I’ve been debating about this post for about a week now. What I want to write about is not easy, and it involves my son. The last thing in the world I want to do is hurt him, and someday when he’s older, for some random reason, maybe he will read this. If he does, I hope he knows that there is not a cell in my body that doesn’t love him, not a part of my soul that isn’t knit together with his. It’s just that life isn’t exactly what we always expect, and that’s when it’s time to truly step up. I hope I’ve stepped up for him.
Before you have a baby you have your idea of your baby. You put in your order. First off, they might sleep (ha). They will coo at you and smile. You will go to classes and have fun. You will make a million wonderful mama friends. Then your baby arrives and you realize that there’s one thing you kind of left out of your fantasy: the actual baby. Maybe that baby won’t really want to sleep. Maybe she’ll cry all of the time instead of cooing happily. The actual baby will have actual opinions, actual wants and needs, and those might, most likely won’t, be the same as yours.
It can be kind of a shock.
It didn’t take long for us to figure out that Finn was not going to come lightly into this world. He arrived with is eyes wide open, nursed with his eyes wide open and it was only a matter of time before the world simply became too much for him. So instead of cooing and mama friends and classes, we became the parents who kept leaving. We left restaurants. We left play dates. We left family gatherings. We left classes. We left story time. All because our son was incredibly overstimulated and overwhelmed. And this didn’t just happen for a few months, it happened for years. There were moments where I wanted to scream:
THIS IS NOT THE BABY I ORDERED.
A couple days ago we carried our four and a half year old son out of Target as he screamed, his face red and wet with tears. I wrapped my arms around his thin back and my heart ached for all the pain that he was unloading onto us. He was in the grips of something so big that nothing could tear him away from his sadness, not even my embrace that so wanted to take all this away.
This is my son.
He’s intense in most everything he does, responding in big ways, living on the edge of normal at all times. Life with him is not what you might expect. It’s full of changes, surprises. He’s four and a half and there we were, right back where we we’ve been over and over, with everything grinding to a halt as we stop and deal with Finn. Again. Leaving. Again. And the feelings were there again: anger, disappointment, resentment, exhaustion.
…this is not the baby I ordered…
Parenting Finn has forced me to face my own disappointment. He is an unstoppable force in the world, and his intensity is not lost on his parents. He is not the average happy kid. His feelings are big: his joy is huge, his sadness fills his entire body. These are wonderful things but they are also things that bring incredible challenges. I could collapse under disappointment and resentment, I could disengage, pull away, and sometimes I want to. But parenting Finn has made me step up.
It doesn’t matter that this is not the baby I ordered. My disappointment is something I can live with, because it’s nothing compared to my love. This is my baby, our baby. Our first baby. We were brought into this world to parent this child and if there is one thing Megan and I are, it’s big enough, strong enough, solid enough to be the parent our children need us to be so we don’t force them to be the children we want them to be. From the moment he came out of my belly I have known this child and I will know him the rest of his life. Even if we never go to another story time. Even if I have to carry him out of Target a million times. Even if it exhausts me, I will step up over and over. I honor my disappointment, I mourn all those missed opportunities, but I still step up. Because as parents that’s just what we do.
Even if it hurts sometimes.
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