Journey to a New Life

I was asked a question by someone as to how come some parents can be blatantly selfish in their behavior towards their child(ren). Where, to observers, this type of behavior is unacceptable – but where the parents themselves will act out their selfishness within a sense of entitlement and thus in essence not seeing what they're doing or seeing "what's wrong" with their behavior.

So I had a look inside myself as to where and how I could see such a pattern would emerge and develop, in terms of what I have experienced myself and walked through myself with Cesar so far.

And what I saw, was that it really goes all the way back to the beginning. And what becomes clear from the beginning is that: parenting is not easy.

All your life, your life has been about you. What you want to do, what you want to do with your life, your friends, your family, your job, your hobbies. Then – a baby is on its way.
You think you can conceptualize and ‘imagine’ what it would be like to have a baby – but the truth is = you don’t. Even when you read others’ stories, written in detail about birth, babies, parenting – in the end they’re just words and you don’t really grasp the reality of it – until you’re in it.

I suppose in a way, pregnancy does prepare you a little bit for what is to come. All these things start happening to your body, you get put into the backseat and your whole body becomes about ‘the baby’ – where to a certain extent, ‘your body is not your own’. But you know, you can still do a lot of things and pretty much live your life ‘as usual’.

Then, the baby comes – and everything changes. Every minute, every second, every breath you take is in service of your baby. Your baby is completely helpless and completely dependent on you. You are quite frankly put: its slave (unless family/friends are there to help out big time or you’ve hired someone to assist). It’s feeding, changing, clothing and feeding again round the clock. You sleep, when the baby sleeps (or at least you try). You are sleep deprived, your body hurts, you look like a mess (and very possibly smell like one too) and it seems to go on for what seems like forever. That’s how the first 3 months are registered in my brain.

So, especially in the first few months, being a mother, being a parent does a big number on you.
I mean, I am pretty lucky in terms of the environment and support that I have available with Cesar. I’d say that I pretty much live in the ‘optimum environment’ to bring up a child. And so – even with physically everything being in place, it’s still hard, it’s still an immense job.
I have no idea how I would cope if my situation would have been any different and I have the greatest respect for all women out there who are doing their best to raise their child(ren) when their environment is not one that promotes peace of mind.

So you have your baby, you’re busy all the time, you’re trying to do your best and sometimes that seems to even be not enough. Your old life is GONE. Byebye seeing friends, family, work, hobbies – it’s just you and your baby now (at least initially). Having a baby probably looked and sounded like a fun thing, blissful and all joy – but ends up being quite the opposite as you’re drained tending to your baby’s every need. If you’d imagine how you would want a relationship to be between two beings – this is not how you’d want things to be, as it’s in essence a ‘master-slave’ relationship. Now, I don’t mean to blame or shame the baby for being demanding or needy. And I don’t mean to create any type of moral issue within describing and comparing a baby-mother relationship to one of a master-slave relationship. It’s simply that by design – they are the same. It’s not good, it’s not bad – it’s just what it is.

This point, if you look at the design of babies and their 100% dependency relationship towards the mother is what one could call ‘unfair’. Meaning, you have two beings, and the one is living every moment of its life in function of the other.

I’m pretty sure that if you had a relationship with another adult in this line you’d pretty much break ties as soon as possible, because it’s no way to live.

And it’s this dynamic – being ‘unfair’ by design – which is your introduction to your relationship with your child - which forms the baseline, the nice fertile soil, from which many mind patterns and resonant designs can emerge from… if you let it.


To be continued

One of the first points I faced with Cesar that I knew I had to deal with – was reacting to him crying.
In the beginning he didn’t cry much – but the reactions inside myself were obvious, and I knew that this was just going to be the beginning. Because when a baby cries and you react, every second that you hear the baby cry – the reaction just compounds and compounds and compounds – where you either pop to release the energy of the reaction, or where you suppress it to let it come out in other ways later.

I experienced both, where at some point all the crying was getting to me that I just cried with him lol. I first just got angry because I didn’t know what to do and then just felt powerless/helpless at which point I just cried it all out. This was when he cried really intensely for a long time.

Then I remember that he had some short cries, but frequently throughout the day/night. It didn’t hit as ‘hard’ because of the short duration, but it was as if with each cry I was getting ‘buzzed’ – but since it was so short, I didn’t think much of it and “let it go”. Then after a while of on and off crying – I found myself thinking ‘I am not going to check up on you now, I am tired of this’ when he would cry again. And I mean, it was weird because I was finding myself in this weird icky, mean mood when I was thinking this and deciding to just leave him instead of going to him. And then when I check where this was coming from, it was basically from a sense of ‘wanting payback’ like ‘you know what you did to me, now you take that’. And then I asked myself: Seriously? You want this little baby ‘to pay’ for what ‘he did to me’? I mean he didn’t do anything really. He’s uncomfortable – he’s expressing his discomfort in the only way he knows: crying. I am the one reacting to the crying, I am the one generating the experience of negativity in relation to the crying, I am the one creating the sensation that ‘I am tired of this’. He’s not doing anything ‘to me’ – this is just freaking unacceptable. And then I cried, but that was more because of the shame of the monster I had just allowed myself to become than reacting to his cries.

