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This be the verse, by Philip Larkin They f**k you up your mom and dad, they may
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not mean to, but they do They fill you with the faults they had, and
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add some extra just for you But they were f**ked up in their turn, by
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fools in old style hats and coats Who half the time were soppy stern, and half
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at one another's throats Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like
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a coastal shelf Get out as early as you can, and don't
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have any kids yourself Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly
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podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science.
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Please welcome your host, Amit Barma Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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Most of the episodes of this podcast have been about economics or politics, about public
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policy in other words, but even private actions have seen and unseen effects.
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In today's episode, I want to examine the seen and unseen effects of parenting or parenthood.
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My guest today on the show is Natasha Badwar.
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Natasha is a columnist, filmmaker, entrepreneur, but is best known for her remarkable column
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on parenting that has appeared every week in Mint for the last six years.
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Now, I hate kids and have no interest in parenting, but week on week, I find her column
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insightful and deeply moving for what it reveals about being human.
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She doesn't look at parenthood or herself through a glossy filter, but with unflinching
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honesty and that relentless week on week self-awareness and self-examination contains many deep and
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Natasha has recently released a book, My Daughter's Mum, and I strongly recommend it to all my
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I caught up with her recently to chat about what she has learned about parenthood in all
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these years of writing about it.
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Natasha, welcome to the show.
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Hello, I'm really happy to be on this show.
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Natasha, I'm not normally an audience for parenting columns.
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In fact, I'm a determined non-parent and I don't like kids.
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I'm not an audience for parenting columns either.
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However, I've been reading your column with great interest for the six plus years that
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you've been writing it and partly because I feel what they do is in a very gentle, sensitive
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way reveal human nature.
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It's not just about children or parenting, but it's about looking deeper at people and
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things that we take for granted.
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Now, in today's episode, I'd like to sort of talk about the seen and unseen effects
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Now, we all know the scene effects, that the scene effects on the positive side is that
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You have your own flesh and blood and you watch them grow.
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They look after you in your old age.
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If you run out of food, you can eat them.
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And on the negative side, they disrupt your life completely.
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Women, especially, often have to give up their careers or their independent dreams to have
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And essentially, the life that you live is completely different from what it would have
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been without the kids and many people become parents before they're ready for it.
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These are sort of cliched tropes which many have gone over.
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And I enjoy your column and now your book so much because it looks at everyday happinesses
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and sorrows which are not sort of from that playbook and you get the sense in all your
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writing that by watching your children grow up with such attention, you are also growing
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up yourself and becoming a different person and discovering yourself.
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So can you tell me a little bit more about what writing about this has done to you?
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I'm so sorry, you should be stopped now.
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I'm going to just record this and use it in one of my columns.
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But yeah, you're right.
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Growing up with the children is a process of growing up and it's not always a voluntary
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It kind of jolts you out of your notions of normalcy, your notions of what is right and
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what is wrong, what is a decent way of living.
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And I didn't expect this.
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I agree with you that a lot of people have children before they're ready for it.
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And I also agree with you that we shouldn't have children unless we really, really desperately
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But I, you know, I was 31 when I was 32 when my first child was born and I always wanted
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So for me, whether I was going to have a biological child or not, I, you know, I'd been ready
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to adopt a child and I'd been kind of looking at adoption.
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So I was one person who really felt that she was ready to be a parent.
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And the first couple of years were fairly, you know, simple.
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The only things that I had to battle against were the stereotypes that others were thrusting
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But as soon as my daughter was old enough to go to school, you know, as soon as she
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was ready to start speaking her mind, expressing herself, and as soon as we had two children
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and we had to deal with the dynamic of the first one suddenly discovering that she's
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not the center of the universe, me discovering that I do not have enough hands, you know,
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one that is at work on the smartphone, the other that is holding the baby, the head that
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is paying attention to the husband, and you know, now I had a new baby and I was besotted
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So I didn't have any time for anyone else.
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So you know, from there started a process where I have literally discovered that every
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day you are forced to learn something new, that every now and then you forget the lessons
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that you have learned yesterday.
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For example, just in the last two months, our middle child, she's 12, and she's, you
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know, she's going through what everyone would call a phase, she'll get over it, you know,
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never mind, don't take it too seriously.
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But she's angsting over something.
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She's not at peace with the world, with the family, with herself.
