The Things They Forget.

We sit together on the balcony of our new home in the mountains, he fiddles with the gardening tools I recently purchased, checking to see if he can use them for anything but their intended purpose, as he tells me about the kids in the neighbourhood. After he regales me with the story of Viv, a very young boy, who recently told him that he should reject me as his mother because I work and drink alcohol, he is ready to issue his condemnation.

“I don’t even understand where they learn these kinds of things,” he says, seriously, before beaming at his own moral uprightness, “I was a kid too and I didn’t ever believe things like this about men and women.”

I smile at him. He really isn’t a kid anymore, I suppose. As he barrels towards fifteen, he has shot up like a weed and seems to rejoice in being taller than me so much, he reminds me every single day. Yesterday, he saw a jacket of mine hanging on the hook by the door, declared it would fit him and if it did, it would then become his jacket. It did fit him and I still don’t quite understand how that happened, we have different body-types, he is eighteen-years younger than I am and most importantly, it doesn’t seem like it was so long ago that he put on my shirts as a joke because they were as big as a house on him. He remembers that, but he seems to have forgotten a few other things.

“You don’t remember?” I ask him, bemused at his developing sense of pride in his ethics, “You never believed anything like that?”

“Did..I?” he asks, putting down the rake to stare at me in anticipatory horror.

It’s funny how raising children means that you will be able to recall with ease so many things that they will just as easily forget. I think I used to worry about that. When you start raising a child closer to the age of eight then zero, you tend to think that they will remember everything about your interactions because they seem old enough to do so. With his biological parents, he understands and accepts the mores as they stand, he was once an infant with little consciousness, and they remember that part of his life better than he ever can. Parents, who were there when you were a baby, or ones who birthed you, are always the authority on your infancy, they have access to a part of your life even you cannot structure, but I wasn’t there in his infancy, nor did I give birth to him and I think, in a way, that led me to believe that I would never be able to tell him about his childhood in the way so many parents seem to do. It’s a rite of passage when your children get old enough to forget but are still young enough to want to remember, you can so easily amuse the little narcissists by telling them stories of their own lives they cannot recall. I think I believed I would never have that with him. I also miscalculated how that can go, because there will always be stories they don’t know that they don’t want to remember. I don’t think he wants to remember this one.

“What do you remember about the time when you moved in with your dad and I?” I ask him, now curious about the memory of children, “The first few days?”

“Not that much, I guess,” he says, grimacing in hard-thought the way he does when I’m breaking down a mathematical concept for him, “I remember the room, it was all blue, I remember that I vomited after drinking milk, I remember that mama and daddy were fighting about some school document or something. I remember I was excited but also scared of the new school.”

I remember the fighting too. The design of divorce in India is about as idiotic as it gets, it claims to want to protect children and rights, but it seems much more concerned with preserving the sanctity of marriage by making the process as painful, punitive and secretive as possible. Divorce is a privilege you must obtain by a process that plays out in an environment of animosity and scheming. There are good laws in place, laws that are optimized by lawyers who want to win and wielded by judges who exercise legal foresight without considering the environment, played out through parties who become much more interested in defeating one another than taking stock of what they really want. It's not all about law and society, I suppose, hateful relationships lead to hateful divorces, because as people, we seem to love with the same fervour as we hate. Even so, it’s difficult to get behind any system that makes it so that you could assume permanent custody of your child on a given date, in accordance with a fat document of rules, but before that date, have been advised and mandated, not to reveal any information about your life to the person with whom you had the child. I will never be able to wrap my head around that because functionally, it meant that one day in August, a child who didn’t know of my existence would arrive in the house I shared with his father, without any knowledge that I was there, and we would immediately view each other in roles neither one of us had yet bestowed upon one another. I guess, in that way, it’s not very different from giving birth, because you become parent and child, overnight.

I remember that day. His father, who is now my spouse, was on the phone with his mother, arguing about a Transfer Certificate, while the two of us sat in our sparsely-furnished living room, having breakfast off a table that was too small for two plates because divorce is also expensive. He ate very slowly, and still does, quite like his dad, eating with them is a long process.

“It’s going to be a bad day,” he looked at me and said, as he watched his father on the phone.

“Why do you say that?” I inquired.

“It’s always a bad day when they are fighting,” he said.

