Journey to a New Life

This is a continuation to my previous blog: Day 87: Forced Learning

Another dimension I have come across as a parent in relation to learning, is that of 'Let Babies be Babies'. Where on the one side you have people who are more inclined to 'force' their babies/children to learn; there's also the opposite attitude where people are more inclined to 'let babies be babies'.

On this extreme end, anything which has got anything to do with 'learning' is pushed aside: "Babies are meant to have fun and play, why bring in this tedious topic of 'learning'?" "They will do penty of learning when the time comes that they go to school, just let them be and just this time of just fun and play."
Fasinatingly enough, there's even a dimension that parents fear they will develop a 'smart baby/child' who will be judged by his peers and they'd prefer their child to be 'normal like the rest of them'.

In this case, there's a negative connotation to the word 'learning', and whatever one believes constitutes this learning. And because you yourself as a parent had a negative experience with learning, we rather want to push it away, avoid it and postpone it.
Thing is that babies and toddlers are learning all the time, whether we are conscious of it or not. Whenever they observe something, hear, smell, taste, touch something - babies are learning about themselves and reality around them. Learning is not limited to what happens inside a school or classroom, and how things are taught/learnt at school is not the only way one can learn something.
Just as forcing your child to learn will lead them to experience learning negatively, so will the opposite of dismissing, avoiding and postponing it as your own bias towards learning will be carried over to your child.

When Cesar is learning about words, their meanings and how to read them - he doesn't access the same idea many have of 'learning' as being a negativly laden concept. For him it is simply an extension of what he is already naturally doing: exploring his physical reality, how it relates to him and how he can engage and participate with it. Learning is natural to babies, and 'letting babies be babies' then naturally implies providing an environment conducive to learning, prickling their curiosity and stimulating their natural explorative disposition.

Unfortunately we have made learning quite an unpleasant experience through limiting it to school and their factory-like setup. But it is up to us to re-create and reinvent what constitutes learning and to pass this on to our children.

In this picture I took today, Cesar and I are playing on Maya's bed with mini flashcards. We've recently started playing with learning how to read and made our own flash cards. Maya made her own little set that Cesar can play with when we come visit her, much to Cesar's delight.

During my pregnancy, I tried to prepare myself the best as I could by reading up as much as I could on taking care of a baby/child and parenting and went to a pre-natal class to get some last questions answered. You’d think that after 9 months of reading that I’d be pretty well informed and confident to walking the actual practical process of taking care of a baby. Truth was that on the day we got released from the hospital and we were busy leaving the parking lot, I was thinking to myself: “Oh cr*p, can’t someone give me a manual on how to do this thing?”


Having an actual baby and going through the daily process, more questions came up. As I would nurse Cesar, I’d be reading up in more books, looking more things up on the internet. I wanted to be informed about every single point or question I came across. Because every time a point opened up that was new, I was faced with uncertainty – and that was not something I liked in relation to having a new born lol.

So from that perspective – finding all the information and making sure I was informed on all points so I knew what practical steps to take if ‘this’ or ‘that’ were to happen – was a supportive action.

But then, I found myself researching the same points over and over – and finding the same answers over and over – and found an anxiety that started generating and accumulating each time I participated in ‘let me just look this point up one more time’ or ‘maybe there’s something I’ve missed’. Because the evidence was clear: there was no new information coming up whatsoever; so there was no practical reason to continue looking, I already knew what I had to know.

So now within having reached a point of ‘knowing all there is to know’, I knew that the next step was to actually walk the practical process of applying the information, when the need for it would arise. Here I got scared because, I wanted to hold on to ‘being in preparation mode’ and still being busy gathering information as being in that process, I found a sense of safety knowing I do not yet have to trust myself, I can still pretend that I ‘don’t yet know’ and that I need more time to figure things out.

So when there was nothing left to figure out / look up and I got faced over and over with the same answers and information – this would each time re-enforce the self-belief that ‘I cannot trust myself’ in the sense of applying the information, and each time I would look things up again, I could feel myself being disempowered over and over.

So one night during one of our many nursing sessions, and noticing how totally unpleasant the process of looking things up and educating myself had become (which at that point wasn’t educational anymore but merely obsessive) – I put down my tablet which I would use to google things, turned it off and just breathed. Because I realised that what I was doing, was no longer practical but had become compulsive behaviour to excuse why I was putting off trusting myself, within knowing that I would be able to draw from my repertoire of knowledge I had accumulated, and actually put it to the test. Where as long as I was still ‘researching’ and something would happen, I could still ‘claim ignorance’.

