Journey to a New Life

I was asked a question in relation to my previous blog, specifically in relation to this part:

“Children are not supposed to be possessions, they are gifts. They are gifts with an immense amount of responsibility attached to them.”

The question was: How does a child ‘being a gift’ and ‘being a parents’ creation’ fit together?

These two points are seemingly at odds with each other; because if a child is a given then the role as parent is limited, but if the child is a creation then the role of the parent is grand.

Yet, these two points need not be at odds with each other, when they refer to different dimensions/aspects of what is involved in caring and raising a child.

So let’s expand on each dimension in isolation first, and then bring them together:

A Child is a Gift

In my previous blog I wrote:

“The child is a person on his own. He or she is a life-form, which came through you, but is not owned by you. Every child has his or her own unique expression, and that expression will differ from your own and other members of the family. Your child as a life-form happened to have come through within your family-setting, but could have sprouted up anywhere else just the same.”

Within having a child, you are the receiver of life, the receiver of life in the form of a child / another human being. The life that is here as your child is not something you created, this life/life-force was already here – but is now taking on a different form. So when you are pregnant and have a child, yes your body creates another body and bring together and creates from itself all the substances/material to make another individual body possible, as the form in which this life will manifest itself. But even here, ‘you’ as that part of yourself that you are aware of; is not involved in its creation – your body did all the work and ‘you’ as that of yourself which you are aware of was simply a bystander in the whole process and did not contribute anything (for more on this, see Day 26: How are Babies Created?).

So within that, your child as life is a ‘gift’ given to you, a piece of life being shared with you for a moment (in the scope of the enternity of life) , for you to have the opportunity be a custodian of another form of life other than yourself. But your child as life is part of the totality of life that is here, it was not 'created' by you.

A Child is a Creation

A child is not only life, it is also a person. Part of being a person, is having been born with a clean slate (if we leave out the unconscious and DNA programming) that is ready to be written on, ready to be instructed. Through the inputs parents provide to their children, an equal and one output is created as the character of the child. This input consists of in-form-ation; which forms and shapes the child. From that perspective, the child is a creation – because its personhood is dependent on what instruction it receives from its environment. And this personhood, is an intrinsic part of being a human being, and will determine the child's relationship with and towards life, and thus towards him/herself.


So when we bring the two points together, we see that a child is a gift in the child being life – and the child is a creation in being a form – and so your child is a = life-form.

The two points do not need to exclude one another as they refer to two different dimensions/aspects of a singular manifestation.

In my previous blog I explained how a parent’s responsibility starts with self first.

This seems paradoxical, how can my responsibility towards my child start with a responsibility towards myself?

I came across a piece of Osho writing which I find pertinent to this point:

“Nobody has been exploited so much as children -- neither the proletariat nor women, nobody has been exploited so much and so deeply and so destructively as the innocent children. Because they are helpless and dependent they have to learn whatsoever you teach them. They have to imbibe all the falsehoods that you go on forcing upon them. It is a question of survival for them -- they cannot survive without you. It is a question of life and death! They have to be Christians, Hindus, they have to be Mohammedans, they have to be Jainas, they have to be Buddhists, they have to be communists. Whatsoever you are interested in putting into their minds, you go on putting it in. Instead of making them more alert, more aware, more alive, more reflective, instead of making them more mirrorlike, pure, you make them full of ideas...layers and layers of dust. And then it becomes impossible for them to see that which is. They start seeing that which is not and they stop seeing that which is.“

We cannot know, see or assess what is best for a child, if we are coming from a box of ideas. These ideas come from memories of our life, based on experiences we’ve collected. When we want to direct or guide a child, we can only do so from within the limited bounds of the box – as if the ideas in the box are the only options available, and whether they are actually best or not for the child becomes irrelevant – what is relevant is that the ideas and opinions we’ve gathered through life are put to good use.

This is obviously not the best way to go about raising a child.


Why?

