It’s a shame, really.
This is what life and families have become.
Let me paint you a picture.
Mother walks in tired and in need of some alone time with herself.
She hardly knows where anything is in her own home: it is the househelp’s domain.
She sits quietly for a while and then opens up her phone.
It is time for some catch up with whatever she has missed on the wide world of internet socials.
Before she has to get up and do whatever she needs to do.
If she can bring herself to do it.
The kids are not home.
They leave before she or their father and come home later than them going straight to madrasa from school.
(Photo courtesy of Edith Hulcoop on Unsplash)
Father comes home ragged, bone tired and they hardly mutter a hello before he too settles down and looks at his own phone.
They hardly say more than a dozen words to each other. Despite being in the same building/same house/same room – each lives in his/her world.
Later, much later, their exhausted offspring show up.
Their mother knows there has to be more to life than this.
More to life than work and study and the rat race but does not know where to start – how to opt out.
She knows there is more to marriage than communication via phone calls and text instead of face to face.
There is more to life than spending a bigger chunk of your day with your work mates than with your offspring and kith and kin.
She does not know how life has come to be like this.
She does not know if anyone feels this despondency.
She wonders whether other parents grieve for their children’s lost childhoods.
(Photo courtesy of Sadhin Mahmoud on Unsplash)
Childhoods buried under heavy textbooks; their casual clothes and sneakers and flipflops and Eid clothes gathering dust and growing smaller because uniforms rule the day.
It’s prison really, she thinks.
Bells, uniforms, wardens, laws and punishment.
And the endless endless endless books spouting irrelevant principles they would never use.
She tosses away her phone.
Knows if she doesn’t curb her addiction to it… any meaningful relationship she might have will not last long.
She longs for the old days and doesn’t care much what the ‘experts’ say about not living in the past.
The past was good – very good.
Then families gathered and talked and looked each other in the eyes.
She sighs and thinks : Bring back the landlines. Homeschool the children.
Maybe from there there would be hope after all.