Journey to a New Life

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.

Another dimension which I would like to open up in relation to my previous blog Day 69: Introducing Toys & Expansive Play, is that of hidden values we may hold towards toys – which our children don’t – and which may affect one’s relationship with one’s child playing with toys; and consequently the child’s relationship with playing with toys.

In my previous blog I mentioned how Cesar would play with toys in a way that ‘they were not intended to’, and the dimension of fear involved in terms of ‘developmental delay’ where I feared that Cesar not playing with the toy as how it was designed/intended to be played with was indicative to him being ‘behind’. Now, another dimension of fear I noticed at one point, was the fear of him breaking toy – which also falls within this category of ‘not using a toy the way it was intended to be used’.

Here, we were playing with a toy which we had just gotten him which had been quite pricey. Then as he started to play with the toy more intensely, almost as if he was deliberately putting its structural integrity and durability to the test – I experienced myself constricting inside myself and intervening in how he was playing with the toy. Cesar obviously didn’t like this very much, as he was exploring the toy within this particular way and was set out to continue exploring it within this manner as far as he could take it. When I noticed movement inside myself and wanting to move to intervene I stopped and asked myself why I was so intent on limiting him within how he was playing with the toy. “It’s his toy” I told myself. And then an image if how expensive the toy had been came up.

‘Ah’.

So here, I saw and realised how I had placed a particular value on the toy within the knowledge and information of how much the toy had cost, and where within the decision of buying the expensive toy, having made the decision/hope that it would ‘go a long way’.

Then you have Cesar who receives the toy and is like ‘Oh yay, cool’ – and almost immediately goes into checking how he can take it apart. This didn’t match my expectation which had been part of the decision of buying the toy, and how I projected he would play with the toy – which than caused inner conflict and friction. Where initially, I perceived Cesar to be the problem within ‘how he plays with the toy’; instead of seeing and realising that the problem was within my projection and expectations which were like ‘hidden terms and conditions’ which I was carrying around within myself in relation to the toy.

So, I took a step back within myself, breathed in, breathed out – and within the out breath completely let go of any expectations and limitations I had placed on the toy – placing the toy unconditionally within Cesar’s control (or rather, within his innocence).

I also realised that it would be futile to forevermore try and keep him from breaking things, as it would always leave an unsatisfied curiosity which would be bound to come out in one way or another.

The one day for instance, we were playing in the garden when some flowers that Maite had recently planted caught his eye. I went ‘uh oh’, and soon enough Cesar was pulling the flowers from the plants. But then he did an interesting thing, where he would pick up the flowers and place them back on the stem from which he pulled them; which obviously didn’t work and the flower would just float/fall down to the ground. And he would try that a few more times with the other flowers he had pulled off and then looked at me with this ‘Oh!’ face. So there I could tell he went through a learning-moment where he realised that if he pulls the flower off, then it’s off and you can’t get it back to how it used to be. So he will pull flowers off and he will break things – it’s inevitable. But the other side of the coin is that he will inevitably learn about the actions he performs, their cause and effect and consequence – and so how our physical reality operates.

When we initially started introducing toys to Cesar, I approach the situation from my own experience and background. Within my experience, I always felt and believed myself to have had ‘little toys’ and that I was missing out in some way or another, especially if I looked at how many toys my friends had.

I didn’t want Cesar to have this experience but I also didn’t want to go overboard by bombarding him with toys.

I felt that it was important for him to have ‘choice’ and to be able to decide what he plays with out of a range of things. So I would always present him with several toys at once and see which one he wanted to play with. What I started noticing is that even though I thought that ‘choice’ was what he wanted or something he would see as ‘important’, he was actually experiencing a lot of frustration and conflict.

Because, within each time having to in a single moment decide between a bunch of toys, he could not make up his mind because he has no reference of ‘what he likes’ – everything is new and he wants to explore EVERYTHING. So he doesn’t really want to choose. What would happen is that he starts off with one toy, and after briefly having ‘met’ the toy he would already be eyeing the next one and then drop the first to go on to the next – again exploring it only briefly.