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And I discovered that because I have been writing about, because I have the column and
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I am, you know, deadline bound to write every week about what's going on in my life, I discovered
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that she was actually going through the same phase when she was three years old, and then
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the same phase when she was seven years old, that when I describe how she was behaving
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or how I felt she was feeling at that age of three and at that age of seven, and now
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at the age of 12, the words were exactly the same.
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And I would not have made that connection if I hadn't actually written about it.
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I didn't even remember that I had written about it.
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I just chanced upon the same thing, which also goes to show that, you know, you deal
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with the situation and you forget about it, you don't make the connections.
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And somewhere I feel that popular culture, popular parenting culture, family culture,
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doesn't want you to make the connections.
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Because when you do, you then begin to question the entire structure of the family, the hierarchy
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within the family, not only the nuclear family, but also the extended family.
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You then have to question the structure of our education system.
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You may have chosen as a parent, the finest school in the city, and you know, you think
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Yeah, now I have put together the finances and I have used my influence and I have charmed
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the principal into accepting my children and look what I've done for my child.
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When your child comes back home in despair and you don't know, what is it?
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Is it something that I didn't do right because that's always your first thought as a parent?
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Is it something that's happening in the school?
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You go and have a conversation with the school and they're listening to you, they're empathetic,
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but they don't have a solution and the child is too young, too confused, too isolated as
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an individual to be able to articulate what is it that is getting to her.
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And you realize that, you know, what is supposed to make you happy doesn't always make you
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You can offer her the finest dance class and, you know, take her for football and buy her
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the best kit and give her the best coach.
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But not enough has changed in society, our notions of gender, our notions of authority.
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You must, you know, if your coach says so, he's right.
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You haven't questioned your own relationship with each other as parents.
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You know, you're very together.
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You may be, you may have read the same, you know, books and had the same influences and,
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you know, you feel that, okay, you've got this liberal minded guy and you want the same
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kind of future for your child.
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You want the same kind of values in your child, but you're kind of repeating a script between
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yourselves where he can get angry and you will cry in the corner every time you have
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an argument and your child, like every other child in the history of mankind is witnessing
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the same kind of dynamics between the gender and finding it not just because children can
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Even children, you know, they respond to their feelings till we have actually wiped out the
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And somewhere in popular culture, we are always telling parents, don't take them too seriously.
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Abhi toh wo bacha hai, ussi kya pata kya ho raha hai.
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Which you feel is a mistake.
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Which is an absolute mistake.
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Because you're also being told as a new parent, you don't know what is happening.
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Let me tell you what is happening.
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And you know, you know, you know, because you're so deeply connected with that new baby.
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And sometimes you don't know, but you do know that what is being told to you is not exactly
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So you struggle as a parent to name experiences, to name feelings that have not been expressed
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either in other people's writing or in everyday conversations.
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And like you said, you know, it's not only that you find that you don't have a language
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to accurately represent what is hurting you and what is confusing you, you also don't
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have one to accurately represent the highs, the happinesses, you know, those little moments
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that make it worthwhile.
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Because since you were writing a weekly column and every week you had a deadline and you
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had to put a column out there on parenting, was that heightened awareness of what your
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child is doing and how you're interacting with them and it heightened self-awareness,
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something that either helped or hurt you in different ways in the actual job of parenting?
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So you know, when I, I had begun to write about everyday moments on my social media,
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I had begun to blog about it anonymously because what went on my blog was something
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that I was still trying to figure out.
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I didn't want anyone else to tell me how to feel about it.
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So that was a space that I protected.
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Then if I felt that it was something that, you know, was entertainment or entertaining
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or, you know, it had some humor or it, I would share it on Facebook, you know, just tentatively
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within my own circle of friends.
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And if Facebook said, why are you thinking like this?
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What's really going on?
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I'd say, Hey, wait, wait, wait, you're not being a good listener.
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I would take it to Twitter.
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So even before the column was commissioned, I was writing in three different spaces.
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And you know, I had a hierarchy, completely private for an audience on Twitter that didn't
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So I could ignore them if I wanted to, and they could accept me if they wanted to.
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And for a circle of friends on Facebook, when the column got commissioned and I had been
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hoping to write formally for a larger platform, I actually sat down and cried.
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I was like, Oh my God, this is the end of my life, because now I'm going to have to
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be a good parent, because it's not worth writing anything unless it's honest.
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And if I'm not going to do a good job, it's going to be really hard to put it out there.
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Did it change your parenting, the self awareness?
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I think in the long run, it changed us in the sense that we all, through the words that
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got written, learned to listen to each other better.
