Are we there yet?’ How many times have you heard this from a small person on a plane, train or automobile journey? (I once heard it as we walked down the road to a pharmacy.) Kids have no patience for journeys. They are all about the destination. As much as you coax them to look out the window and enjoy the beautiful scenery or the interesting buildings, they just want to get where they need to be.
I can so relate.
Of late, all I can think is ‘Am I there yet? No? Okay. When will I get there? Am I where I’m meant to be? Shouldn’t I be there by now? Why is it taking so long? What am I doing wrong?’
A couple of years ago, a batch mate of mine shared an article I’d written in our final year for the college magazine. It was awful in the way that know-it-all, self-indulgent college writing is. It was about finding one’s place in the world, and I cringingly ended the piece spouting some nonsense about how in a year or so we would all have found our spot in the universe and would be doing amazing things.
Ugh.
Here I am, almost two decades later with no idea of my place in the world or what I am meant to be doing. Or what to make for lunch. Or when I will have it all figured out.
As one son gets ready to go to middle school I’ve been asked by other parents what plans I have for his future. Do I plan to send him abroad for a degree? For graduate school? Will he do ICSE, IB, IGCSE? Apparently, he or perhaps I, on his behalf must decide now. Before… before what?
As an almost 40-year-old who is still trying to figure out what to do with her life, the idea of expecting my almost 11-year-old son to chart his future seems ridiculous. And yet, here we are, being asked to choose boards of education and enriching extra and co-curricular activities that’ll look good on college applications.
This urgency to decide things seems to filter into everything we do with our children. The day is a checklist of things: classes, homework, summer camps, piano practice, eating, brushing teeth, pooping, peeing, getting to bed on time. Do it now or live in regret forever is the call to action.
No wonder kids are always asking ‘Are we there yet?’.
They’re used to us cracking the whip at them, getting them ready to arrive at something — an achievement, an award, a new level, all the time. Okay, that and the fact that they have zero patience. But are we passing that impatience on to them?
Right now my son wants to be a cricket player who takes photos of insects with 1,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel when he grows up. What board of education does he need to choose to get there?
While we ponder this question, I need learn to look out of the window and enjoy the beautiful scenery. And find all the copies of that college magazine and burn them.