Recognize Your Partner’s Child

May 20, 2013 by · 1 Comment

Have you ever had the experience that you have a discussion with your partner about something he did that upset you, and he seems to agree and be understand, but then later goes back to justifying his own actions? Feel free to switch the genders, since this is common behavior in men and women. It used to upset me when this happened. I’d think, wait–I thought he understood why it was hurtful when he criticized the way I cleaned the kitchen! Why is he now going back and talking about why he was partly justified in talking to me that way?

These days, it doesn’t get to me as much.

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31 Weeks of Lydia

May 15, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

How quickly they change! As of this week, Lydia is officially seven months. And the separation anxiety has calmed way down to the point where I’d say she’s back to baseline. Assuming it makes any sense at all to talk about baseline behavior for babies, which maybe it doesn’t.

She did get a bit of a cold, mostly as evidence by a snotty nose. I can feel a tickle in my throat, but I think there’s a good chance it won’t turn into more than that on my end, since I’ve been getting enough sleep.

I can feel my brain wanting to take credit for the reduction in separation anxiety, but I think it has very little to do with me. It was just a phase.

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Do You Feel Like an Adult?

May 13, 2013 by · 1 Comment

I was doing some IFS with an old friend yesterday, and when I told her to imagine what her adult self would say to her ten-year-old child self, she said that her problem was that she didn’t feel like an adult.

I primed the pump with some wisdom I’ve heard from her over the years, and she mostly took it from there. Still, it was an interesting situation for me. I think one nugget of IFS theory that I’ve heard is that if the subject of the process doesn’t have a strong enough “Self”, the facilitator can lend his. That advice has largely informed how I’ve dealt with similar situations as well.

But, at least in her case, the problem wasn’t that she didn’t have an adult self to draw on, it was that she wasn’t in touch with it–she was too blended with the child.

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30 Weeks of Lydia

May 8, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

Probably the most notable feature of this week was increased separation anxiety. Quite interesting to watch. I do think that, because of her own increased mobility, Lydia has much more of a concept of people leaving than she used to, and she doesn’t like it!

The most classic thing she has been doing is crying the minute I go around a corner. She’s also sometimes not liked to be put down, even if she can see me. (Since she’s been born, there have been times when she didn’t want to be put down, but this seems to have a different character. More clingy is one way I would describe it, though I don’t like the negative connotation of that word. It’s not that she’s otherwise tired or fussy, but that she wants me. If I put her down, she’ll crawl over and start climbing my leg.)

And sometimes Lydia just wants to be with me, not even Will. Though, even when I’m with her, she’ll still sometimes get upset when Will leaves to go to the kitchen or something, and start crawling after him. Actually, Lydia’s not crazy about anyone leaving, and has expressed distress when my roommates left in the morning for work, and when a guy we were hanging out in a coffee shop rounded a corner and she couldn’t see him anymore. 

But in the case of non parents, I think it’s more that she’s trying to understand what’s going on. When I pick her up and take her to see them leaving more clearly, she doesn’t seem to mind.

We’ve been making a point of saying “bye!” to her when we leave (her visual field), and then saying “hi!” when we come back. I think that works pretty well. I doubt she thinks of it as meaning very much, but saying “bye!” is something positive for her to focus on, so it seems to work from that angle.

(My sister-in-law taught her 9-month-old to wave goodbye to her toys when she’s done with them, and she said that it’s been helpful for keeping things positive.)

That said though, mostly I’m just keeping her as near to me as she wants to be. More on that below.

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Motivated Forgetting

May 6, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

One of the creepier phenomena I’ve encountered as a human is motivated forgetting.

And one of the more powerful moments of my life was the first time I noticed myself doing it. I was with my boyfriend at the time. I can’t remember whether we were having an argument in the moment or I was remembering an argument we’d had somewhat earlier, but I was recording video of myself.

As I sat there, rehearsing some thoughts about how right I was, I looked into the camera and thought, “What if all of my thoughts were being recorded?” And I realized that my current mental operating system would break down if I had records of what was going on in my head, because I was sometimes throwing out data that didn’t fit my identity.

I wish I could remember what it was that I remembered forgetting. I think it had to do with whether I had said something to my boyfriend at the time during an argument. In the recording, I looked at the camera and said, “I think I just realized that accepting reality is harder than I thought it was.”

Upon realizing that I’d been trying to forget something unflattering on purpose, I also felt very ashamed. But feeling ashamed upon realizing is an excellent way to encourage further dishonesty with myself. The answer is (almost?) always to reward the behavior you want more of. 

First, consider the possibility that you may engage in motivated forgetting. Not everyone does it, as far as I can tell, but it’s also pretty common.

Second, decide that, if you were doing it, you’d want to know! You can always still decide to lie, if that’s the issue. I don’t recommend lying, but I do think that lying to others is a bit better than lying to yourself. You’ll make the best possible decisions if you stop withholding information from yourself.

