SOMETHING TO CONTEMPLATE:
I grew up in a home of eight children and I have come to experience that we all experienced our childhood differently but yet all in the same home.
We like to say it as a defence.
We grew up in the same home.
As if bricks and routines guarantee sameness.
As if proximity equals shared reality.
Not really.
The home is not the point.
The siblings inside it are.
Parents are not fixed entities.
They are moving landscapes.
They age.
They tire.
They learn.
They break.
They adapt.
They survive things their children may never see or hear about.
The parent, a child meets is not the parent, a later child inherits.
One child meets vigilance and hope.
Another meets exhaustion or ease.
One is born before grief, another after it has settled.
One grows up in scarcity, another in relative comfort.
The home may look the same from the street, but inside, all is different.
And then there is the children.
Children arrive already different.
Different n