Decisions that affect our children

This is about an event that occurred in 1988/89. My mother was working for federal government. In India federal government employees are transferred to different states/suburbs to keep the diversified culture(I guess). One of such decisions affected my mum and I believe changed our(bro and me) life significantly. My mother had 3 choices;

1. Quit her job

2. Take us with her

3. Leave us behind and do Monday to Friday (as lot of consultants do)

Option 1: This was out of question as she was blessed with a husband who had drinking and gambling problem (double whammy). If she chose this we would probably starve to death or would have pushed my dad towards responsibility.

Option 2: She did not like this as the place she was transferred to was very small (smaller than Hassan) and no good schools around.

Naturally she chose option 3, leaving behind a 13 and 15 (my bro) year old kids to manage themselves with a drunkard.

This was the time in our life we learnt heaps (good and bad) but changed us for ever. Before this happened, I was academically very good (at least for that small town). Most teachers (i have had) were dick heads as they did not have the ability to understand children appropriately nor were they skilled for the job (I think i have a blog post about the kind of things i have experienced). I did fare well by my own effort. Proof of how good i was academically, when i graduated from engineering school, one of the guys who was competing (trying to keep up to me) with me during my good years, graduated with 2nd Rank (2nd best in the University).

I did not like going to school as teachers were morons, I did not want to come back home after school as we had to cook and clean. My dad would happily sit and drinking when I was cooking (my bro had dish washing responsibility). This was the time I lost interest in everything. My mum would come back on Friday evenings and hardly had time to ask us how we were coping with the change.I don't blame her, she was fighting with the government to get back to our home town . She could see that academically I was getting worse and lots of complaints from my school (more than usual hahahaha). It took 2 years for the government to understand how we were affected. As far as I am concerned, damage had been done.

Am I using this as an excuse for not doing well, academically? FUCK NO. I stand by my mums decision. In her position, I would have done the same. Its easier to complain or think about options in hind sight. If Gandhi was not around, may be we would have got freedom much earlier. I think, since Gandhi was less risky choice, we did not support Bhagat Singh or Subash Chandra Bose. We had enough population to piss and drown Britishers (I think).

The reason I wanted to pen this down is to remind myself that once we have kids, decisions we take is just not about us. Decisions we take during the formative years of our children are extremely important, however big or small they are.

K