N. Raghuraman's column: When children no longer need us, what is our second purpose?

Remember the days when the child would simply say that I wanted this, and you would somehow find a way to fulfill that wish by saving a little, hiding something from your husband. Remember the days when the child's body was heated like a cauldron, you would stay up all night changing the cold bandage on his forehead. And remember the day when your child moved to the US and told you that he didn't have enough money for a down payment to book an apartment in New York, then you somehow convinced your husband to take out his retirement savings by saying, "After all, everything is for him after us." And then, one day something changes. Now remember how you keep looking at that mobile phone again and again, which used to ring for every small and big problem of the child, but now it is silent. This silence is not because your child no longer loves you. But now he's grown. He is an adult who has a job, a long series of meetings in a distant land; She has her own house, a spouse and children of her own. Since many mothers forget to acknowledge these milestones in their children's lives, the phone they have been silent on appears to be a place from where an invisible emptiness begins. The mother who had been asking for decades if she had eaten? Or what did you eat?, she now waits for someone to ask her the same question. Fathers who once used to drive around the city to solve their child's little problem now hesitate to say that my back hurts. There are many parents I know who often socialize and party together, but when one of them says that my son called me and talked for 45 minutes, they are suddenly alone in the crowd. After many decades of being someone's mother or father, they quietly ask themselves, "If no one needs me today, who am I?" They go back to the past, when as parents they spent almost half of their lives with a clear purpose that they never needed to find. The journey began with a tiny shriek in the middle of the night and progressed through school uniforms, lunchboxes, homework, fevers, exams, college admissions, first jobs, heartbreaks, marriage, and hundreds of small needs of children – needs that the children themselves may not remember. But parents remember every single one of them. They remember every dish their child likes. They know which medicine works on them. They also understand when the child is pretending to be okay. They know the difference between I'm okay and I'm really fine. This is because they have been responding to the needs of children for years—no matter how small or how expensive they are. All these things came to my mind when I read about Raashi Khanna (actress of the 2013 film Madras Cafe) this week. She said in an interview that she tries to choose the right roles, because today the audience wants every character in the story to have a purpose. And how right they were. Today's single mothers suddenly lose the purpose around which their entire adult lives were built. And the saddest part is that children still want to help their mothers, but mothers themselves don't know how to ask for help. Maybe that's how they're crafted. Parents should be expected to create their own identity. Learn something that they have been putting off for 30 years. Go for a walk in a place without waiting for the kids. The idea is that every parent should have some other purpose in their life and if it starts before the child goes away, then nothing can be better than this. Our children will not always be the purpose of our lives. They also have to live their own lives and fulfill their own objectives.