut up, but the mere fact of its existence annoyed me. Today we have good communication systems, the spouse knew where I was, we communicated as and when required.
I had not made anyone worry about me. There was absolutely no need for guilt.
And yet the wretched guilt did exist...

I asked my older daughter the other day whether she felt the same way? She does too. She does whatever she has to, comes back home whenever she wishes to, but that wretched voice still exists.

This is a legacy I do not wish to give to anyone. Our cities may not be terribly safe, we may live our lives with sensible precautions, but we need to be our own women, not haunted by the conditioning of our youth...