While he picked himself a toy, I would pick a different toy for myself to play with. This was not also a source of conflict because now Cesar wanted to explore what I was exploring! So then I would say ‘Okay, sure – you take this one and I will take yours’. But then as soon as the toys swapped hands he wanted his previous toy back again.

When there were lots of toys on the floor, he would get ‘disorganized’ within himself as he is faced with all these options and not knowing how to make a decision of what to play with and what not to play with. This led him to being more frustrated and agitated throughout the day as he was lacking direction within himself and his environment.

I then stopped my ‘choice’ approach, as I saw that this was not actually serving his well-being but just feeding into frustration. We started a new approach of ‘one thing at a time’. So now, we would take one toy – any toy – remember, at this stage everything is new and everything is interesting, so it didn’t matter what we picked. And we would take just the one toy or object and just sit and explore it. We would talk about how it looks, how it feels, the colours, what we can do with it and really get to know the object/toy. This, Cesar enjoyed a lot more. You could actually trace a look of concentration on his face and could see how he just lost himself in the toy for a moment, exploring it totally and completely. There were no other toys to worry about or any other things waiting to happen or to do. There was just this one moment, with this one toy and Cesar’s eagerness to explore. His behaviour changed immediately as he was a lot more calmer and stable within himself.

Once he had explored a toy for a few days, we would then also have a look at things we could do with the object/toy that it wasn’t necessarily meant to do in terms of how it was designed to be played with – but what we could do with it none the less. This I enjoyed a lot as it also forced me to move beyond the state of mind that ‘this is how this toy is supposed to be used’, where if the toy is used in a different way it means that ‘Cesar is not getting it’ [see also Maite’s blog on this topic].
So we would take for instance shapes and see where else they fit in the room with other objects around, or we would stack toys that weren’t meant for stacking, or make up new games with parts of a toy-set.

This I found a very cool way to work with toys, as you firstly set the scene for focus and attentiveness within working with just the one toy and then set the scene for creativity as you see how far you can push a single toy. Still today Cesar surprises me with how he comes up different combinations of using a single object.

One of the objects he really likes playing for instance and has been playing with since the moment he could ‘play’ is an empty plastic bottle. It’s one of those objects that is so ordinary and so simplistic in its design that you’d think that a child would get bored with it in no time. But Cesar has learnt how to roll the bottle and crawl behind it, to make it spin, to put it upright, to bang it against different object and observe the different frequency sounds the bottle makes, now he also plays with matching the frequency with his own voice, he practices screwing the lid on and off, putting small objects into the bottle and getting them out again, looking through different parts of the bottle and how it skews what he sees,…

If you give an adult an empty bottle, they’ll quickly be tired of it because they think they already know what they can and can’t do with it, that they ‘know its purpose’ and so won’t bother moving themselves to find out what else they can do with it.

So this ‘out of the box’ playing with toys has been very interesting for Cesar and myself and has shown to be a lot more satisfactory than him being overwhelmed by choice.

Now, there are many times where he gets to roam around the room and play with whatever he wants – but now he has learnt how to play with toys and he understands that he doesn’t have to get lost in the face of choice, but can move with one toy at a time and explore it completely. So from that perspective, having choice around is cool for him because he can actually exercise it – while he previously simply did not know how to deal with it and was simply a source of frustration.
So choice does come to a have a part in how he plays with toys, but we first had to establish a foundation of how to play with toys and take something to the max – so that he can now do this for himself and within this also appreciate every toy for a long time rather than only being happy and excited by the novelty of things.

Whenever he gets a new toy or someone brings several new toys – we still introduce only one toy at a time so he has the time and space to get to know the toy before we introduce the next.

