On New Year’s Eve, driving home along a narrow road with a birthday cake for my gardener, my heart felt buoyant with year-end cheer. Then what I witnessed made every ounce of festive warmth evaporate.
A woman walked along the roadside, gripping a toddler’s hand, the child on the traffic side, his tiny arm stretched overhead at an unnatural angle while she stayed safely on the inner edge. As my car approached, she yanked him roughly toward her. He cried out, whether from pain or fear, I couldn’t tell. Her response was another harsh pull, then a slap to his head, before she lifted his wailing body and carried him away, cursing.
I don’t know if she was his mother or hired help. What I do know is that no child deserves such callousness.
I understand the exhaustion of early parenthood, the sleepless nights, the bone-deep fatigue. But I also remember the overwhelming joy, my daughter perpetually perched on my hip, so constant that friends joked she was my ‘extra fitting.’ I chose not to hire help because I couldn’t imagine entrusting my children to anyone else. I also recognise this is a privilege many don’t have.
Therein lies the modern parent’s dilemma: return to work and wrestle with guilt or stay home and grapple with frustration over shelved ambitions. Many women face this impossible choice without support. No workplace creches, no family nearby, no option untouched by psychological cost.
As I handed my gardener his cake and watched his face illuminate, I couldn’t stop thinking about that toddler. Could his mother have made a better choice? Or was I witnessing something darker, resentment toward a burden she never wanted?
Harry Chapin’s Cat’s in the Cradle haunts me at moments like these. The song chronicles a father perpetually too busy for his son, missing milestones, postponing connection, always promising ‘we’ll have a good time then.’ When the son grows up, he becomes exactly like his father: too busy, too distant. The father, now retired and lonely, finally understands what he cultivated. A perfect replica of his own absence.
Children become what we show them, not what we tell them.
Why have children if you’re unwilling to commit wholeheartedly to them? Having children is about presence. It is recognising that the small human depending on you didn’t ask to be here, but deserves your wholehearted devotion, no matter how tired you are.
My gardener knows what many parents have forgotten: you reap what you sow. Every morning, he tends the plants with patient hands, understanding that neglect yields withering, while consistent care brings abundant bloom. You cannot curse a seedling for failing to thrive if you’ve given it neither water nor sun. Yanking a tender shoot can damage its roots irreparably.
His birthday cake sat waiting because for many years he had cultivated my garden with care. While I’d been generous to him, somewhere in my city, a toddler was learning that the world is harsh, that hands meant to protect can hurt, that his needs are burdensome.
We reap what we sow. In children. In hearts we touch. In the life we build, one choice at a time.
As midnight struck and a new year began, I thought of that crying toddler and prayed that someone, somewhere, was finally holding him gently.