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And what I discovered when I began to write about is, was that what I was really struggling
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to make a breakthrough in was my relationship with my own parents.
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Because you realize that you cannot cut through the bushes and charter a path for your family
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with your children, till you have also gone back and figured out where you're coming from.
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And what is it that influences you?
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Why are some things easier and some things so hard for you to do?
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And it makes you think something happened that I have forgotten, or that has made me
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very angry about something.
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So if the water ran out in the house, I would go into a panic and my husband would be like,
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it's just water, it will come back.
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And it made me connect to a memory when my mother would panic when the water would run
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out ages ago, and at that time, if it ran out and we were on the fourth floor, it would
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not come for a couple of days, but I was in the new millennium and it would come in a
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But I had inherited a kind of fear.
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And I mean, that's a really small example.
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But there are many other things where you find that there are emotional blocks, that
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there are some things that just trigger you.
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Some things come really easily to you.
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You buy them a certain kind of shoe, you dress them up in a certain kind of way, and it doesn't
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quite fit with the times or with the trends, and it takes you back into your childhood.
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So how it changed us was really when I began to write how I understood them, they began
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to understand how I was trying to understand them.
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And somewhere the words helped us misunderstand each other less, because I think that really
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is the roadblock in all intimate relationships.
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Because at some point, you have just piled up the misunderstandings, and you don't know
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Often what happens in relationships, whether they're marital relationships or parental
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relationships, is that you just have two parties talking past each other.
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But in this case, I guess you're paying more close attention to each other.
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Not only that, you have two parties from very, very different upbringings.
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So one is reacting very strongly to something, the other one thinks this is nothing.
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And then the hurts begin to accumulate.
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You did not pay attention to my feeling.
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And the conversation doesn't go beyond that, because we don't have a template.
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Our parents didn't go beyond that.
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No one else is going beyond that.
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You don't really want to go to a psychiatrist or a therapist, because you don't feel that
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the situation is that bad.
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There are those little knots.
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And because I had to write week after week, it wasn't a choice I made.
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It was those knots that wanted to be unraveled.
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So my other question here is that as your kids grow up, they became aware that mommy
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writes a column, and presumably they began to read it also at some point.
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And did that, for example, affect their attitude towards you or their behavior?
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Because was there a performative element to that, in the back of their head, would they
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be aware that, oh, she may write about this?
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So my middle daughter, she was the first one to put it on the table.
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So there would be things she would show me that she would say, don't put this out.
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So clearly there was an awareness that if she likes it very much, she Instagrams it,
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you know, or she makes a Facebook post out of it.
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And they enjoyed my enjoyment of things.
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But when they felt that something was private, she was the first one.
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She activated the opt-out clause.
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So she was the first one to do that.
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And then what I get from them in a sense is, you know, my oldest daughter, she's now 14.
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She read the book, and she was the second person to read the book throughout.
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And her initial reactions would be, you know, she would see herself as a younger version
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And she would connect, oh, this is something that I'm still angry about, or I didn't like
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And you know, she would come back to me.
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But when she finished the book, she actually wrote me an email, and that's the first review
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It really is a review of the book, in which she writes, my mother is a hero on paper.
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And then she goes on to say that our life is messier, angrier, harder than what it looks
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But I understand what she's trying to do.
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She writes about being the kind of parent she wants to be.
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And in that sense, what has happened is that if I hadn't accessed the writer in me, and
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tried to, you know, simplify things so that I could understand them, and that others could
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resonate, that it would resonate with the stories of others, because the same thing
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is happening in every family.
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What my children would have known of me would have been a mother who tends to get very angry
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who, who kind of gets into the victim position rather frequently, more frequently than I
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like to remember, who struggles, and doesn't always do a great job of, you know, figuring
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But when I write, I am, I'm forced to figure them out.
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So what they were getting access to was what I was trying to do, which is the one thing
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that I realized I never had access to with my own mother.
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So you try, try, try to understand where your parent is coming from.
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And then you give up because you become powerful as a young adult.
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And you just judge them.
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And you, you know, push them into a bend and you say, I'm never going to make the same
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mistakes again, not realizing that eventually you're going to behave as you have seen them
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behave and struggle with that behavior as well.
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So that the same thing happened with my mother.
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And I think that perhaps for me is the greatest, I didn't anticipate it, but it is the greatest
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achievement of the book.
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And my mother once, you know, she read something and she came back to me and she said, and
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it had been a couple of years.
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She said, I didn't know you think so hard.
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So you opened up your interior world to them.
