Journey to a New Life

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