Fear, Loathing, and Teething

11:20 AM Posted by Knox McCoy




So Rowe is teething...Not just teething though. It's more like TEETHING.

Something I've realized over the last year is that for all their linguistic limitations, babies are particularly adept at expressing their emotions. Perhaps they don't meet our expectations of speech clarity, but they do put forth an unrelenting effort to convey their needs. It's as though they realize their inefficient speech and to compensate, they escalate the volume and intensity of their protestations.

This week has been full of said protestations. Loud, angsty, temple-throbbing protestations.

I don't begrudge him this because I suppose that if I had shards of teeth slowly descending through my gums that I probably would be similarly unpleasant.

Which is where we find our problem.

Essentially, this process provokes frustration and stress. Ingredients like a shrieking child, profoundly poopy diapers, poor appetites, and late night rampages are the fundamental elements of stress.

In and of themselves, these are not overly problematic things. But when intermingled, they work to undo our sanity. Justified as the descent into sanity might be, we still feel guilty.

The guilty feelings are so potent because we know that our ideal reactions would be those of grace, sensitivity, and calm in the frenzied face of his screaming mouth and swatting hands from 2am - 4am nightly. But those ideal reactions are generated from equally ideal behavior from Rowe.

Realistically, I'd like to say that our temperament is unconditional and not dependent on his interactions with us. It should be anyways. Maybe it will be one day.

But for now, under the influence of sleep deprivation, that notion is naive and dangerous, particularly if said by someone without kids.

So how do we reconcile how we feel versus how we should feel?

I don't know. Endurance I guess?

Someone smarter than me once said that stress and money don't make you a different person. They just make you more of who you actually are.

While we don't have money, we do have a surplus of stress and what we're finding out is that we'll never be able to pull off the idealized concept of the perfect parents.

But who can? There's this notion that you have to have everything figured out to be a good parent. You don't. You just have to be consistent, loving and resilient. Mistakes will be made, but love is always an effective elixir.

Besides, we get like four years before they remember anything right? Right??

Comments