A man in his forties swept into the OPD one late afternoon, dragging behind him his ten year old son with a pink eye, a frail, shrinking presence whose loose trousers lagged a step behind his own body.

A quiet, practiced terror flickered across the boy’s face. Over the next twenty minutes, the father performed, each joke at the child’s expense, his charm stitched from the boy’s undoing.

By the time the consultation ended, nothing visible had changed, yet the child seemed lighter, as if some final, fragile weight of self worth had been stripped away and left behind for others to smile at.

His lips still bore the learned smile, the kind that signals compliance, as though he had already been taught that being the punchline was the price of acceptance by his father, his hero.

Because his father, after all, was exemplary.

He had toys his friends could only dream of, shelves stocked with books of his liking, cookies and chocolates brought for him on cue, a curated childhood that looked unmistakably like abundance.

My heart went out to him, his coming decade unspooling before me like a trailer no one would willingly buy tickets for.

To question the hand that provides is quietly branded ingratitude, and so the child will most likely learn to contort himself into the father’s shape, guilt becoming the custodian of a self never fully allowed to form.

No child chooses the family into which he is born, yet some spend years painstakingly undoing what those very years at home have so efficiently installed.

I may even be judging too soon, but the whole ordeal got me thinking.

Why does a man procreate? Does it turn a womb into a shrine and a child into a commemorative medal of his manhood? Does the child make the makers more “man” and more “woman”?

Or is the kid just a well timed passion project when life feels a little underwhelming, a quick patch for a dull marriage, a sense of purpose with legs, or perhaps a long term investment plan?

Is it the desire for a lifelong, highly sophisticated pet, much like the man in the story?

Or an excuse to make up for failures?

The valley of what-ifs is where a man finds solace to fill the gaps of his inadequacies. And what better excuse than a child, to blame for the mundane detour your otherwise “magnificent” life took?

Is a child, then, merely the most palatable alibi, an almost noble pretext, for a life that failed to become what it once promised?

Is parenthood, then, the common man’s brief, chaotic audition for godhood?

Do not get me wrong, I have met extraordinary parents. But it remains fascinating how casually many approach parenthood, as though it were something you could just figure out along the way, like learning to cook eggs, except here, you cannot throw away the burnt ones.

It is not for everyone. I, for one, find it among the most daunting undertakings, something I doubt anyone is ever truly ready for. Because every word, every gesture, every silence is being quietly absorbed by someone who is still forming.

And what could be more unsettling than that, the quiet knowledge that a human being is, in part, shaped by everything you choose to be, or fail to be?

A couple of decades from now, when the child i met today rises into clarity, shedding the grip of guilt and seeing things as they are, will this father reckon with his failures, or retreat into a fortress of victimhood, sealing himself within and singing his own praise?

I suppose only time will tell.