Our first-born has been noticeably moody lately, also impatient and –
which worries me a bit – easily irritable. Not like the kid at all. Temper
tantrums were alien. Neither as infant nor toddler were there outbreaks of
anger or impatience, absolutely never in all the twelve plus years. We parents must
have subconsciously got accustomed to it. We were never seriously challenged. The
kid was always happy, balanced, obedient and naturally disciplined. Tibetans call
such a person Lama Kunchog: good-natured and peaceful - but also
somewhat innocent. It's not always used as a compliment.
The contrary of Lama Kunchog I would say is kha gyagpa or
"thick-mouthed" – someone who is brazen, talks back and is difficult
to control. With puberty setting in, things around our home were becoming a
little different: A little louder sometimes; more explanations were necessary,
more arguments and also more patience to handle the adolescent mood swings. Sometimes
when our offspring would gravitate too heavily towards kha gyagpa we parents
had a hard time not responding with anger. The kid had simply made it too easy
on us all this time.
My colleagues from work with children in this age range say kids are
simply testing how far they could go and that we needed to set boundaries. They said it's good as parents to air the anger so things can clear
up and can calm down again. I am not sure that's a good idea at all. Setting
boundaries, of course but the more one resorts to anger, the easier anger
arises, that's my unholy feeling. It's contagious and pollutes the entire
atmosphere. In a peaceful moment I tried to emphasize to my pubescent housemate
what the Lama taught: One moment of anger can destroy all the wholesome karma
accumulated over time. - Do we want to be the Tibetan Sisyphus creating our own
Samsara over and over again?
When the local school invited
parents to a lecture on "puberty"I decided to attend. Any clue on what could be going on
in the mind and body of an adolescent was more than welcome for a perplexed
mother and father. The lecture included an interesting section about
biochemical processes in the body of the adolescent triggering unacceptable
behavior and "not yet fully developed brain areas" accounting for extreme
responses. That shouldn't serve as an excuse but it made us more aware of the
things going on in their bodies which could cause behavioural outliers.
Then followed a question round: How did we parents remember our own
puberty? One woman said she regularly fought with her mom until the latter
cried. It was her goal to make her mother cry, the woman added. I would have
been embarrassed to disclose something like that in front of a group of aliens.
What could I report? When nothing came up I noticed on the way home that my own
puberty or adolescence was a total non-event. I remember sitting in my room a
lot because I wasn't allowed to hang out with friends in my free time. My dad
disapproved of khyamdepa, the Tibetan equivalent of "roving
about" and he didn't tolerate the faintest attempt of back talk. Moreover
I, as the girl among the three children, had to be protected from what I guess
could only have been an unwanted pregnancy. The best method, my working parents
thought, was to restrict my mobility.
There were no computers when I was growing up, only typewriters; there
were no games or smart phones and TV was restricted to certain hours and
programmes. The highlight of my week was a trip to the library which became my
temple and refuge. Reading about Tibet became a favourite pastime or about communism,
socialism, revolutionaries, history, oceanography, palaeontology, archaeology, occultism,
astronomy – I borrowed books from almost every topsy-turvy topic they had. One
day when I borrowed a book about Konrad Adenauer, the first post-war chancellor
of Germany, the librarian knitted his brows. Whether that is a suitable subject
for a fifteen-year old? He didn't have the faintest idea: It couldn't be more
boring than sitting in one's room doing nothing!
My dad kept me on this short leash between twelve and eighteen years. Same-aged
friends used their freedom to spend time outside their home experimenting with
alcohol, cigarettes and romantic liaisons. With my restriced radius, growing up took place mainly inside my room and more specifically inside my
head. Of course my dad knew he couldn't uphold this situation of semi-house
arrest forever. But when I was finally granted the freedom of spending the night
away in a club or hang out in a bar, it turned out to be boring; dancing was
okay for one hour or so but the whole night? And hanging out in a bar was plain
torture if you weren't into alcohol. As for romantic liaisons,
they just didn't "happen" - probably because all the reading had turned
me into an opinionated egghead, who knows. My sobering conclusion after my
newly found freedom: I actually hadn't
missed a thing the last five years because I didn't fit in to begin with.
Complete trust from my dad and freedom set in after the sometimes lonely
years where books were my best friends. I was his oldest child and after I turned eighteen, my dad began to treat me on par with other adults, even listening to my
views and engaging in a serious discussion. Before, discussions were mainly a
paternal monologue with the children expected to listen. In post-puberty time however, he never played the Tibetan-father-authority-card again nor did he
try to influence me. Certainly our views on many topics diverged
more than they converged. With youthful fervor I would argue and he would sometimes
exclaim in frustration, "You should become a professional critic! You must
always have the last word!" But never again did he try to impose his wish.
He let me run free even if that gave him a hard time. It was the logical result of his education style: Shape their character as long as you can; when they
are old enough to think for themselves, let go. To teach us how to think for ourselves was one of his prime parenting goals. When we couldn't explain why we had done
something the way we did, our dad would unleash one of his notorious slogans on
us. "The Tibetan people are like oxen," was one of his favourite
phrases, "the farmer pulls them in this direction, they go in this direction;
the farmer pulls them in that direction, they go in that direction." He
said it with contempt and it used to make me angry. Among all his phrase-mongering
this one was the most annoying because I found it disrespectful of the Tibetan
people. As if he were something better. But as with many of his initially
annoying comments, with time this one too was not without truth.
