The True Infinite Game

I’ve always drawn about everything related to French. Many reasons have been written here in the past.

Raised by a french teacher gave significant impact to me more than any of my siblings. From the parenting, way of life, and many little things that my late mother did really goes along the way and it influences about the way I raise my little girl now, consciously and unconsciously.

From being adventerous about eating, being strict about sleeping, being details about footwear, the love for pastries and cake, make her wait for everything, that’s why I said before how amazed I was when I read the famous Bringing Up Bébe for the first time. Knowing everything that I have done, those things are done by a whole country, which I thought previously it was only and solely from my mother.

Recently, I just finished a book about a woman who wrote a story how her student exchange experiences in Paris gave meaningful and profound lessons to her and just like me, it gave enormous insight and influence to how she lives her life and raise her kids too. She learned so much from the family she lived with and wrote three books about it. How many pages that I felt like doing high five with her.

I found few pages that really hit home, like these :

There are lots of things that make French parenting and way of life make sense, for me. No matter how much I read about it, I could read another and still find new perspectives from the same method. I am totally blessed to be raised such method although I live thousands miles away from the country.

It might relate to this (or not), but, at the beginning of this week, me and the doctor talked about one of my close relatives.

This aunt of mine has been a ‘fan’ of my mother’s parenting for a very long time. When we look from one side, it seems that she looked up to my mother when it comes to raising children, but on the other side, she was actually someone who tried to beat whatever my mother did with a better result, which was not bad actually.

I was once her benchmark for things like school. His only son went to the same junior high school, to the same music school. She is the real example of true tiger mom. An authorarian and helicopter type at the same time. Study is number one and anything that could disrupt it should be eliminated.

Knowing how ambitious she was, her son obviously did very much better than me and my siblings did. But, it wasn’t surprising at all since she made him worked ten times harder than us. Day and night, weekdays or weekend. No wonder his achievements were all over the places. Always top of the class, yearly rank concert, student exchange to US, volunteering in Middle East, and many other flashy achievements that no one in the family could achieve.

Meanwhile, none of my mother’s kids achieve such things. We were (and are) just ordinary kids that sat on the top ten without too much pressure. Enough time to play and biking around. Didn’t join any other extracurricular activities other than piano lesson (three of us). My mother concerned more if we couldn’t function well at home on our own more than doing well at school. When my cousin was busy doing his lessons, we were busy with lots of chores at home. My aunt was very proud of her son’s achievements and said it loudly. But, what could be bragged from children that are capable of doing chores?😂

Fast forward few years, her son studied at the university and became the doctor’s junior at Faculty of Medecine. I happened to be married to the doctor and I didn’t know when it started, a new benchmark formed. This time is not only me but also my whole family.

From one of the doctor’s colleagues who happens to have quite close relationships to my aunt (they are neighbors), my aunt has been really obsessed about everything that my family do. The way I raise the little girl, how much the doctor’s made, which hospitals he works at, which area we bought our house is, she is pretty curious about us and little things that we do or have.

I felt there were few starting line when this behavior grew. First, when the doctor became a staff consultant of national hospitals in his department after he finished his residency. Second, when we ‘suddenly’ moved to London and he didn’t go for study, but for working. Those two were something that her son couldn’t (or hasn’t) achieve(d) (yet).

It doesn’t stop with the doctor. She also started comparing her granddaughter to the little girl. What kind of lessons she took, what kind of achievements she got, etc.

She sounds so dissatisfied and disappointed because his son couldn’t achieve things like above or some other things in his personal life. The pressure is really hard on my cousin and I felt sorry for him because her mother really projects all her disappointment on him. She told the doctor’s colleague of how his son couldn’t act like a real adult in daily life, couldn’t handle his personal and little important things well, but maybe most of all, he couldn’t meet the benchmark she set based on other’s achievement. It indeed doesn’t feel comfortable when we put other’s shoes on our own feet. It’s hard to be happy too that way.

From my perspective, my cousin is doing okay. He’s fully capable and functional adult, but maybe, he might need a bit of help to get out of his mother pressure and expectations. He might need more space to be free from his mother (and all the helps she gives, until now).

I won’t discuss further but this feels like a wake up call for me. To reflect back everything that I do to the little girl. I am far from tiger, but, I sense there are some characteristics of my aunt that I see in myself. It’s not surprising too actually, knowing that both my aunt and my father shared the same father.

My late grandpa from my father side was a disciplined man and he really thought highly about academic and career achievements. He was once a Bank Indonesia employee and expected his kids to follow his directions. He measured his children (and their spouses) mostly from those things. It’s totally understandable that all my father’s siblings are doing well in that area. Of course, there are buts too. So, what my aunt did was actually just the extension of what she got from her parents.

This shows me that parenting is like an infinite game which the finish line couldn’t be seen in the short term and its influence doesn’t stop in one generation. It will keep going to the next generation and it takes conscious effort to fix what should be fixed. It doesn’t matter how well the child is doing at the start, but it matters more how they would be doing as an adult. Preparing the child to be an adult is the parents biggest homeworks, which often being forgotten by most of us.

Looking at this case, I feel like to remind myself as a mother of the little girl that she’s more than anything that could be measured. She’s not defined by anything that she achieves or doesn’t achieve. My job here is to raise her well within my and our best abilities and it’s never up to me and us how she will end up later in life.

Back to the book I read above, another page explains well what I want for my daughter :

I hope later I forgive myself for everything that I have and haven’t done in raising the little girl and leave the rest to whatever things life assigned to her and find peace with that. I hope no single tiny resentment about everything she would become of. Amin.

Parked my car in little girl’s school while enjoying the morning sunshine from the car and listening to Friday’s storytelling sessions from the students. It’s getting hot here and I think it’s time to go home.

Bon weekend!