So I just sat there nursing, breathing and letting go of all the fears and anxieties. After all, if a point would open up like some form of emergency, it was not going to help me to be in a state of anxiety and insecurity as I’ve seen in the past that this disables me within being able to clearly assess what is going on and what I exactly need to do, as I then within anxiety start to doubt myself and mix up information. So the best thing I could do was just to let go, trust myself and not let myself be tempted to look things up just ‘one more time’ as this would only turn into paranoia about me not being able to practically walk the reality of taking care of a baby.

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

In my previous blog I laid out how when investigating a sense of ‘duty’ within myself, how this whole can of worms opened up in terms of you as a mother/female carrying out the duty/mission of continuing the bloodline and having the responsibility to make sure that your offspring survives (or at least get to the point where it can have its own offspring). I ended the blog, with how I could see this point being tied in the Female’s Ego Design, where females have a strong tendency of ‘wanting to be right’. This is where I continue with this blog.


So – now you have a baby, a child – just like all the mothers before you and have a sense of duty to ‘continue the mission’. At the same time, a lot of people did not like the way they were brought up by their own parents, where there’s a strong feeling of ‘wanting to do it better’ with your child.

So, not only do you already carry this sense of duty from the perspective of those who came before you – now you also gave the duty to yourself to do it better, or at least not ‘worse’ than your parents.

So how does this now all come together in the design if the female ego? Well, having a child, raising a child is a huge responsibility. It’s huge on its own and it’s made even ‘huger’ when you drag in the whole ancestral baggage that you carry around unconsciously. And now you, as the mother being in most instances the primary caretaker/guide for the child – it all lays in ‘your hands’ in terms of how this child is going to grow up and succeed in life, and we all want ‘what’s best for our child’.

Though, what each one thinks to be ‘what’s best for your child’, differs from person to person, depending on variables such as personal history (eg. How my parents did things is definitely *not* what’s best for a child), environment, relationships with other people, economic status, etc.

So by the time you have a child, you’ve already pretty much made up your mind about life, what matters, what doesn’t matter, what things you value, your preferences and so on. From that context/idea you then derive what you think is best for your child, what you believe will give them the best outcome in this world.

Throughout your own life, you invested quite a bit of time in ‘inventing yourself’, in terms of your personality, who you are and who you want to be seen as in society. Then when you have a baby, you invest a lot of time and energy in making sure that you are bringing up your baby in line with your own values, believing they are ‘the right ones’.

So, what I have noticed here, is that when one mother points something out to another mother, there’s a tendency for conflict to spark, as both believe they are ‘doing the right thing’ and both think that ‘they are doing what’s best for their child’. And because the bond between a mother and a baby is so strong, where you carried the baby in your belly, where you nursed it and spent your every moment with it as it was completely helpless and dependent – that point of ‘you are doing something ‘wrong’ with your baby’ which translates into ‘you are not doing what’s best for your baby’ is a veeeerrrry sensitive one.

Because you just spend all this time and energy figuring yourself out in life, then you have this huge responsibility of raising a baby, then you try and raise that baby as best as you can within what you think is best – so that your child may succeed in life, and so that you are not seen as a failure against the backdrop of ‘those who came before you’ AND NOW YOU ARE TELLING ME THAT I AM DOING IT ALL WRONG AND HARMING MY BABY/CHILD??????????????

So instead of investigating one’s idea of onself, one’s values and perspective on life – it’s easier to just ‘want to be right’ and defend yourself at all cost – than considering the possibility that you may not have been acting in the best interest of your baby – because that is a very painful realisation/consideration to look at and face. Which is unfortunate, because what eventually plays out is the opposite, wherein ‘wanting to ensure the best for your baby’ and not wanting to look at the possibility that maybe you’re doing things in a way that are not really best, you’re creating the very window where things can actually go wrong. But because you don’t want to see/be faced with that point, it’s easier to just stubbornly go along with what you’ve always been doing, and sticking with your point of view/outlook on life and block out any feedback that may indicate otherwise. So that in your reality, in your mind : you are doing what’s best for your baby, you are doing what’s best for your future lineage, you’re doing what’s best for the future of humanity in general. And this is then also why females will go and ‘clump’ and ‘group’ together in their shared activities/points of view and participate in gossip and being nasty towards those that do not agree/do not walk their opinions/outlook on life – just to each time re-affirm and strengthen that point of ‘It’s okay, I am right, I am doing what is best, they are the one’s who are going to burn in hell for living their lives like this and teaching their children this way’.