Here we come to the dimension of responsibility towards your child that is not directly related to you and where it comes to being all about the child. The child is a person on his own. He or she is a life-form, which came through you, but is not owned by you. Every child has his or her own unique expression, and that expression will differ from your own and other members of the family. Your child as a life-form happened to have come through within your family-setting, but could have sprouted up anywhere else just the same. There should be no entitlement involved in raising children; where you believe you have the right to raise your child ‘this and that way’ because ‘he/she is MY child and I can do with MY children whatever I want’. Children are not supposed to be possessions, they are gifts. They are gifts with an immense amount of responsibility attached to them. Because here we have a life-form, that like Osho says – is completely helpless and dependent – and here we have you, the parent, as an able-bodied individual – that can stand in as a point of support where the child cannot for itself. And everything you do, everything you say will impact the child. Better still, the child counts on it that you know what you’re doing, and that you’re looking after its best interest. It gives you its trust completely.

Most of us have our own experiences with our parents where we are less than happy with the way they treated us, with ways in which they imposed their ideas, their way of doing things, their opinions and their values. Some we rejected forcefully, others we are not even aware we are living. We’ve all seen and realised the extent to which our own parents influenced us and influenced our life’s path. Some we are grateful for, others we’d like to erase from our minds.

So: Who Am I in relationship to my Child? – is that of Self-Support to ensure that one is working on breaking down the walls of self-limitation to open up the way to self’s utmost potential.
Who Is My Child in relationship to Me? – is that of a life-form here to express itself, to develop itself and grow into its utmost potential.

Which then brings us back to the role of the Parent, where Who I Am in relationship to my Child is that of support, direction and guidance – as self has walked and is busy walking the path to utmost potential and is aware of the stumbling blocks, the temptations, the falls, the consequences and what it takes to correct ones misalignments.

Within this, an interesting thing takes place, because as you commit yourself to the development of another to its utmost potential, new dimensions and aspects of yourself and your own self-expression open, where the limits of your potential will shift in the most surprising moments and ways.

So realising that having and raising a child within this principle, the principle of Life, is a task of utmost responsibility – it is best to develop and work on one’s own potential as much as one is able to before taking on this task; as it will make it easier to develop your child’s potential rather than its limitation.

Currently when we look at family and having children, we go by sheer ‘feeling’ to decide when we want to have children. We get a feeling that we want a baby, we get oozie at the idea of having a family, pictures and imaginations start popping in our heads, they seem so nice – and then one day you say the words: I want to have a baby! If you’re lucky, the adults looking at starting a family will first consider their financial stability before entertaining the reality of having a family – but many will allow the feeling and desire for a family/baby to overpower common sense practicality and bring into this world a child that is necessarily compromised.

Raising a child being the responsibility of holding Life in your hand, to grow it, to develop op it without rigidly moulding it, without breaking it – is a massive task in itself. To lay this responsibility unto yourself whilst not being in a financially stable position makes it that much more massive, if not impossible. It is easy to get carried away by feelings, pictures and imaginations of what it would be like to have a child. But realise that there, you are looking at your own ambitions, your own interest of how you want things to be – and are not actually taking into consideration the life of the future child, who will suffer the consequences.

I really want to stress this point because, parenting is the most important job in the world and it’s an all-or-nothing situation. Once you are a parent, that’s is: no take backs – and it’s a responsibility you will have to live with for the rest of your life. It can be fun and rewarding and it can also send you straight down to hell – if you have the choice, prepare yourself in the best way you can to make sure that you are up to the task.

So really, a parent’s responsibility towards the child doesn’t start with self, but starts with self before there is even an actual child.

To be continued

Parenting, children, family – why do we do it? What is the point?

This is a question I’ve walked – though not per se explicitly – within my Motherhood Paranoia blog series.
Through walking, investigating and examining my own mind-set within the context of being a parent/mother – the starting point that currently prevails in our world is: survival. Where, each one of us basically thinks that ‘we know best’ and within this belief, think we are entitled to ensure the continued existence of this ‘know-how’ by passing it on to our children who will in turn pass it on to theirs. To what point? This is not really clear – since if we keep going down the road we are heading, we are on to road to global annihilation. So while the final destination’s not really clear, there’s a clear sense in each one of us that ‘we must just keep on going’ – maybe just to ensure that someone of our lineage would be present at the end of the race as the end of our race.

But – that’s not really a worthwhile scheme to invest your time and energy in, but that’s just my perspective.

So, what is?

Well, if I look at the type of world I would like to live in, the type of world I wished I would have grown up in – it is one of exploring and testing out the limits of my potential; in other words, pursuing and realising my utmost potential – being and living the best possible version of myself that I can be.

