What do you do?
What do you do when it’s 12:01 in the morning. You want to sleep.
In fact…you’re desperate for sleep.
Yet…there’s something in the way.
That nagging…loud and getting louder and louder voice…telling you to stop. To give up.
To go away.
It’s tomorrow now. Just barely. Maybe we still consider it to be “today” since we haven’t quite slept yet. But the calendar considers it to be tomorrow.
The night was going well. As well as it could have been expected to, anyway.
Then, I made a mistake. An extremely unknowing one. Sharing videos and cute memories of my now 5 year old when he was 18 months old….the same age as my now 17 month old is about to be in a few days.
It didn’t go well.
Long story short, he boldly and loudly (in his quiet, passive voice) blamed me for the physical developmental delays ALL of my children face because of a GENETIC DISORDER…..not a parenting disorder. (Even though it did come from me…I guess therefore very technically speaking making it a literal parenting disorder.)
There’s nothing in the world you could do that would hurt me more than low key, obviously, subtly or directly accusing ME of being the difference between my children making progress vs being as delayed as they are in reality.
It’s 12:01am.
I want to die.
And I could.
I have everything I need.
It isn’t what I want.
Not at all.
What I want is support. Love. Affirmation. Encouragement.
My husbands example, on this fucked up evening, was that “if we put food in a bag…and hung it up…eventually, he’d just stand up and eat it.”
I encouraged him to consider the following.
“If you put food in a bag, and hang it up…..he’s fucking hungry. He wants the damn food. He’s trying SO hard to reach it. He can’t. He’s hungry, he wants the food. But his muscles don’t work the same way yours do. So he tries. And tried again. Maybe 3 times. And he fails. Because he can’t do it. His muscles work differently than yours do.
He’s frustrated now. So he throws himself on the ground. Crying. Hitting you. He’s hungry. You hung the food up, and a typical kid would’ve learned to walk and reach it.”
But he couldn’t.
Our kids are not typical. And he couldn’t reach it. Even if I really, really wanted him to.
It isn’t my fault.
It’s 12:01 in the morning…..
And it isn’t. My. Fault.