So, this is what I found within myself being a major contributing factor to the ‘wanting to be right’ construct which is typical to females; where females from a symbolic/archetypical standpoint have that responsibility of ‘ensuring the well-being of those to come’, and where this is such a huge responsibility, and where I am sure everyone experiences a great deal of uncertainty, but where instead of acknowledging this uncertainty and working with it, and actually figuring out what’s best from what’s not – we just ‘pretend’ and ‘hope’ to know that we’re doing, and that this is the right thing, and then defend this point of view, whichever view it may be – at all cost.

In my previous blog I went over how I was allowing my relationship with my baby to be shaped through scoring his behaviour into categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as how I saw it fit in with developmental milestones for his age. In this blog I am continuing with this point, where I not only look at how I see this point affect myself but how I see this being linked in at a societal level as well.

I remember the one day I was doing some research in terms of babies’ development. I have a few books where I had gotten info from before, but since each source seemed to vary in its timeline and approach of developmental milestones, I took it on me to go through quite a bit of sources so I could get a wider picture and not only use one or two sources as my frame of reference. I watched some videos and in the one video the development of a typical baby was shown at X age, and alongside the development of an ‘atypical’ baby was shown.

When I saw how the atypical baby was moving and compared Cesar to him, I was happy that Cesar did not turn out to be a ‘atypical’ baby, because it was clear that the atypical baby was struggling and did not have an effective body to develop and grow effectively. I saw myself going into this point of satisfaction where I kind of went ‘Aaah, everything is okay – I can be relaxed now’ – and as I was allowing this experience to take over, there was a moment of silence within me – and then I asked myself: Wait – what is going on here?

Because what I saw in that moment, is that I could care less about this atypical baby that’s struggling it’s ass off to move himself in his reality and carry his development forward. In a way, it was almost as if there was a form of being pleased that this baby is struggling, where there is this odd logic existent where ‘because this other baby is struggling, my baby has a greater chance of being a winner’.

It’s like, we’ve become so accustomed to the idea that there are always those who lag behind, those who are normal and those who are always at the frontier in society. Whether it’s in growth/development, school, relationships and ultimately jobs/careers. So if someone else in your ‘peer group’ fall in the category if being part of the ‘losers’, then that’s already one less statistical chance of you being in that position.

So when you’re faced with a situation where someone else is disadvantaged, you’re happy because, at least it’s not you or – at least it’s not your baby. Who cares about this other person/kid who is struggling and where this might follow him/her his/her entire life? At least I/my baby’s part of the winners and he will make it in life.

So there’s no regard whatsoever for other people, other children, other forms of life. All that matter is you and your baby. So here I could see, how in the way I was participating in this point of developmental milestones, where I had allowed it to become emotionally and feeling charged – this was another form of Survivalism, where I was trying to gauge and measure ‘how good my baby’s chances of survival are in the world’ – and where an unspoken decision had already been made that I would look after ‘only my baby’ and that I care for ‘only my baby’ – as if there is some tacit rule that each one must just look after their own offspring and ‘may the best win’ type of thing.

And I mean, it was not as if I was consciously voicing thoughts of this nature within myself – it was just like an overall ‘feeling’ that was just scarcely noticeable which was just silently hovering around, like a slight mist present all over inside myself. And only once I started investigating my conscious fears, and then investigating the emotional charged, I really became aware of this presence which is kind of like the rules of the game you are playing, which you once upon a time had agreed upon but had forgotten about. Yet, you were still playing within those parameters as the rules has become normalized through acceptance and allowance.

To be continued

I was reading another article the other day in one of the baby / parenting magazines that we got. The article was about disciplining your child through teaching it self-discipline. I thought “Ok, let’s check this out”.

So then the article starts talking about how important it is to inform your child when your child is faced with particular decisions in life. With this they meant that you should always explain to your child what their choices consist of and explain the consequences of each one of those decisions. Like that, your child is able to make an informed decision and is empowered to take self-responsibility for the outflow of their actions. I was like “Oh my god, someone’s actually making sense in this magazine, let me continue reading”.
So now that they explained kind of the ‘background’ behind their ‘method’, they go on giving an example of how you should practically implement this point, where you as the parent explain the consequences of the choices your child makes. The event they are using to demonstrate their example is that of your child about to draw on the wall. So here it goes, this is how you can teach your child, common sense reasoning, self-responsibility and empower them – ready? :”If you draw on the wall” (=choice) –> “You will not get cake” (= consequence).

SERIOUSLY???