And this is exactly what Parenting should be about.

One little problem though, is that our world hasn’t been set up to allow us to explore and realise our utmost potential. So even though we would like this for our children, the reality of the situation is that within our own limitation – our ‘guiding hand’ is more likely to control them and condition them to grow within the bounds of our own limitations, rather than our hand being a guiding force for the child to explore its own self-expression and utmost potential. Whether we like it or not, who we are and how we live impacts our children.
We all want things to be ‘better for our children’, compared to ‘how things were for us’ – but the truth of the matter is that we can’t just ‘want’ things to be different; we have to actually be and live differently, to manifest the opportunity for our children to live things differently. Often, people want things to be different for their children, and will spend a lot of time, money and energy in ‘getting the best’ for their children; but will do so within already having given up on themselves. Where “it’s already too late for me, but my child may still have a chance!” Yet, within that very act of self-defeat – you are sending the exact opposite message to your child. Not one of utmost potential, but one of ‘settling’ and ‘accepting that you are all that you can be’.

If you believe you can fix yourself through having a child, or believe a child will make things better for you – think again; because everything you are unhappy about with yourself, everything that bothers you about yourself/your life that you do not direct or bring to correction – will only blow up in your face a hundred times over – screaming for attention.

The bottom-line is – that parenting starts with the parent first. Whatever you want for your child, you have to live first. This adds a whole new dimension to parenting, and this a dimension of utmost responsibility. Your responsibility towards your child, starts with your responsibility towards yourself first. Unless you are actively engaged in fostering and developing your own utmost potential, there is only limitation ahead in the child’s future.

To be continued…

In this blog I want to share a little ‘method’ I’ve been applying with Cesar which has been working out nicely.

I have to move around a lot during the day, going from room to room, going to different place – and everywhere I go: Cesar comes with me. Whenever we are in a space, Cesar will find something that he wants to explore or play with. When I am done with whatever I had to do in a particular space and have to move on to the next point – Cesar is usually ‘not done’ in that he is still busy exploring or playing with something.

At first, I would see that he is obviously enjoying himself or being intrigued by whatever new object he got his hands on – but within having to go, and only considering my schedule and ‘what I need to do next’; I would pick him up and remove him from what he was busy with or place back what he took and then pick him up – where he very often would let out a shriek of discontent; but where I figured that ‘he needs to just get over this’ as we can’t always do ‘what he wants to do’ and so would cringe a bit inside myself but move on to the next thing.

This pattern started happening more and more and I wasn’t satisfied with my own inner-experience as these scenarios would play out. The cringing-experience inside myself, to me indicated that somewhere I am compromising and missing a point – because if I were confident in my actions, then there would be no experience, as what I would be doing would simply be: common sense. But this cringing-experience kept coming up each time I would remove him and we’d move on, so I decided to slow down and zoom-in to what goes on in these play-outs.

So the one day, as I was in the bathroom with him and he found himself an empty shampoo bottle to play with – I was looking at what I was about to do, as picking him up and going back to our room and how it usually plays out. As I played it out for myself within myself, I saw that I was only ever taking my perspective into account, where I was only worried and concerned about ‘getting to everything’. I realised, that I had completely forgotten about Cesar and how he ‘fills up’ his day. I only ever looked at how my timeline was playing out and not looking at his!
There was this idea that, I, the grown up has specific plans, with a specific purpose and specific reasoning about these plans – where I saw Cesar, the baby, as kind of just being random in that there’s no particular direction or structure in his day, and so he can just ‘tag along’ because you know, he’s just kind of like ‘whatever’.

So what I saw then and there is that, even though he doesn’t have an organized way of going about his day or giving himself an overall structured direction – he does give himself direction in every moment, in his own way. Sure, his trip to the bathroom wasn’t planned and only occurred because I had to take a potty break – but him reaching for the empty shampoo bottle: that was a specific decision. Him touching, moving, throwing – interacting with the empty shampoo bottle in various ways: this was him directing himself, this was him being involved with something. And if I am stuck in my world where I am going ‘okay, done with this lets go on to the next thing’ and simply pick him up while he is participating with an object in this manner, then I am in fact interrupting his ‘purposed-plan’ as what he decided to do now and interact with.