Immediately, I felt kinship with him. I knew exactly what he meant. For a few years, the contentious relationship of two other people had possessed the power to alter my mood and day, because the most horrible thing about divorce in India is how long it takes. You can separate and functionally move on with your lives, but it tethers a part of you in the past and until you can sever that connection, a part of you keeps being pulled into the future still affixed to the past, like elastic that is constantly in a state of tension, threatening to snap. For him, the reason was different, they are his parents and the state of their relationship had immediate impact of his entire life and lifestyle but it led to us feeling the same way. It led to us feeling anxious about how their interactions with each other would impact us. I didn’t know what to tell him then, we hadn’t even known each other for twelve waking hours, so I asked him if he liked coconut and gave him a piece of candy. Sometimes distraction is all that occurs to you, until you get to a moment where you have to face a difficult truth. This moment, almost seven years later, feels like a difficult truth he has to face about himself.

“Do you remember the first time I asked you to clean you room?” I ask him, “It was the day after they were fighting, it was Saturday and you didn’t have school.”

“No bro,” he says, rolling his eyes at me, “Not everyone remembers every single thing in the world, nerd.”

So, I remind him. It was just the two of us in the house. We had eaten breakfast, played with the cats and taken showers when I knocked on his door and told him it was time for him to clean his room. People think that those first few days would be such big emotional moments but, in its function, I found that early parenting was more about feeding, providing shelter, cleanliness, structure and safety than anything else. Everything else comes later. When I asked him to clean his room, he looked at me, aghast at the suggestion and squinted his eyes the way he still does when he feels anger.

“Why do I have to clean?” he had asked me, “Girls are supposed to clean.”

When I tell you that absolutely nothing in my life had prepared me for that moment, you better believe it. People give you all sorts of feel-good advice when you’re about to embark upon this fraught journey of being a step-parent but none of it—just be his friend, don’t try to replace his mother, work to earn his acceptance—is actually of any kind of use in most real-life situations. It’s because most parenting advice is ideological and most actual parenting is horrifying gritty and rooted firmly in reality. In that moment, I wanted to blow a gasket because I have spent my life, like many Indian feminist women, victimized by men and oppressed by the patriarchy and to add to that, I made it my life’s work and my literal livelihood, to fight against gendered systems of violence and oppression, but you want to try saying that to a child? More important, would you be able to explain to child who is a week older than eight that what he said is sexist, offensive to you and unacceptable? What is the right way to explain to an eight-year-old who has been raised in an environment over which you had no control that what he is saying is wrong for political reasons? Very easy question to answer in an essay, just as hard to enact in reality in a single moment. The cure to ideology is persistence, because years of seeing his father do housework and being responsible for his own care has taught him a different ideology, but in that moment, I learnt the restraint that is vital to being a parent. I chose not to chide, scold or demonize him, but ask him a question instead.

“So, while you wait for this girl to show up to clean your room, will you be living in filth?” I asked him.

He looked at me, then around the room and then down at his hands for a while.

“Actually, I don’t know how to do it,” he said, and whether it was a form of bargaining or not, it had a certain vulnerability to it.

“Okay, how about I teach you how to do it and we’ll do it together?” I asked him, “You do the parts that you can manage and I’ll do the parts that take some time to learn.”

“You will help?” he asked, smiling in a way that I have come to understand much better over the years, it’s a smile of gratitude because sometimes, children of divorce find nothing more reassuring than the promise that you’ll guide them through a process.

I was always going to help him clean. I wouldn’t except a child so young to be able to mop the floors but the fact that collaboration immediately made the process more desirable to him taught me that his earlier exclamation of gendered expectations was far less strong than his desire to be engaged with, to not be left alone to take care of something.

“Of course,” I told him, “I will help and I will teach you.”

The ideology problem with parenting also extends to teaching, because you trick yourself into believing you had to teach the big things but in actuality, you have to teach children how to organise a desk or put covers over a pillow much more actively than moral philosophy. That comes later, when they begin to contemplate it themselves, first. As I tell him the story of when we first cleaned the room, he stares at me in shock and horror.

“I cannot believe I told you of all people that only girls clean,” he says, genuinely amazed at what he had done, “Was that the hardest moment of your life? Did you just want to kill me?”

I didn’t. I really didn’t but it was difficult. You’re never really working with a black slate, even if you create the slate, because they interact with the world and they bring back information you’d rather they not learn to believe. You can’t stop that from happening, but I guess, you can do your best with it when they do bring you information. You can tell them what you think and hope they do their best with it.

“I guess, I shouldn’t be so harsh with, Viv,” he continues, thoughtfully and unexpectedly, “He only said what he has been taught to believe and maybe it would be better to ask him why he thinks that than to dislike him for it. Maybe his parents behave like that or he’s never been taught to think about it differently.”

You can tell them what you think and hope they do their best with it.