How is the existence and presence of a piece of cake – physically, intrinsically linked to the physical existence of a wall and the action of drawing on it – that makes it so that the moment you draw on the wall, you can be assured that there won’t be any cake around for you. How the hell does that work? How is that consequence? That’s not consequence, that’s you blackmailing your child and you don’t even have the guts to do it straight out – no, you do it in a way where the child will think that HE is responsible for setting into motion these events by drawing on the wall. That’s so absolutely mean!!!
I mean, explaining consequence to child in terms of the choices they make, should be explaining how if they do A, then B will happen as a direct consequence (and not one you’ve just conjured up to suit yourself), where this consequence is absolute in every way. Because obviously by the time your 20 and you draw on your wall and you put out a piece of cake on the table for yourself, and you draw on that wall and keep your eyes on the cake – you will see that it does not disappear or ‘go away’ in any way whatsoever. That’s because ‘there’s not going to be cake if you draw on the wall’ is not real consequence, it’s just your parents threatening you while upholding the illusion that you ‘have a choice’. Sure, VERY empowering.

And then we get surprised that our children to bad in school and have a hard time developing critical reasoning skills. Well obviously – I mean, if you teach them that ‘1 + 1 = banana’ (yes, that’s right ‘banana’, not even a NUMBER), how do you expect them to get stuff that is actually supposed to make sense? Did you really ‘inform’ your child when you said that ‘he will not get cake if he draws on the wall’? Did the child just learn anything about the consequences of drawing on a wall and what such decision entails within its implications? No! Because all your child knows, is that somehow, by some godly divine power that does not have to make sense – he will not get cake. He doesn’t get to learn for instance, that if you draw on a wall,that that drawing will stay on it , until you clean it up.  So you either have to be okay with the drawing being on the wall forever or you got to clean it up. Then of course you also have to consider the other people living in the house with that particular wall and if they are okay with the drawing staying on their forever, so you gotta check that as well before you decide to draw on the wall, unless you know you’re going to clean it up afterwards.

Consequence would be, where if you don’t feed your pet bunny and give him clean water, that his physical body is going to deteriorate as it cannot support itself and the bunny will die.  That is consequence, that is if A then B and there’s no way around it.

If you tell your child ‘no cake’ if you draw on the wall, you are in NO WAY informing your child or putting them in a ‘power position’. Your child has no freaking clue as to why he for instance should or shouldn’t draw on the wall, and he’s got no freaking clue as to how the cake magically disappears if he would draw on the wall. All you are “informing” your child about – is that it’s in the child’s best interest to ‘not do things my mommy and daddy don’t want me to do', because if I do, they will do something to me that I don’t want them to do’. But did he learn anything about drawing on walls? Nope – nothing.

So now obviously if you’re going to practice this little method over and over again, you get a child that has no common sense reasoning skills because he has been taught to accept absurd claims by his parents, and will thus be ineffective in physical reality because he has never been taught to only stick to principles that make sense like 1 + 1 = 2 and the laws of physics (which does not include cakes disappearing if you draw on a wall). On top of that, you get an obedient future citizen who will not question those in power as your mom and dad have clearly shown you that those in power positions do not have to make sense, all you gotta do is listen and do as is expected of you.

Here’s another good one, in terms of ‘how to grab your child’s attention’ when you want to explain him something: use big words. Use words, that sound big and intelligent and that they don’t understand: works every to get their attention!!!

What the hell, seriously? Play the big smarty ass adult who knows big words that you don’t? Do you know what you’re doing to your child? Do you understand that you’re trying to make them feel like dumb little shits that are inferior to you in every way just to ‘grab their attention’ and ‘make them listen’? Do you understand how this affects how they view themselves and all their future relationships in this world and how this will affect their information processing skills just because you think it’s okay to use BIG WORDS as a fear tactic – where they will forevermore feel inadequate and inferior towards words they don’t understand just because you were actually inadequate as a parent? Where in your inadequacy you resorted to manipulation as threats, black mailing your child and bullying them with big words to get them to behave how you want them to?

These type of articles should NOT be appearing in parenting magazines. This type of manipulative BS under the name of ‘good advice’ should simply be ILLEGAL as this is dangerous shit. I mean, you’re busy creating the future, busy creating the future generations of this world – and what they will know is what you teach them. And if you teach them deception, lies and abusive behaviour – then that is what you will get in return. No wonder that the world is in such a mess today – if after so many centuries of ‘evolution’ this is the parenting advice we come up with.

To get some real perspective, I suggest you rather invest in the Parenting: Perfecting the Human Race Series on EQAFE to get an understanding of how you can best assist and support yourself and your child to become the best possible version of themselves.