Parenthood Diaries: On Becoming

The vigil kept in braced preparedness is a kind of waiting that mothers know intimately. The rehearsal of consolations for disappointments not yet arrived. I have become fluent in this waiting over eight years now, the grammar of it inscribed in my body like muscle memory. This month, waiting for my son's report card, I find myself contemplating William James's notion of the "twice-born" where he refers to the idea of those who must be broken and remade to find their way to wholeness.

My son spent six years learning what the poet Adrienne Rich called "the geography of fear." Bullied in primary school, he developed an atlas of avoidance: which hallways to skip, which moments to disappear, which parts of himself to keep carefully hidden. Singapore's educational meritocracy renders its verdict subtly on quarterly printed slips: academically weak. The language of deficit, dressed in the presumed objectivity of institutional observation.

I think often of what the psychologist Carol Dweck discovered about praise and its shadow twin, condemnation. How the labels we affix to children—smart, talented, lazy—become the prisons they inhabit. How a "fixed mindset" calcifies around identity, while a "growth mindset" remains fluid, open to transformation. But knowing this intellectually and holding space for it as a parent in a culture that measures worth in percentile rankings are different orders of knowledge entirely.

When my son turned thirteen, the system offered him what the philosopher Hannah Arendt might have called "natality." The human capacity for new beginnings. A new school. The radical possibility of becoming otherwise.

What unfolded was not what I expected.

He began reaching toward leadership roles with a persistence that baffled me. Here was a child whose fear I could map as precisely as any cartographer; the fear of visibility, of judgment, of repeating humiliation. And yet he kept nominating himself, kept trying, kept stepping forward into the very exposure he had spent years learning to avoid.

But it was his relationship to failure that taught me something I had not yet understood about resilience. The Stoics spoke of amor fati (love of one's fate) but my son was practicing something subtly different: a kind of joyful pragmatism about outcomes. He aimed high, genuinely reached for what he wanted, but received disappointment with equanimity. Not resignation, not the defensive armour of low expectations, but actual contentment with the reaching itself.

I watched him operationalise this philosophy over two years. He lost elections. He was passed over. He tried again. In each iteration, I could see him metabolising rejection not as confirmation of unworthiness but as data about the world.

The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter writes about "strange loops" which he describes as patterns that fold back on themselves, creating something new in the recursion. My son's repeated attempts became their own kind of strange loop. His teachers, watching this persistence, began to see not the "lazy" student I saw specifically through my judgmental academic-oriented lenses; no, they saw a young person demonstrating the very qualities leadership requires. They sent him to training programmes. They groomed his strengths.

What they were witnessing, I think, was the difference between talent and character. Between the legible metrics we've designed to sort children and the illegible qualities that actually determine how a life unfolds. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that human flourishing cannot be captured by a single measure of value. My son, my in eyes, was becoming living proof of this thesis.

This morning, I sit with the particular species of dread that report card days bring. I know the numbers will not be impressive. I have prepared my internal monologue: the one about Gardner's multiple intelligences, about the limitations of standardised assessment, about all the ways we fail to measure what matters. These are my talismans against the pain of watching my child be reduced to inadequacy by institutional metrics.

My phone illuminates with a notification.

Leadership programme acceptance.

For a moment, the two realities sit side by side, incommensurate: the child who struggles academically, the young person selected for leadership development. In Singapore's binary of success and failure, these should not coexist. And yet.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a young poet about the necessity of living the questions, of dwelling in uncertainty until we might, one day, live our way into answers. My son has been living a question about what kind of excellence matters, about whether persistence might be more valuable than talent, about whether character can be cultivated through repeated acts of courage even when academic talent seems absent.

The answer that arrives today is partial, provisional. The report card will still come. The academic struggles will not evaporate. But he has, through two years of reaching, demonstrated something the philosopher Iris Murdoch called "moral attention;" the patient, repeated practice of turning toward the good, of choosing again and again to become.

What I am learning, watching him, is that development is not linear progress toward a predetermined excellence but something more like what the biologist Stephen Jay Gould described in evolution: punctuated equilibrium, long periods of apparent stasis interrupted by sudden leaps into new forms.

My son spent six years in one form—the bullied, struggling child. Then he entered a period of trying, failing, trying again. And now, suddenly, a leap: recognition that his way of showing up in the world has value.

The Romantics believed in the correspondence between inner and outer nature, the idea that what we feel matches what the world is. But I think there is something more interesting happening here: a correspondence between who we practice being and who we might become. My son has been practicing courage, practicing resilience, practicing a relationship to failure that allows forward motion. And in that practice, he has become someone I did not know to hope for.

I am thinking about what it means to trust another person's unfolding, to resist the urge to reshape them according to cultural templates of success. The negative capability that Keats described (the capacity to dwell in mystery and uncertainty) turns out to be a parental skill as essential as any other.

My son reached for something, and this time, his reaching was met. Not because he became academically stronger, but because he demonstrated that there are other architectures of excellence, other ways of mattering in the world.

The report card will come next week. We will face those numbers together, as we always do. But today, I am learning to recognise a different kind of achievement: the achievement of becoming, of insisting on one's own possibility against institutional verdicts, of remaining in the reach even when the stars seem impossibly far.

He taught himself this. I only bore witness.

And in witnessing, I am learning what all parents must eventually learn: that our children are not ours to shape but ours to recognise, mysteries to honour.

He is still becoming. So, it turns out, am I. If this resonated, subscribe below.

NINH BINH
DECEMBER 2024