So here I saw how easy it would be to react to a baby crying, where you just suppress what you experience and then later do little mean things to your baby ‘to get back at him’ without you really knowing why you’re doing it. And with ‘mean things’ – I am referring to quite a broad spectrum of ‘meanness’ because for instance not being very considerate when changing his diaper or when you are changing his clothes where you are kind of rushing it to just ‘get it done’ could be one of those little points that are ‘seemingly innocent’ – but where if you trace back the internal steps behind that action, it’s actually coming from a point of payback.

So several nights in a row I applied Self Forgiveness on my reactions. I started with the immediate reactions as the experience that would run through my solar plexus as a form of anxiety and then went into memories of myself where I found myself in situations where crying was present, either me crying or someone else and how other people had responded to this which formed the basis of my ‘opinion’/relationship towards crying and how I would respond/react to it later in life.

The main memory the stood out for me was a memory of me crying on the street next to my mother. She told me to ‘stop it’ and that ‘look, everyone’s watching you!!’. I remember looking around and no-one was really watching me / interested in what was going on with us. What ‘struck’ me the most – quite literally – was my mother’s panic. It was like electric sparks of fear and anxiety within a general sense of ‘not knowing what to do’ that was flickering off of her unto me– and this was now the exact same experience I found myself having when Cesar would cry – and generally the thought pattern that was paired with it was ‘what will other people think of me and him when he’s crying’ and ‘I don’t know what to do’. So I could see how I had effectively internalized that memory, that experience with my mother and used it form an energetic relationship to the point of crying and had become my mother in that aspect.

It’s quite interesting how we find ourselves in these moments, experiencing ourselves a particular way and then believe that ‘this experience is me’, ‘this experience is genuine’ – and not at all question where this experience comes from, but just accept it as ‘this is me’. While all the while, you’re just playing out an experience you picked up somewhere long time ago, where in a single moment you established a link, a connection – without even being aware of it, and then filed it away for future use. And then when the file as the memory and the connection that was established gets used in a ‘suitable setting’ – it’s as if it’s ‘a brand new experience’ that just ‘came out of nowhere’.

Anyway - I would say that the most important point to remember and remind yourself of when you find that you are reacting – that it is you reacting. The baby is not doing anything to you, he’s just communicating with you in the only way he knows: crying. Sure, it’s not pleasant that the baby is crying, and really the person for whom it’s most unpleasant is the baby itself – otherwise he wouldn’t be crying – but by reacting to the baby crying you are only turning an unfortunate situation into something really unpleasant, by your own doing.

And I mean, crying doesn’t have to be ‘a bad thing’ or something that ‘must be avoided at all cost’ or ‘must be remediated ’. Crying can just be a point of physical expression, a nice way to just ‘let it all out’ and way of releasing physical pressure/strain.

If you’re always going to react within a point of negativity towards your baby crying, the baby’s soon going to figure out that crying is ‘disliked’ no matter why you cry, which later in life can become a point of suppression where you’ve now incorporated crying into your morality system and not allow yourself to go there because ‘it’s bad’/’wrong’.

So the simplest and best way to go about it, for your baby and yourself – is to take responsibility for your experience, get a grip on it and direct yourself in those moments that you are reacting to your baby. Just within practicing this one point over and over, each time as your baby cries – you are showing your baby that you are able to change from mind reaction to self-direction here – so that when it does happen that your baby cries out of a point of reaction – now or later when he/she’s older -- you are already showing and teaching him by example that ‘it doesn’t have to be this way’ and that self is actually able to direct oneself in such situations to a point of stability and hereness. But unless you yourself practice this movement of change and direct yourself out of the mind, your baby/child has no reason to stop crying if the crying is coming from a point of reaction, and things will just escalate as your reactions will feed the baby’s reaction and vice versa.

At the same time I would also suggest to be careful and attentive to who you are and how you move yourself in moments where you hear that your baby starts crying, where it is easy to go into an 'alert'-reaction from which you then rush yourself to the baby to quickly pick him up and tend to him. Here if you allow yourself to go into this response-pattern, the baby learns that crying =  parent comes to me quickly -- which can then be integrated as a manipulation technique later on. So instead of suddenly rushing and moving faster, to just take note of the baby crying and move to the baby at the same pace you were already doing things/walking your day, being consistent, stable within yourself -- so that the baby learns that crying does not trigger any particular energetic response pattern in you which gets you to go into 'acceleration' to give the baby attention.

So there is both a negative and positive reaction pattern to be aware of, where you can either respond negatively to your baby where you don't want him to cry, or where you can respond positively by quickly wanting to show your baby some love -- where either of these can have repercussions in how the baby develops and what kind of relationship the baby creates around the point of crying.

The interview below gives some cool insights and perspectives one may not have considered in terms of why babies cry, and is definitely a must if you have a baby yourself or find yourself in the presence of one.

Crying Babies - Perfecting the Human Race - Parenting - Part 35

Why do we tend to react to the sound of babies’ cries? Why was the sound of babies’ cries not pre-programmed in the Mind and how does this contribute to us reacting to their cries? How are memories involved with contributing to us reacting to babies’ cries? How can we assist and support ourselves to remain stable and not react to babies’ cries?