Third, be on the lookout, and then be very, very pleased without yourself if you ever catch yourself forgetting on purpose. Awareness is an extremely useful first step.

(One hack you can use if you’re trying to figure out if you’re being honest with yourself is slightly changing the questions you’re asking yourself. Instead of saying, “Did I do that thing?”, try “If I found out that there were a video tape of what happened, how would I feel about watching it? Would I be shocked if I found out that I did the thing?” Accessing your true anticipations may be more involved than consulting your verbal loop and believing the first thing it says, but it’s rarely actually difficult.)

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29 Weeks of Lydia

May 1, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

Lydia and I had a pretty happy week this week. The weather has been warm and beautiful, so we’ve gotten out to playgrounds multiple days, and that worked well enough that I want to make it a very regular habit, at least when it’s nice outside. I still haven’t been to the playgrounds closest to where we live, so that’s a goal for this week.

The progress in her physical skills is the easiest thing to notice a difference in, week to week, but she’s growing into a person in other ways too. I’m thinking that I’m going to phase out attending the new parents group at Rites of Passage that we’ve been going to for a few months now. She’s not such a baby anymore!

And so far, my prediction that I would enjoy her more and more as she got older has been proven true. Her mobility is cool, and not actually much more work for me yet.

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It Is More Vulnerable to Ask for What You Want

April 29, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

I was talking to someone one a while back about why it can be hard for people to ask what they want. After all, it’s obvious that you’re more likely to get what you want when you ask.

As far as I can tell, the answer is that it is actually much more vulnerable to ask, especially if you’re the sort of person who typically avoids asking. 

If you habitually repress your desires, there’s a good chance there are some things that’ve been desperately wanting for a very long time that feel very scarce. It’s possible that you sometimes get these things, but you find it hard to enjoy them even when you have them, since it seems as though you can never have them to your fill. And chances are, you wouldn’t want other people to know how much you want those things.

Letting someone see where you have an unmet need is vulnerable.

If you really show someone how much you care about having something, chances are good that you’ll have a strong emotional response whether you get it or not–perhaps an unexpected one.

I can think of a time when I pushed through my discomfort, asked for something I was terrified of not getting, and felt joy and relief even when the person I was requesting it of said no!

And I can think of times when people gave me what I wanted and I cried, finally feeling the weight of all the times I’d never asked.

If you’re not comfortable having a strong, authentic emotional reaction in front of the person, then it’ll be hard to ask for what you want, and rightly so.

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28 Weeks of Lydia

April 24, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

Lydia had her six-month doctor’s visit this week. Nothing too eventful there. We’re doing the normal vaccine schedule, and it’s been working really well to have her in the wrap for her shots. That way she’s right up next to me and she can nurse right afterwards.

Here are some stats:

The scale said 7.56 kg, which is 16.7 lbs.

She was measured at 27.5 in (though I never trust these measurements to be all that accurate).

That puts her just above the 50th percentile for weight, and closer to the 90th for height. We didn’t measure head size.

And I think Lydia is actually one of the smallest babies of the eight in our birth class! (And they’re pretty much all exclusively breastfed (plus solids in the case of the older ones) too.)

Overall mood this week has been good. We had one or two days where she was on the fussier end, but I think it had to do with interrupted naps. She seems happy these days.

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Conscious Judging, Mourning, and Self-Forgiveness

April 22, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

One day, maybe I’ll write a post about how “judgement” (like “belief”), is one of those words that is overloaded to the point where using it at all is likely to interfere with precise communication.

But today, I’ll just use the word “judgement” as best I can.

While I was working with someone the other day, it came to our attention thats he had a bunch of unresolved, quasi-specific judgements about herself.

When I say quasi-specific, I mean that they were somewhere between “I’m not good enough” and “I would have had a more fun evening if I’d remembered to download Game of Thrones a few hours earlier.”

Judgements like these can be quite suffering-inducing because (as usual) it’s easy to get stuck in a pattern of resisting them.

One solution is to take a step back and not only noticed the judgements but make space for them, hear them out, decide whether they’re true and how you’d like to change your behavior in the future. Once you’ve done that, you can mourn the past, forgive yourself, and move on.

I’ll give an example below, using a judgment that still somewhat lands for me, that “I’m lazy.”

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27 Weeks of Lydia

April 18, 2013 by · Leave a Comment

Six months plus one week!

I’m tired right now, but tiredness has not characterized my week overall. We were both pretty happy this week.

We’ve been doing solids for another whole week, so that still feels pretty new.

We also went to the zoo today, which was maybe the first kid activity I planned for Lydia. As expected, she didn’t appear to care much about the zoo activities, but it was fun for me, and she did actually enjoy the goat at the petting zoo when I held her down at its level.

I’m so glad I’ve been taking the time to write these summaries every week, because she really is so different! I know I forget a lot as it is, but I would forget much more if I didn’t keep these records.

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