So even though I have my world where certain things need to be done, Cesar also has his own world where he is doing things – it’s just not as apparent since it doesn’t conform to ‘adult logic’ but relates his experience and whatever way he in that moment/stage is exploring the world and developing his relationship with his environment and himself.

So in that moment where he is playing with the empty shampoo bottle, he is just as ‘purpose-driven’ as I am in wanting to get to the next room to get on to the next thing – just in a different form. I know I don’t like to suddenly be interrupted and ripped away from something I was giving my attention to and sharing my moment with, so why should I treat Cesar as such?

If I was busy reading a book and someone would just take it away all of a sudden – I’d also be like ‘Oi!! I was busy with that!!!’ So, that’s what Cesar’s doing when he is playing or exploring something. He goes totally into it, and for that moment, the only thing that exists is him and the object he is exploring/playing with.

So when I realised that I was actually being quite rude to interrupt him just like that and expect him to be okay with just ‘tagging along’ and expecting him to be able to ‘immediately let go’ of whatever he was doing – I changed my approach. Sometimes, if time allows it, we will stay a bit longer and I will let him play a bit longer with what he is doing or join in. Then, when it is time to go – I will tell him, and I also announce to him now every time that I am ‘going to pick you up now!’. Then, as I let him know, I will place my hands around his waist – but instead of then immediately picking him up – I will just leave my hands there for a moment and count to three inside myself or out loud. So that, when I announce to him what’s going to happen next, he knows there’s about to be a change, and then the moment I am placing my hands on his waists and leaving them for a moment: he has time to internally let go of what he is doing. Then when I pick him up, he has been able to process the change through space and time, instead of in one second being ‘ripped away’ from what he was doing.

I’ve found making this one adjustment in how I interact with him making a big difference in his demeanour, where before he was more frustrated and on edge and now is more flexible and easy going; which makes sense because he is now being considered, and in me slowing down and taking his experience and how he takes things in into account: our relationship is more balanced since I am treating him the way I’d like to be treated, and within that treating him as an equal instead of me role-playing as “adult” and treating him as a “baby”.

So this one point of in essence, ‘stretching things out’ where instead of just picking the baby up and going, where it is now divided and spread out into announcing, giving a moment, and then moving + making it a habit to not only look at my timeline but to basically in every moment that you’re with your child see things from yours and his perspective = adds up to a much better relationship between parent and child.

An EQAFE interview which gives perspective into this and other points is: Understanding Your Baby Within Sharing - Perfecting the Human Race - Parenting – Part 47

In my previous blog I laid out how one within compromise will start to develop a specific ‘give and take’ relationship with one’s child of one allows to indulge in a pattern where you decide to hold on to ‘what you want to do’ and consequently will not direct your child or give your child attention when the moment for it presents itself. Being aware that you are robbing the child direction it needs, one enters a cycle of feeling guilty which you will then seek to relief by ‘giving back’ to your child, but where this ‘giving back’ is not what is required of in a moment, and where you allow the child to hold on to ‘what he/she wants to do’, just as you had granted yourself this permission.

What I found quite interesting here as well, is how one will use past moments/periods of where things were hectic and where the parent went ‘the extra mile’ to justify why it is okay to hold on and want to have ‘personal’/’me-time’ because “look at all those things I did for you” and “I spent so much time on you, why can’t you just give me a break right now”,… where the parent draws on ‘fairness’ to justify their desires and their behaviour of pursuing it.

So the whole design of it is actually quite clever. Because you find yourself in a situation that is disproportionate, you have to put substantially more time in your child than you do towards yourself or anything else – which is just an outflow of the design of children/babies and the dependency that comes with it; it’s not like they ‘chose’ to deliberately take in a lot of your time. And then you have the parent who makes the deliberate decision to try and go ‘against’ the design and ‘capture’ a bigger margin of time/energy to go towards themselves which necessarily creates an imbalance which they constantly have to counteract by trading with the child/children by giving them things they want and desire so that at least things are ‘fair’ in terms of each one being allowed their indulgences.

