Parental instincts

"ANY good news?" is the usual question that most couples get barraged with, a month or two into the marriage. "Yes, we are doing well; we seem to be getting on like a house on fire; we are laying the foundations for a long relationship," are neither the expected nor the appropriate replies. One either beams at one's interlocutor and nods shyly invoking much cheer and merriment, or one shuffles uncomfortably and hangs one's head in shame accepting the reassuring back-patting that appears a tad forced. If you fall in the former category, you are warmly welcomed to the adult world, all your past sins forgiven, and are regaled with stories of how Uncle so-and-so just had to look at his wife and that would do the trick. If you belong to the latter category, you are fed large quantities of almonds, chestnuts and other assorted nuts until you feel sick, and are advised to keep "trying harder" even as not-so-subtle enquiries are made of your technique and are expansively reassured about the miraculous powers of the family deity and modern medicine in that order. And finally, when that much-awaited urine test turns out positive, your spouse's and your first reaction is more one of relief than joy. At least until the ultrasound report comes in and the whole gender issue gets raked up.

It's quite extraordinary how, in our country, one's entire social network appears to have a stake in the arrival of the first child - the second and subsequent children are more matters of routine, since your prowess is now proven. As an immediate consequence, the decision on when to have one's first child or for that matter whether to have children at all, is often taken away from the couple's hands. Victims of inordinate familial and social pressure, large numbers of young couples feel compelled to have their first child within the first year of the marriage.

I need scarcely remind you that children do make demands and have to be responded to with, aside of love, a lot of maturity and responsibility, and whether we like it or not, they tend to impact significantly on the marriage - positively, if the foundations are well laid, but adversely if they are not. I am, of course, not suggesting that children are best avoided. I am sharply conscious of the unspoiled pleasure they can bring to our lives and indeed teach us more than our parents did. The point that I am trying to drive home is that you should have your children when you're good and ready to take on the responsibility, and not because you want to give your parents a grandchild or your siblings a nephew/ niece or to fend off the agonising pressure put on you by your intrusive social network. The latter are all the wrong reasons to have a child and the last thing you want to do is to contribute to the growing generation of "latchkey" children who are vulnerable to a variety of hazards in the social environment, not the least devastating being child sexual abuse, and who may inadvertently put more pressure on your relationship than it has been configured to handle.

It may be politic at this time, to examine why the need to have children is so strongly ingrained in us. There exists a well researched body of literature on the nature of the maternal instinct in animals. The theory is that animals have developed this instinct owing to the inherent need to propagate the species for fear of extinction - to ensure the survival of the species. But does this apply to human beings as well? I mean, just look around you. Do you really believe that the survival or perpetuation of the human species is dependent on whether or not you contribute your mite? There are enough and more numbers to reassure you that the species runs no risk whatsoever from extinction. Yet, why do we have such a pressing need to reproduce? While social pressures contribute, they do little more than touch a chord, press the right button, stimulate an ingrained need that existed inside of you in the first place. And surely, we cannot get around this conundrum by invoking an animal instinct, particularly when, after millennia of evolution, we pride ourselves on belonging to a superior species, can we? There has to be some other explanation for our deep longing to have children, for how devastated some of us feel when we are told we cannot have any, for the feeling of incompleteness and indeed emptiness that even the more mature among us feel when the hatchlings have flown the coop.

To understand the origins of this parental instinct, and I use the generic term not for reasons of political correctness but because the need to reproduce exists in both genders even if more strongly manifest in women than men, we need to explore a phenomenon that all human beings are subject to - unconditional fear. Unconditional fear is one of our two primal responses, the other being unconditional love, which we experience when we are born and is related to the experience of surviving in a hostile environment. So, one of the basic drives that impels us forward in our lives is the fear of personal survival, not survival of the species. And we do everything we can to ensure that all our survival needs are taken care of thereby keeping the primal fear of our survival at bay.

Another way of looking at unconditional fear is to conceive of it as a fear of our own mortality. We are all going to die some day, a fact that, until we actually face it from close quarters, we do not have the wherewithal to come to terms with. So, we obsess about increasing our life-span to the extent possible. But we cannot all be Methuselah, can we? However, human beings still have a need to do everything possible in their lives to ensure immortality. Some do it by, to the exclusion of everything else, pursuing renown and writing their names in the history books. Most others do it by having children.

Our children represent to us our lineage, our contribution to the world, the products of our creativity, the propagators of our names, the extensions of our identities. Is it any wonder then that we have such inordinate expectations of them to become what we want them to, so our accomplishments live on in enhanced form after us? By the same token, this is also why we tend to forget Kahlil Gibran's exhortations to us that our children don't come from us, but merely through us. And we find it so hard to "let go" of our children when it becomes necessary to do so. For, as long as we don't come to terms with this need for immortality that is present in all of us as a reaction to the fear of survival, we will obsess about having children and tell ourselves that our parental instinct is crying for expression. However, if we do come to terms with our unconditional fears, we will have our children because we want to, not because we need to, and nothing could be better for an unborn child than this realisation on the part of its parents.

In this context, by "coming to terms with our fears", I mean owning that this fear exists in you (it does in all of us); accepting the inevitability of its presence and appreciating that no action of yours is going to grant you immortality; legitimising its existence as a normal human phenomenon; and letting go of the compulsive quest for immortality. If, after having done this, you go ahead and have a child or two, you will be able to value them more substantially than otherwise.

And more than this, you would have given yourself the time and opportunity to work on your marriage and configure it in a manner that you, your spouse and the children are the collective beneficiaries and that your relationship with your children is a balanced one in which neither you nor the child gets carried away with the "ups" or depleted by the "downs".

So, the next time somebody asks you whether you have any good news, try referring them, with as straight a face as you can muster, to CNN, BBC or Star News.

VIJAY NAGASWAMI

The writer is a Chennai-based individual and marital psychotherapist. He can be contacted at vnagaswami@vsnl.com.

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