Meanwhile all kinds of crazy ideas had got into my head from the indiscriminate
reading during my years under "house arrest". I boycotted bananas from
big colonialistic and exploitative fruit companies, only eating politically correct
"Nica bananas" from Nicaragua which was economically suffering at the
time because of what I thought was an unfair trade embargo. I carried my school
books in a scratchy bag that had "jute not plastic" written over it
to protect the environment and alert others to do the same. And I wore clothes
as unfashionable as possible: My friends from school and I were fully behind
the women's movement and according to our teenage understanding, fashion was a
sign of non-emancipated, brain-dead bimbos.
The other day I saw an article about Emily Lao, a prominent Hong
Kong politician of the Democratic Party, who was confronted by students for going to
the hairdresser while the youths were holding out in the streets demonstrating
for more democracy. How come she had time for a decadent haircut in the face of
such anguish? It could have been me asking this uncomfortable question. That's
exactly how I ticked as an adolescent.
A father at the lecture pleaded, "What rights do I have? Am I
allowed to also watch my own TV programme and not always them?" A mother
asked, "What can I do if they don't want to join us for a hike on Sunday?
What about family time? Am I allowed to make them come?" – And another
mother lamented rather helplessly, "My son is gaming every free minute
refusing to communicate or interact; when I pull the plug, he gets aggressive,
once he destroyed the door!" Whereupon the two teachers went on to explain
the physical changes that were going on in adolescents and that certain parts of the brain that were not yet fully developed, could account for some of the erratic behaviours
of youngsters such as aggression, apathy, inconsideration, egoism and so on. That only meant parents had to suffer through this, always showing concern but not too
much to avoid stressing the youngsters. Withdrawing interest from an adolescent,
they warned us, has resulted in suicide in some cases. And if your kid shows
signs of an addiction such as excessive gaming, parents should seek
professional help. They had all the addresses ready too. The presenters then showed
us a slide with a quote that I found enormously telling:
"Today's youngsters are sleazy and dissolute. Young people don't listen to their parents any longer… The end of the world is near."
To what time does this quote possibly date back? We all took our guesses but
none of us got anywhere near. It was discovered in Chaldean cuneiform in Ur, a
place name I vaguely associated with Mesopotamia, and it was dated to around
2000 ante Christum natum – the quote was 4,000 years old - greetings from
prehistory! More quotes followed: One from antiquity by Sokrates, another from
the Renaissance and the last one from a family in the 18th century
and all had the same tenor: People through the ages thought their younger
generations are the worst. But when even prehistoric parents complained about
"today's youth", maybe our youngsters were not as hopeless as parents
sometimes thought? I guess that was the intended bottom line of the teachers.
I shared my insights from the puberty lecture at the dinner table the following
day. My mom dryly replied parents in the West were too lax on their children
and that in Tibet you just had to fulfill your duties. Paying attention to a
problem caused by something called "puberty" was kyiptrabä kedscha
or "talk that arises because one's situation is too pleasant" - a
luxury problem in her view. Children in the West only had school as their duty
and were spared from helping around the house or farming and looking after
animals. Parents here tended to overdo it sometimes, she said. Too
accommodating, too understanding, too egalitarian. My husband then jokingly produced a curious
Tibetan gtam dpe or saying in response to my update from the puberty presentation. He solemnly recited it in the earthy Kham dialect spoken by the elders in our Tibetan hometown, sounding almost as archaic as Chaldean. I try
to reproduce it as phonetically accurate as possible in the Latin Alphabet:
Phuro song de dheoring guo, drung Kessur shering guo
Phutha song de dheoring guo, thratong thongtong shering guo.
"Three good kids walking along discuss the Gesar story
"Three bad kids walking along discuss food and drink."
You definitely want your kid in the company of the first trio: It is exemplary
because these youngsters study. You don't want your kid to hang out with the second
group: These guys only think of how to have fun instead of working on
themselves – bad company.
And here's another funny saying which I have used on my pubescent child-housemate
a lot lately:
Putshaa makyó, threemba kyó!
The kid doesn't grow, instead the liver grows!"
Americans call it guts, we call it liver. It means youngsters get
cheeky on you long before they can fend for themselves. It's actually a miracle
my dad hasn't used it on me. Oh my, I sound so funny when I hurl this at my
teenager. I almost forget I am mad!
The other day, just before going out the door to school, the youngster got
checky on me again with my mom witnessing it. Spontaneously I realised it must all be déjâ vu for her: I did the same to her when I was growing up and all of a
sudden I felt very guilty. I hugged her and apologized. dgongs tag
Amala. Only now as a parent of an adolescent do I understand how hard it must have been for my mom back then. My Amala only gave me a warm smile: All forgiven and forgotten.
Later that day the kid didn't even remember what had happened in the morning.
I received a hug and was told "best mom ever". Relief. There is still hope that it's only the hormones
playing crazy and no one is walking away with a permanent damage from this age-old ordeal called puberty.
Mountain Phoenix Over Tibet
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