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And here, you know, I was opening up my interior world because I needed to for myself.
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I was actually going forward doing that because I had got an audience that was very, very
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gentle and kind and receptive of that writing.
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But within our family, we didn't have a platform in which we could talk to each other in the
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And when she was reading me from a very far distance, she was able to hear me in a way
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that she had not been able to hear me as a parent.
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And I was able to hear her and speak of her in a way that I hadn't been able to as her
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And it's very interesting.
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A couple of weeks back on Facebook, you posted a lovely little piece by her.
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And what I was really struck by there was the assuredness of the writing, just the quality
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of the sentences, you know, short, crisp sentences, keeping it really simple, you know, the clarity
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Is that something that you think she picked up from your writing or, you know, because
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You can be born with an artistic sense, but craft is something you have to work at.
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So I was very struck by that.
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Has she ever discussed your writing with you?
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So this is my oldest daughter, Seher.
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She has read me consistently.
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And you know, I wonder.
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So when she wrote this review of the book, and I call it a review, but she actually wrote
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me a mail after reading the book, when she wrote it to me, I felt that she had taken
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the kind of personal writing I was doing to a new level.
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And you know, I was I was not ready to read that depth of truth.
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She actually pointed out to me things that I had begun to gloss over myself.
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And it made me think that, you know, rather than the fact that she may be influenced by
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me, it made me think that perhaps when I write, I am accessing that cleaner thought process
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that, you know, what would be my culture, like, but we always appreciate it when it
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comes out, you know, in writing, you know, straight from the city.
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And I know that I know how hard I have to work to be able to get that 1000 word column
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So, you know, if it is submitted on a Tuesday morning, my brain has begun to work on it
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from the Friday before that, and I will, you know, nap at odd hours, I will go to sleep
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at three in the afternoon, I'll sit with my computer, I have begun to actually fall asleep
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And I realized that I'm not sleeping, I am shutting down the, you know, the very conscious
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thought process of what how should I create this, and allowing a much more organic thought
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process to to reveal itself and, you know, come out through the typing.
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And so perhaps what she has is an is an original way of writing.
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She also reads a lot, and it's it's amazing the, you know, they not only read what we
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read while we were growing up, but there is such a huge body of writing for young adults.
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Now that they access through the libraries that and because we don't have TV, they really
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read a lot, because there is nothing else to do if they are not cycling or playing in
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So so a lot is coming from contemporary writing work as well.
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And with, you know, with regard to parenting itself, like, do you think that there are
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different levels of parenting that you end up doing?
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Because one is the actual parenting.
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And one in a sense is a performative parenting which you're doing for yourself as fodder
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for your own thing that this is what I should do or this is, you know, does that make you
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a different kind of parent?
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Okay, so I'll tell you what my experience with parenting has been.
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I started with my first child as this super enthusiastic, always attentive parent.
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And you know, Amit, by the third year, I realized that I was performing.
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I was performing for myself.
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I was performing for everybody else.
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I wanted my mother to see me as a certain kind of parent.
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I wanted my mother-in-law to see me as a certain kind of parent and I wanted to see myself
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as a certain kind of parent.
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My parents lived nearby and we would spend a lot of time with my mother-in-law when the
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first child came in, the first grandchild in the family and stuff like that.
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And so my notion of the good parent was in itself very performative.
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And that has, that has decreased over the years.
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So that I have learned that if they ask me a question, a tricky question, it is not my
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job to necessarily answer it.
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I am just supposed to allow that question to arrive in the space within the family and
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for everyone to think about it as they want to.
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I am not the solution provider.
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I am not the one who has to fix everything, which was not only a traditional notion of
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motherhood that's thrust upon you, but also one that I had very actively embraced.
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And also a notion of adulthood, like completely unrelated to parenting, one of the things
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you figure out when you hit 40 years, both the first and the few years ago is that, you
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know, you are not sorted, you are not supposed to have figured it all out.
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You have been winging it all along and you will continue to wing it and that's fine.
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And somewhere this comes from this very, very early question that every adult is always
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firing at every child, what do you want to be when you grow up?
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You know, and when we were in our early 20s, how can you not know what you want to do?
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Or if you had a good job, how can you not want to do the same job for the rest of your
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None of this rang true to us.
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You know, as a generation, as a world, we had come to a point where you could actually
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do many things that the most successful people historically had actually also been prime
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ministers, also writing books, also, you know, being sports people.
