Parenting is an incredibly intense job. One has the natural ability to create a human life, but being a parent to a child requires many skills that are learned from experiment or from advice. Caregivers have the biggest influence on the children they raise. Sometimes, parents impart good lessons to their children. Sometimes, they do not. We judge our parents as being good parents or bad parents by which type of lessons they bestow. In my case, I judge my parents mostly based on the lesson they taught me in personal religious freedom.
My father came from a long line of South Indian Roman Catholics. My dad used to tell me that his 20-something-great grandfather used to hang out with St. Thomas the Doubter, the apostle of Jesus Christ who traveled to India after the Resurrection. Whether that is true or my father was just spinning tall tales, my father has been a devoted member of his faith since his birth. He may not make it to church every Sunday or align completely with the opinions of the Catholic Church, but he firmly aligns himself as a Roman Catholic.
My mother, on the other hand, is a little more complicated. My mother descended from a Hindu-based family. However, her parents never emphasized religion much during her childhood. This influenced her to align herself as a loosely spiritual person. She believes in the forces of nature that work in miraculous ways throughout our lives. She believes in a God or entity that holds the answers to the deepest questions of humanity. But she does not align herself with any specific faith.
I was baptized as a Catholic when I was young and attended Catholic school all throughout childhood. I was a curious child and my parents wanted me to experience the answer to all of my questions about religion. They took me to Roman Catholic masses, Buddhist retreats, Unitarian discussion groups, and Hindu temples. They would play different cassette tapes in the car of various people explaining their interpretations of the Bible, the Quran, and the Bhagavad Gita. As I grew older, I began to struggle with all these ideas.
The way that my parents had raised me was very different from the way that certain other supposedly "good parents" had raised their kids within the faith. I could not figure out how to align my ideas into a healthy lifestyle for me. Had my parents raised me correctly? Were they even good people? According to the Catholic faith, they did not even have a legal Catholic marriage, because my mother did not profess the Catholic faith. This led to the even more terrifying question: was I even a good person?
Looking closely into how my parents raised me helped me to answer this question. I was always taught, no matter what the situation, to always do good, to lessen the pain of others. What I also learned was that good had the potential to be done by anyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or social class. As long as I was trying to lead a life in the pursuit of good deeds, it did not matter whose name I was doing it under. What mattered was that I was making the effort to do it.
I am not perfect. My parents most certainly are not either. But I think that the way they raised me shows that amidst the ever changing society of the 21st century, they were just trying to do their best to help me learn and feel comfortable in that life-long process. And for that, I thank them.