So within all of this, what I found is important to realise is that: yes = things are not fair. Sometimes in life you’re on the end where things are really good for you and other times you’re on the end where things suck ass. The thing is that you can’t allow the design and structure of things determine ‘who you are’ and ‘what you’re going to do’. Say you really want to have a unicorn. Yet, by the design of things, we don’t have unicorns on Earth – what are you going to do now? Throw a tantrum? Be spiteful at horses for not having horns? Get yourself a horse and force a horn unto its forehead with God knows what consequence? I know – it’s a farfetched example, but it does very clearly show how ridiculous it is to try and get something which by design is just impossible. We can try having a unicorn by taking a horse and forcing a horn on its head, but we cannot do it without creating consequences, by creating ripple effects through trying to force something to exist – which goes the same for wanting and demanding some form of ‘fairness’ within your parenting reality to and with your child. You cannot manipulate and force your ideal/desire unto reality/your children without them being adversely affected by it. Because you are making real sacrifices to attain something unreal.

In the first few months with Cesar there had been moments where I found myself with a lot of inner conflict and where I couldn’t’ see straight as to ‘why am I experiencing myself this way’ because I was so ‘in it’. I would then make use of Osho Zen cards to do a reading and fascinatingly enough, the card which represents the issue would be the same one over and over again when I had that same experience which was: ‘the dream’ – and the solution was each time to ‘let go of the dream’. Where I was, without being much aware of it – holding on to certain expectations, hoping for things to go a certain way and where reality was not going the way I was expecting/hoping it to go. The nature of taking care of him at that stage was very intense and took a toll on my body – and I would hope/expect him to sleep a bit more or if he had started sleeping more, to ‘keep up’ with this pattern so that I didn’t have to spend as much time and energy in actively soothing him (as he was very uncomfortable back then considering the acid reflux and colic and needed constant ‘intervention’ to alleviate the pain/discomfort for him). So when I got to the point of walking him and bouncing him around for the so many-eth time at night – I would be going ‘pffffft’ and a build-up of energy would start to emerge. This was because I was hoping/expecting for this ‘not to happen’. So when I finally got the point and embraced that things were tough and weren’t going to change – (or maybe they were going to, but that would still be irrelevant), where I realised that I was only making things worse for myself by holding to a ‘dream’, as I am constantly contrasting what is happening to this dream and within doing so make reality look more dull while making the dream look more colourful; the only thing that is going to give me peace is just to be here in every moment, to take every moment as it comes without any expectation. And sure enough, I was more content than ever before and could move myself with ease and would actually explore more ways of assisting Cesar which I previously wouldn’t have even thought about. Because previously, I was so busy ‘suffering’ and just being in ‘automatic’ that such an option would’ve just totally slipped me by.

So this is how I’ve seen the role of Fairness play a point within parenting and being a mother and how it can turn parenting sour if one allows fairness to move oneself instead of self moving self for the sake of what’s best for all, and how dropping Fairness in a simple point such as not expecting things to go a certain way can go a long way.

I’ve written now two series (paranoia and fairness) on what I’ve identified as ‘problem areas’ within parenting which become apparent very early on in the parenting stage, and would like for the next series to take on solution/correction dimensions as we’ve now seen and understood the problem and so can transform our movement within and towards corrections to establish a new parenting paradigm as Principled Parenting.

GnaGnaGna!

In my previous blog I ended off with a scenario where you are still in the days where taking care of a baby is an extensive job, and where in those moments where you find yourself ‘going the extra mile’ within taking care of your baby – that it is easy to create a negative/bad energetic experience within yourself, where you’re carrying out the task of tending to your baby but carry an experience of dislike/resistance where one would rather not be doing what one is doing. I also wrote how babies pick up on these inner-conflict experiences and in essence witness the parent(s) going through an ‘inner-tantrum’ and within doing so, learn that it is okay/acceptable/alright to bring up and express emotion turmoil when ‘things are not the way I want them to be/would have liked them to be’.

So now, your baby has had many opportunities to observe you in your inner-tantrum (from a little nagging experience to very loud backchat – the size of the tantrum doesn’t matter) when things are not going ‘the way you would have liked them to go’. Each time baby witnesses you in that state - that is the behaviour that is being taught to the child. As time goes by, the baby grows up and is able to do more things and be more independent. Here you’re at a stage where taking care of a baby is still intensive and extensive – but not at the ‘hardcore’ levels as when the baby was very small and completely vulnerable – not being able to do anything without an adults help.