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So unless you are expressing all your talents and you realize by the time you are 40, everybody
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is talented, that each one of us does not have that one, two or three talents that were
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discovered by some generous soul when you were, you know, in your early years, but that
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there is so much more to you.
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And it may not have revealed itself when I was six or 15, but it will reveal itself when
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And how come you started writing you didn't use to write before, you know, so the notion
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is that every talent, you know, that there is a certain number of things that you will
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be good at and you discover that that's not true.
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And there doesn't need to be a linear path.
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So life is not like a school project that this is the aim and this is how you get there.
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It's just a really messed up journey, messy journey.
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Even school projects, I mean, education systems are constantly discovering that this one way
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of doing, you know, breaking it into subjects and doing the, learn and do the exam and then
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forget about it and learn something new is not the way we learn.
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And is there a process while parenting where you sort of disassociate from the parenthood
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aspect of it and just start relating to them in different ways as people as they grow older?
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You know, like in a sense, when you refer to Sehar's email as your first review for
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a moment, you've stepped back and you're, you know, it's a writer reviewer relationship
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Does that happen more and more?
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Do you have to force it to happen and not stay in the parent mode?
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It does happen more and more.
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And I think I got lucky with my first child, I was a very, very serious committed parent
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with my second child because I was taking it all so seriously, I began to break down
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and crash and not be able to hold it all together and therefore discover that I was not supposed
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to hold it all together.
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And with my third child, you know, who we hadn't planned to have at all, but by the
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time we had our third child, I had quit my job.
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I was, you know, trying out all kinds of new things in my life and I had calmed down.
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I calmed down as a parent because I had seen an utter and complete defeat.
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So I was, you know, at ground zero and ready to start again and I didn't have any pressure
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We also almost lost her.
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So there was a very, very, you know, we had, I'd had a very emotional, traumatic time and
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literally it was like coming back from ground zero because there was one point where we
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could have lost me also.
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And coming back from there, you know, just kind of got me in touch with the core of what
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it's all meant to be about.
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And because raising the third child was so different from the way I had behaved with
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the other two, I learned through that that I could behave in the same way with the middle
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child and the older child that I was so easy with the new one because just the fact that
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we had survived it, we had come back home, two living beings was enough for me.
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I had no other expectations.
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That was just, it remained enough for me for years.
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And then I was like, why don't I let everyone else be?
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You know, why don't, why am I, you know, if I'm satisfied just to be alive with this
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child, then I should be able to take that feeling to almost everything else in my life.
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And that kind of, you know, it helped to break this whole perfectionist mold that I had been
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You know, you're good at something.
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You just feel compelled to always be good at it.
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Not only that, even professionally, you know, you've done really well at it, then what's
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You don't have to keep getting better at things.
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And somewhere it just become over the years has helped me to form a much calmer worldview.
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And it's very interesting, a lot of, I've read a lot of writers on parenthood, but most
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of them looking at it from a vantage point or in retrospect, and you've almost been sort
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of life blogging parenthood in a manner of speaking, you've been a witness and a chronicler
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of the reality show inside your own head and in your own life.
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So to sort of go back to parenting per se, what has this experience over the last decade
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and a half, which is culminated in this book, taught you about parenting and if you could
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meet the 32 year old Natasha just about to embark on a journey, what advice would you
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The advice I'll give to the 32 year old me is to calm down, to take it easy and to slow
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So those are the big lessons that don't try too hard and just things will happen.
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What the 32 year old me was getting away with was being able to pretend to be okay, even
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if she wasn't feeling okay, because that's what I had winged all the way up to there.
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And when it all became too much for me, I had to completely change the way in which
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And you realize as a parent that you can't just survive because then you're just handing
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them the same template that if you want, you know that you want them to have more privileges
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But to do that, you have to acknowledge them to yourself, you have to give them to yourself,
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you have to tell yourself that it is okay not to always, not to depend on the endorsement
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of the outer world, not to depend on validation from everyone else.
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Because you think you can keep getting yours while you will free them of that burden.
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But they'll only know how to free themselves of that burden if you give it up in the first
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That's very enlightening.
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Thanks so much for talking to me.
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If you enjoyed the show, do buy Natasha's book, My Daughter's Mum.
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You can also follow her on Twitter at Natasha Badwar.
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You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A, and you can browse past episodes of The Scene
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and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening.
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If you enjoyed listening to The Scene and the Unseen, check out another hit show from
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Indusworks Media Network's Cyrus Says, which is hosted by my old colleague from MTV, Cyrus
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You can download it on any podcasting network.
