Watching My Kids Become What We Were

My children have fought, this year alone, over a television remote, the front seat of the car, whose turn it was to choose the restaurant, and - memorably, for reasons I still do not fully understand - the correct pronunciation of a word neither of them knew the meaning of. I mention this not as a complaint but as a status report, because I recognise every single one of these fights. I had nearly the same list, with nearly the same intensity, with my own brother, three decades ago.

It is a strange thing, watching your children argue in a register you remember arguing in yourself, at the same age, over things that will matter to no one in a year. Strange, and then, if you let yourself sit with it a bit longer, quietly moving - because you already know, in a way they cannot yet, exactly where this goes.

You want to tell them. That is the hardest part of watching it from the parent's side - knowing, with total certainty, that the sibling currently being blamed for absolutely everything will, twenty years from now, be one of the two or three people they can call at any hour without explaining themselves first. But this is not the kind of knowledge that transfers by being told. My own parents tried to tell me the same thing at the same age, and I did not believe them either. It has to be lived, apparently, one ordinary fought-over remote control at a time, before it becomes real instead of a thing your parents say to make you stop fighting.

So instead of telling them, I watch for the other moments - the ones that do not make it into the day's complaint log. My daughter checking, without being asked, that her brother has his inhaler before a school trip. My son, unprompted, saving the last piece of something he actually wanted for his sister, and pretending it was no big deal. These moments are smaller and quieter than the fights, and they lose every single time in terms of volume. But they are the ones actually building something, the way the fights never quite are.

Raksha Bandhan is the one day a year I get to watch this whole slow, invisible process made briefly visible. My daughter ties the thread with a seriousness she does not bring to most things at her age. My son, who would deny under any form of interrogation that he cares about this festival at all, is always, suspiciously, home well before the ceremony without ever being reminded. Neither of them would describe what is happening between them as love, not yet, not out loud. But I recognise the shape of it perfectly, because I built the same shape myself, with my own brother, at their exact age, without either of us noticing we were doing it.

What I have started doing, the last few years, is keeping a photograph from every single Rakhi - not posed, not everyone smiling on cue, just whatever the actual moment looks like that year, thread half-tied, someone mid-sentence, the ordinary chaos of it. I do not think either of my children understands yet why I bother. I am not sure I could fully explain it to them even if they asked. But I know that in twenty years, when they are the ones who finally believe what I cannot currently tell them, those photographs are going to matter more than almost anything else I could give them from this whole stretch of their childhood.

If you are watching this same thing happen in your own house - the fighting that has not yet revealed itself as the early draft of a lifelong loyalty - it is worth doing the same. Keep the photograph, even the unposed one, especially the unposed one. A 3D miniature or a layered frame built years from now, once they are old enough to actually see what you saw all along, will mean more than almost anything given in the years while they were still too close to it to notice. You are not just watching two children fight over a remote control. You are watching the whole rest of a relationship get built, one unremarkable Tuesday at a time. It is worth writing down while you still have the vantage point to see it clearly.