Stuff My Son Has Taught Me About Myself Lately- The Rebuild Week 8

I'm still doing some stuff the wrong way, but that's okay, because we're all learning together.

After six weeks, my son is finally over his first-ever cold. It’s been tough on the little bigger, but probably more so tough on us as new parents who want to make everything better. It’s not common for us to be sick for that length of time as adults. There were times when I was torn between taking him to the doctor (again) and not wanting to be one of those overreacting parents. We decided to do all we could to make sure he was comfortable and warm and then use his mood to gauge just how sick he was.

I was excited for him to be better, and while you love your kid unconditionally irrelevant of their condition, I just wanted my healthy, happy baby boy back.

But once he was better, he wasn’t the same as before getting sick. I shouldn’t have been surprised. At his age (almost ten months), he’s a different kid nearly daily. He started to get really clingy. He would have days where he was obsessed with me and disinterested in his mum and vice versa, which I found pretty challenging. The highlight of my day is that first period when I come home from work, and he’s just over the fucking moon because I have come home. Being the catastrophiser that I am, the days when I came home and he wasn’t jumping out of his skin to see me, were challenging.

What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with him? Is this the beginning of the end? Will he ever love me again? Maybe he’s rebelling? Perhaps he’s about to start smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap bourbon and cola cans at the park. Of course, this is all completely fucking ridiculous, but they’re genuine thoughts that wander through my mind at times.

What I now know is the poor little bastard went played a solid six-week cold into another developmental leap. Leaps are periods when a baby will go through a significant amount of development over a short period, and it freaks them the fuck out. It’s like going to bed in your bed and waking upIt’sthe lounge of some stranger’s house. The entire world changes overnight.

Ten leaps occur in the first two years of a baby’s life, and the first seven happen in the first year. A baby only realises it is a separate being from its mother when leap six happens at eight months old. Imagine waking up one day and learning everything you thought you knew about your life is entirely wrong and that you’re all alone. That would be pretty fuckin’ terrifying.

He went straight from a cold into leap seven, where he’s starting to see that things don’t just happen independently. There is an order to how things happen. His toys don’t just appear in front of him. Mum and Dad pull them out of his basket. So now, every single fucking toy he has comes out of the toy basket. But he can’t distinguish between what he should and shouldn’t be able to have access to and doesn’t understand why he shouldn’t help me take the sharp knives out of the cutlery basket in the dishwasher, which makes him sad.

He’s also all but walking. Every fucking thing we own has become a walker, except for the walker that I bought him. His high chair, his box of wipes, anything rigid enough to support his weight and solid sufficient to damage the fucking floorboards is now a walker.

He’s also starting to learn how to play with other kids and that, unlike at home, it’s not all about him, and he can’t have everything he wants.

The stuff mentioned above is all pretty cool, and it’s so fucking amazing to watch him learn and grow. The problem is, though, he has no control over the rate at which he is learning and, at times, becomes super overwhelmed. Everything is too much, and sometimes he needs that extra support. When you throw in the mix the transition from two shorter sleeps a day to one longer one, the little fella can get pretty emotional. Some days it’s three hours between sleep. On other days, it can be seven or eight, and over-tired babies aren’t fuckin’ big day.

Even when sitting with his mum on the lounge, I had to be nearby too. If I went to go to the toilet or get a drink, a bizarre hybrid of rage and fear ensued. I’d try to put him on the ground with his toys for a minute so I could hang some washing out or similar, and the closer I got to the ground, the more he would panic and the louder he would scream. You could almost play him Iike a musical instrument. As I lift him up and down, the distance from the ground dictates the volume and tone of the noise coming out of him.

As you can probably tell, I’ve only recently learned all this about leap seven. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been pretty slack with this. I like to lie to myself and say that these things are my partner’s strong suit, and I pick up the slack in other areas. It wasn’t until the other day I was freaking out about being unable to settle him, that my partner mentioned he might be going through another leap.

I realise through all this that I’m still doing things incorrectly. For all of my life, I have always been a fixer. I have always tried to find a logical solution to an emotional problem. I have identified it as a flaw I want to improve on, but this experience reminded me that I still have a lot of work to do.

My initial response to my son being a little out of sorts was that something must be wrong with him. Something that needs to be fixed with a practical measure. I thought he must be teething again. Or maybe he had a sore belly. I didn’t for a moment think, “Maybe he’s going through a difficult time, emotionally”, and just needed extra care and attention. Reflecting on this was a little disappointing because I’m trying to ensure his emotional needs are met like mine weren’t.

