HAVING a child makes you as much a parent as having a piano makes you a pianist. You have to work at it, improvise as you go along. Just as you practice daily on the piano, diligently, changing the notes to accommodate yourself, composing the melody. Similarly parenting is not much different, we learn as we go along. Often bending the rules to accommodate friendship too.

So, it was a hot Sunday and I was on the net chatting with a friend in America. A single parent, he has three children, 12 years, 10 years and 7 years. The kids spend equal time with both parents. As the children tell me, they have two different homes, two bedrooms each, two televisions each, two sets of tennis gear (one at each home), a dog in one home and a cat in the other, a Mercedes in one, a Hummer in the other…I am hoping the love they get is also multiplied twice stronger. Sanjiv began by telling me it was a glorious spring Sunday and he was planning a barbecue for the kids and then taking them for a music concert in downtown Chicago. But the day started with him having run out of groceries and he had to drive out for them, then he realised the painter was coming for painting the garage in the afternoon, the weekly washing was not done, the guy who mowed the yard had called to say he was sick and would not come, and the cars needed to go in and get washed at the gas station. His boss had a birthday mid-week and he should pick up a present…what on earth could he buy a 58-year-old Spanish lady? I sympathised, telling him my life 8,000 miles away was not very different. My added problem was the cook was having it of with the maid and both had taken the day off together and I was mad, smoking-through-the-nose mad. He being the male was single track in our e-chat, he was solving his problems as I chatted along. He was fragile and frazzled dangling on the edge of a domestic crisis. (He had no clue my life ran along these lines daily). So, he said he decided to cancel the barbecue, send the pork chops to the neighbour who would oversee the painter painting the garage, finish the laundry, and take the children to the mall where they could eat and he could shop, and then perhaps vice versa. It would make everyone happy Sanjiv wrote with a smiley at the end of the sentence. “Thank God! I am in a secure job and can afford these luxuries.”

That’s when the mother in me rose like a killer whale. Firstly, I told him your wife, me, your boss, the housewife in Japan and Korea, even in the Cape of Good Hope lived days like this daily and coped without whining. Every time we had to multitask juggling a crisis with home, husband, work and children we did not run out buying candy to keep everyone happy. We did not run for cover in the mall. You promised them the barbecue, cook it. Involve the kids, eat on the porch, tell your boss you were ‘daddying’ over the weekend, buy her a perfume, take the kids to the library to pick up reading material, so next time they can share their stories with you. Chat, cry, smile, laugh with the children, your time spent with them is more valuable than the money spent on them.

Bubbles Sabharwal is a theatre director