Now an interesting thing develops because the demandingness of taking care of the baby is relaxing and suddenly there is space for ‘choice’ again (‘Again’ – meaning, where prior to you having the baby you had quite a bit of space in terms of having time set towards responsibilities but also having space/time towards your own where you can indulge in what you like to do or find important, whereas once the baby comes, there’s only the baby and everything ‘you’ or ‘personal’ disappears for a while). The baby is able to entertain itself for a bit, doesn’t need to be fed constantly so feedings aren’t as pressing/can be more flexible, the baby doesn’t poop himself every hour so his diaper can be on for a bit longer,… So the amount of time that you spend/dedicate towards your baby becomes less and a margin of time starts emerging here and there where you can start doing things ‘for yourself’ or pick up on things that you did before you had the baby.

With having been constricted to only taking care of your baby for such a long time, this ‘me time’ can be considered to be precious and this then creates an opportunity for compromise to creep in. Since the baby is now ‘out of immediate danger’ in terms of not needing constant adult handling, some baby related things can be delayed for a bit while you can extend your ‘personal time’. What I found with myself is that this ‘space’ that opens up can be tricky, where I could catch myself delaying something for just a bit too long, wanting to hold on to ‘my time’ or where I would kind of ‘huff and puff’ within having to ‘give up’ my ‘me time’ to tend to the baby.

It’s quite interesting how the developmental cycle of babies is set up, because it seems to go through cycles where you for a period of time have to spend all / most of your time towards the baby – where it then eases off a bit and you have more space/time to do other things as well – to then again spending all / most of your time taking care of your baby directly. It’s a nice testing ground in a way, where for some time you get to practice taking care of another and doing what needs to be done without having any space for yourself – to then doing the same but have some margin of space for yourself to check whether you can still be diligent and responsible within taking care of your baby without getting distracted/tempted by the ‘personal space’ that opens up – where one dips one’s toes ‘too deep’ and allow yourself to get carried away by this ‘freedom’ and start compromising towards your baby instead of keeping a balance between tending to your baby to the best of your ability and enjoying your ‘me time’ when it is here without wanting to hold on to it/creating it at the expense of your baby.

I’d for instance be working on something while Cesar would be entertaining himself and being content just roaming and exploring the room on his own with me still keeping an eye on him – to where all of a sudden discomfort comes up and he requires some assistance stabilizing himself where I would kind of go ‘Oh no’ inside myself because ‘I am working on this now’ and ‘I want to finish this’ / ‘Let me just round it up’ – where I am wanting to hold on to this ‘me time’/’what I am doing’ and will delay or want to delay getting to Cesar because what he is doing/going through is ‘incompatible’ with my desired situation/circumstance of ‘me working on this document’ / ‘me finishing this task’ – where instead of being here in every moment and being flexible – tending to Cesar when I need to and tending to my points when there is space to; easily letting go and moving around from point to point; – I am holding on to a mental projection of how I think/believe time should go/how the situation should go and want reality to adapt to my mental composition rather than me adapting to physical reality.

So this would be an example where one would compromise within slipping in self-interest where you for a moment place more value on a mental idea/ one’s desires rather than directly, common sensically move self to tend to the baby. So here you also have a scenario where the baby ‘needs something’ from you but you don’t give it. And in being aware that you’re dipping your toes in the pool of self-interest within holding on to your desire – guilt starts to brew inside yourself.

What happens then is that at some other time you are playing with the baby and now the baby is doing something/playing with something/ eating something that it actually shouldn’t or that could be consequential if it becomes a habit – and where in that moment, you should actually direct the baby and intervene, and maybe you do try and intervene and now it’s the baby that is upset and throwing a tantrum because ‘it’s not getting what he/she wants’ (just like me, the adult in the previous example, throwing a little inner tantrum because I wasn’t getting what I wanted within having to stop what I was doing and get to Cesar – starting to see how this pattern plays out?) and within having guilt existent within you for having robbed your child/baby previously of that moment where he/she needed you – you will now ‘give in’ and ‘let it slide’ where you will allow your baby his/her happiness point because you allowed yourself to hold on to your happiness point on previous occasion(s).

