There is a strange surrender that happens when someone becomes a parent. The sharp edges of logic soften. Certainties blur. The world suddenly feels larger than what science, reasoning, or evidence alone can explain. I used to laugh at superstitions, especially the ones woven deeply into Indian households. I rolled my eyes when my mother took a fistful of salt and circled it around my head before throwing it away to ward off the evil eye. I saw it as ritual without reason, habit without proof. To me, it belonged to an older generation that feared invisible forces because they lacked modern explanations.
And yet, today, the atheist and logic-based person in me quietly disappears every time I look at my daughter’s beautiful face.
The moment a stranger smiles and says, “She is so beautiful,” or “What a bubbly child,” something ancient awakens inside me. Before reason can interrupt, I instinctively reach for salt. I rotate my hand clockwise over her tiny head and feet, just as my mother once did for me and my siblings. The same practice I once mocked now feels necessary, almost sacred. Not because I suddenly believe in magic in the literal sense, but because love creates fear, and fear searches for protection in every form available.
Perhaps that is what changes in a parent.
A child introduces vulnerability unlike anything else. Before her, I could debate faith, dismiss customs, and laugh at unseen dangers because the consequences felt distant. But when you hold your child in your arms, you realise how helpless love can make you. Suddenly, the invisible no longer feels impossible. You become willing to believe in energies, blessings, prayers, and rituals; not always because your mind is convinced, but because your heart refuses to leave even the smallest possibility unexplored if it might keep your child safe.
Logic asks, “Does this work?”
Parenthood whispers, “What if it does?”
And between those two questions lies the transformation of countless mothers and fathers across generations.
Maybe these rituals were never entirely about superstition. Maybe they were emotional armour. A way for parents to cope with the terrifying reality that they cannot control everything. The salt, the prayers, the black dots behind the ear, the whispered blessings; all of them are acts of helpless love disguised as tradition. They give parents the comforting illusion that they are doing something, however small, against a world full of uncertainties.
When I remember my mother circling salt around us, I no longer see ignorance. I see devotion. I see a woman trying to protect her children with every tool her heart believed in. Back then, I saw superstition. Today, I see love translated into ritual.
Children have a way of humbling certainty. They make rational people sentimental, sceptics spiritual, and atheists quietly superstitious. Not because parenthood destroys intelligence, but because love expands the boundaries of what we are willing to accept. A child becomes the one exception to every rule we once confidently imposed on the world.
And perhaps that is the invisible force parents truly believe in, not the evil eye itself, but the overwhelming power of love, fear, hope, and protection woven together so tightly that they begin to feel sacred.
Pic source — Pixabay (skalekar1992)
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