On parenting, sovereignty, and the constant push-pull (pt. 1)
Parenting is a battle to defend your boundaries - sometimes from your own independence.
It happens quite often that my daughter, who’s 4 and a half years old as of this writing, will say “Look at this, Daddy!” while I’m doing dishes with my back to her. Although I’m technically engaged in just one task, I’m usually doing my best attempt at multi-tasking, because I’m almost always washing dishes with my mind on the sequence of the half-dozen other things I need to take care of to make sure her needs are in the moment.
Invariably, I feel like I’m behind the cart, and it doesn’t take long before I feel completely overwhelmed. At any given point, I feel bombarded, not just by her requests for my attention or help, but by the items on my own internal check-off list.
I used to respond with a panicked / exasperated "I can only do one thing at a time!" or “I can only do so much!” or “I can’t do two things at once!”
These days, though, more often than not I just say “I’ll take a look when I get a chance, but right now I’ve got my hands full.”
I think it’s important — and ultimately for my daughter’s own good — that I draw a line and send the message that, ‘Hey, I’m here for you, but I’m not always available right this second.’
At my (admittedly, not always patient) encouragement, she’s gotten way better about stopping to consider whether it’s a good time to approach me, but I want to try to get across that I share in her excitement too. After all, I don’t want to punish her or set her up to feel rejected or snapped-at for being excited.
All of which is to say that I don’t think it’s beneficial to view myself as a kind of emotional butler always willing to go bounding off at her beck and call. But I also think it no longer helps to view myself as a wholly independent being that needs to keep fighting her off. It would be most helpful, I think, to view myself as a sovereign but inter-dependent entity that has to work to establish and re-establish that sovereignty.
Of course, this is easier said than done, but I do think I’m actually getting there in an organic, if gradual and clumsy, way.
Actually, we’re getting there: even when my daughter momentarily forgets to check and see whether I’m tied up, she’ll either catch herself or, if I need to nudge her by reminding her that I’m busy, she’ll go “Oh yeah, that’s right.”
At a certain point she started asking me, "Could you do two things at once if you had eight arms?"
My half-joking answer: "No, because I would still only have one brain."
What's interesting is that I can actually multitask — and rather well in certain domains — but when I'm asked to engage emotionally while doing something else, I feel like I'm being thrown off a building and asked to sprout wings and fly.
I mean, I’m often capable of switching in an instant from a really heightened state of agitation, anger, or distress to the more formal, neutral-sounding outer presentation I need to have while conducting an interview. I can even soldier through an interview while having an anxiety attack. But those require the ability to switch off emotionally and concentrate on a task as a kind of static pursuit. When my daughter asks me a question, I’m being asked to switch on.
Interviewing also requires a tremendous amount of improvisation and being able to think, react, and speak on the fly — but I get to strategize a gameplan for those interactions as much as NFL football coaches prepare for game day. I’m also speaking to another adult with a fully formed vocabulary. There’s no language barrier.
Having to come up with answers to questions about, say, how the monstrous villain in the film Coraline was able to survive 60 years between her child victims can trigger instant panic. I’ve noticed that any request from my daughter, no matter how trivial, is still charged with an instinctive heightening of stress, as if the request reverberates in my nervous system as a blaring announcement: “DING DING DING DING DING, YOUR BABY NEEDS SOMETHING!” Ask me to use my imagination on top of that and to translate my answers quickly in a way that a 4-year old will understand them and I get instantly flustered and discombobulated.
I hadn't anticipated that parenting would be a battle where you have to reassert your boundaries constantly with this little person who would push past them all the time if left to their own devices. But it's also more complicated than that. Because, at the same time you’re fighting that battle, you've got aspects of yourself that have been similarly compromising your boundaries for way, way longer than your little person has even been in the picture. So you've got to assert your boundaries there as well, because if you don't, then you'll be pulled away from being as present for your child as you need to be.
If you stop and think about it, you came into parenting as a self-sabotaging person in some way, shape or form. So now, with a child in the picture, you’re fighting a two-front battle. Which means that, during any interaction with your child, you have to manage a negotiation between a few different loud voices — one of those voices is the kid’s, but the other voices belong to various needs within you. Oftentimes, those internal needs aren’t merely in disharmony with whatever the child is asking for, but they clash with your own agenda — and each other — as well. Parenting, in a sense, is the act of learning to be the calm, steady, steadying voice in the room.
I met a pair of parents at the playground recently and got to chatting with the dad. He talked about how freeing it was for him to just surrender to the fact that, as a parent, there’s just no choice but to do what needs to be done. He talked to me about how, when he was in his 20s and 30s, he viewed his own independence as sacrosanct. Letting that go, for him, came with some sadness and shock, but it also ushered-in a profound sense of reward.
“My life,” he told me, “will never be just my own again.” He spoke about it as if he’d been awarded a gift that he hadn’t known existed. He said that it’s only now that he understands what it feels like to be part of the cycle of life.
I agree with him. But be that as it may, the messy push-pull persists — day by day, moment by moment…
Whenever I try to exercise or do yoga in my daughter’s presence, for example, she always wants to participate. It’s adorable, but it means that I have to slow down and can't really get into the rhythm that's so essential for exercise or yoga to be effective. This is actually a battle that I don't fight because it's more important for me to keep her happy and engaged in these instances.
Even my own laughter, it seems, no longer belongs to me. Whenever I laugh out loud, it’s almost certainly followed by a request to explain why I’m laughing, which takes me out of the moment and puts me into an analytical state where I have to explain something spontaneous. I can’t stand it, actually, and I feel resentful and even invaded.
The best I can do, to be honest, is one of three things: snap at her in exasperation, capitulate and explain (an attempt at being compassionate that leaves me with a residual irritation), or just try to explain, as gently as I can, that I understand her curiosity but that I can’t explain every reaction I have in real time. The third option, when it goes well, spares her but it also spares me too — from annoyance and from the guilt of having hurt her feelings.
Perhaps, then, true sovereignty requires that we negotiate with — or even that we fend-off — our own independence. Ya still gotta draw a line and stand your ground sometimes, but at other times you’re way better off re-thinking a concept of your own personhood that no longer applies (at least not in the same way it once did). When tethered, sometimes it’s best to go with it. Like letting go and screaming into the motion just at the moment the rollercoaster you’re strapped into plunges downwards. When you fight it, as they say, it only makes it worse.
<3 SRK