This is where the Baby Economicus starts to emerge – where a silent agreement starts developing between the parent and child that ‘if you allow me my indulgence for a moment, I will let you get yours as well later’. So now you start building a relationship with your baby based on perpetuate compromise where you can only keep things ‘happy’ and apparently ‘stable’ by each one giving in to each other’s’ little self-gratifications. If this is allowed to continue you slowly but surely move away from conducting yourself in a way that’s best for your baby/child to what’s best for our ‘trade relationship’. Because you’re then in essence trading moments: “if you give me this moment for my self interest, then I will give you that moment for your self-interest” – and oh boy if you forget your end of the deal, your baby/child will gladly and theatrically remind you of your ‘trade agreement’. The first thing Baby Economicus learns about human behaviour is: if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

So all in all, while one was trying to keep self from having to ‘sacrifice’ – where you don’t want to sacrifice your moment for the sake of what’s best for the baby, you end up doing exactly that – constantly sacrificing, but sacrificing the reverse where you sacrifice what’s best for your baby for the sake of the mind. So we end up sacrificing in the wrong moments in the wrong way. Where we will not intervene/direct our child/baby when we have to and intervene/manipulate the child when we shouldn’t – because it’s all done within the starting point of maintaining one’s self interest and within doing so, in extension building and maintaining the baby’s/child’s self interest.

In my previous blog, I laid out how it can be easy to experience yourself being/going into extreme levels of emotions/thoughts/reactions within being faced with the rigors of taking care of a baby, and how this then shapes ‘who you are’ in every moment, whether you are conscious of it or not.

It starts off with being limited to moments only, where you’re attending to one of those tasks that require you to ‘put in some extra’ and where you’re really not ‘into’ doing whatever it is that requires to be done, and a negative energetic charge develops within yourself as you carry out whatever it is you have to do.

This momentary reaction, which is like a form of resistance, basically states that ‘I wish that I was doing something else’ or ‘I wish I didn’t have to do this’. These momentary experiences, come and go as you move around your day/night taking care of your baby, where the moment the ‘task’ is done, the experience is gone (or so it seems). However, with this coming and going of this experience and you allowing this experience to keep coming and going and not directing it – it starts to accumulate to an experience where one day you realise that you’re actually not having much fun at all with your new baby and actually are kind of…unhappy.

It’s kind of interesting, because at that stage – you’re not yet actually chronically unhappy. I noticed this myself after working on the point, that I wasn’t actually unhappy, but within allowing such fleeting reactions to accumulate, in that moment that you become more aware of your self-experience - your perception of reality is so skewed/screwed that you think and believe that you’re unhappy *all the time*, and from that moment on you actually start to actively project this experience of unhappiness unto every moment/every task and then in essence bring it to life/make it a reality for yourself which you then start to resonate throughout your day.

Now, within being an adult and having been successfully raised within morality – you know that you shouldn’t be acting on these type of feelings/experiences. Meaning, just because you’re unhappy doesn’t mean that you’re not going to carry out your responsibilities towards your baby because that would be ‘wrong’. Yet, even though we know we won’t be acting upon our experience, we will still stubbornly hold on to it, believing that we are right to experience this way and that what we experience is an accurate reflection of ‘how things are in reality’. Though for children, your baby – it doesn’t matter that you are not acting upon it (well, of course they do benefit from you still carrying out your responsibilities)– they still know how you actually feel, and what it is that you are actually holding within yourself while you interact with them. They can see, and feel that you’re unhappy/not doing what you’d like to be doing – and can in essence, see your ‘inner tantrum’ as the energy you experience within yourself while you carry out that which you do not want to do.

So what your baby learns then and there, is that it’s okay and acceptable to have this energetic experience of being ‘unhappy’ when ‘things are not the way you like’. And even though you may not be acting upon it in those moments, you are still keeping the energy alive which means that you agree with it; and that’s all that a baby needs to know to start copying this pattern and live it out.

One thing that has to be taken into consideration though, is that a baby/child is not ‘innocent’ in that it in its very nature as the result of the acceptances and allowances of the generations who came before – have a tendency to ‘react’ when things don’t go their way. Yet, this behaviour and tendency can very easily be addressed when you’re ‘on it’, and when you do not accept and allow such behaviour within yourself. The tendency then doesn’t have space to develop/grow and the child/baby then learns whatever other example they have been given. It however does mean that the ease with which they will develop and grow this tendency into an actual behavioural pattern = is greater.