I was getting frustrated that there wasn’t a simple fix. His needs impacted my ability to do what I needed or wanted to do for myself. Then I’d get annoyed with myself for being frustrated. On reflection, I think there’s no problem with being frustrated. If something is frustrating, it’s frustrating. It’s how you let that emotion manifest that matters. It’s no one’s fault that this happened; nothing good will come from getting the shits. I think the best thing we can do is allow ourselves some time and space to be frustrated, get it over with and move on.

A similar thing happened this week when my partner told me she was feeling a certain way about something I was doing. I was not doing anything wrong, but she just wanted to tell me how she felt. Instantly I got frustrated and defensive. Even though she made it clear to me that she wasn’t upset with me, without thinking, I succumbed to the urge I had to explain away the logical reasoning behind why I needed to do what I needed to do.

I missed the whole point, and it took me hours to realise that. All she wanted was to acknowledge her feelings, and I was too deep inside my head to admit that I hadn’t time. Again, on reflection, I was slightly disappointed in myself for how I reacted. It was only a minor thing that was quickly resolved, but another reminder that maybe I haven’t doesn’t far as I sometimes think I have or that no matter how far you have come, these things are not like riding a bike. You don’t learn them once and never forget. Consciousness doesn’t work that way.

I know why I react like this. I want to be a fixer because I have low self-esteem. When I find a way to fix a problem for someone, they tell me good job, and I feel nice about myself. But this feeling is a temporary one. It’s cheap, easy and not the kind that will provide me with genuine contentment and fulfilment. That will come from working through these struggles with my son instead of just trying to fix them for him and helping him work through them by himself, with my support.

I’m learning that consciousness and presence take ongoing effort. I used to think that by getting sober and doing “all the right things,” I would be able to learn things, put them in my back pocket, and they would stay there forever, but it doesn’t work like that. You have to want them more than that. You have to want them enough to work at them continually. It’s not an intense, overwhelming, constant raging fire, but rather slow-burning coals that you need to be mindful of at all times if this is how you wish to conduct yourself.

We can learn a lot from our kids in this regard. We encourage them to grow and develop constantly, but the thing is that growth and development are coming whether we like it or not. They will crawl, walk and talk when they are ready. They don’t need you to prop them up on their feet and help them to walk, something I am guilty of doing. They need you to be present enoudon’t identify their developments and encourage and support them once they start trying new things independently.

We constantly want our kids to try. More often than not, we don’t care about the result. We care about the effort. In my case, I was constantly encouraging my son to step outside of his comfort zone and try new things, then try to find a practical explanation or solution when he had an emotional reaction.

It makes me a bit of a hypocrite. How can I push him to step outside his comfort zone because I want him to be able to walk when I’m so fucking reluctant to step outside of my comfort zone. If my son sees the TV remote on the back of the lounge, he will do everything he can to get it. He’ll spend ten minutes trying to climb onto the lounge, then up to the back to grab the remote, chew on it for two minutes, realise it’s not that fun, and then move right on to the next thing. He “doesn’t sit there and think, “Oh, I want to get the remote, but it’s going to take a bit of aIt’sfort to get there, and even when I get there, it mightn’t have been worth the effort”. He just does whatever he can to get the fucking thing, then worries about the result later. It’s an attitude I think we could all benefit from adopting.

I love being a parent. More than anything, I was so fucking terrified of it. I genuinely didn’t think I’d be capable of it. I imagine all first-time parents out there felt similarly. One thing I love about it that I didn’t think I would is that I’m not perfect at it. No one isThere’shis allows us to learn and grow together.

My son has taught me so much more than I have taught him, and he continues to teach me things about myself daily. There’s all the standard soppy shit like “what matters, your career isn’t that important etc.” But more than that, he’s teaching me a level of patience I didn’t know I had. It’s teaching me that it’s ok not to be perfect, it’s ok to fuck up, it’s ok to be tired and grumpy sometimes, and most importantly, not only is it ok to express how you feel, but it’s essential.

He and my partner were away for the night last night. She had to go and speak to her boss about returning to work in August. Obviously, I missed them, but I found myself conflicted because I was enjoying the time to myself. I haven’t had a lot of time to myself lately. I get up early for an hour or so each morning, but over the last couple of months, he’s decided to join me most mornings.

I wouldn’t trade that time for the world. It’s special to have that one-on-one time with him. Mum gets the extra sleep she needs to look after him all day, and I get a solid hour with him, just the two of us. But this has taken away the time I set aside for myself.

So last night, I had mixed emotions about it. Am I an arsehole for enjoying some time to myself? Of course, I’m not, but that was a feeling I had to navigate. I think it’s important to understand that enjoying time away from your loved ones doesn’t make you a bad person. If anything, using the time correctly makes you a better family member because when the unit reconnects later, you’ve had that time you needed. You should be able to reenter that family unit somewhat revitalised.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.

Cheers Wankers.

X.

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