Continuing from previous blog, Day 67: Parenting as Duty vs Parenting as Self-Expression - Part 1 | Parenting & Fairness :

‘So when you parent from a starting point of duty – you do the same. You do what needs to be done but once the need has been removed you stop, you retreat. Parenting is then a formality, you do it because ‘it is written somewhere’ that you have to do it. You don’t do it from a point of understanding, you don’t put anything from yourself into it, you don’t allow yourself to explore what is possible when there is ‘no more need’, you don’t do it just for the sake of it – the very notion of spending more time/moments with your child, giving more of yourself is seen as ‘a waste’ (just as you would paying more than what your debt told you to pay). And every time you ‘pay your dues’ as ‘tending to your child’ – you take note of it, you keep a record – just like you would with a bank account where money movement is involved. And then later, when you child is older – you can remind him/her of these records and what the child now ‘owes you’ in return. Look at all these things I did for you – now what will you do for me?
This is parenting on automatic mode – there’s no life in your actions, in your attention. You are simply reacting to impulses. The impulses stop and you stop. You did not do those things ‘for the child’ – you did them out of duty, you fulfilled your duty – but you did not fulfil your child.’

When you parent from a starting point of self-expression, you move beyond reaction to responsiveness. There is nothing else moving you but yourself. You child needs you and you tend to your child – and then some. You are not keeping track of ‘what you are giving’. When you react, your action is dictated by what you are reacting to, you do the bare minimum, you do it grudgingly, you always do it the same way because you do not know of another way.

When you respond from responsiveness, from response-ability – you move yourself to respond simply because you can. You do not yet know how you will respond, this is unpredictable – only the moment will tell. You respond to the same need in many different ways, because you response is not dictated, it is not determined by the need – it is an expression of yourself. And how you express yourself changes from moment to moment. You stop meeting needs and you start meeting moments.

Say, your baby needs a diaper change. When you change a diaper from a starting point of duty, you change the diaper the way you always change the diaper. You are meeting/fulfilling the diaper change. When you change a diaper from a starting point of expression, you look at yourself, you look at your child and you change your child’s diaper in a way that takes you and your child into account. Your child is in different expressions in different moments, and so every diaper change becomes unique as you meet your child and his/her need for a diaper change in that specific moment. The focus is on meeting the moment which is all-encompassing, the focus is not on the need.

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The above piece I wrote as I finished my previous blog, to give myself a starting point for the next one to come (this one).

Now, as I have been going through my days since I wrote my previous blog and the piece above – I have been mulling over the point of ‘Parenting as Self-Expression’ and how to best explain it and describe it. Each time I think I found a good way to put it – and look at it again; I drop it, because in the very act of trying to describe it and define it – I am already limiting it in one way or another.

The reason why Parenting as Duty is easy to describe and explain, is because it is so very limited, repetitive and systematic. It is you behaving and conducting yourself according to particular rules that you follow. With Parenting as Self-Expression, I can give examples and stories – but those are only reflections of a ‘moment’ and they were only valid and true in that moment and they were only valid and true for me in that moment. What is a point of Expression for me, is not going to be a point of Expression for another.

Whenever I am looking into adapting a new skill or insight into my life, I often (if not always) have the tendency to look for guidelines, descriptions, some ‘how to’ to tell me what to do and how to act. I want to ‘read up’ on it and have as much information and knowledge available to myself that I can reference before I actually start walking/living/applying the new skill or insight into my life.

And even though I am doing all these things because ‘I want to be prepared’ and ‘really wanting to get this integrated in my life’ – it’s this search for descriptions, guidelines and info that in the end limits me and how I walk and live the point, because I am constantly reaching back to the information I hold within myself and trying to ‘make sense’ of the moment and what I am doing and trying to do it along the lines of the information. In those moments, I lose myself because I am holding knowledge and information as my starting-point instead of drawing from myself and simply walking/doing it and then I get disappointed with myself and the new point I wanted to integrate in my life, simply because I was not trusting myself to walk unconditionally in the moment.

The best way to find out for yourself what Parenting and Self Expression is – is to simply do it and live it. For me, this was realising all the moment where I was acting and behaving in a way which was dictated by beliefs, ideas, thoughts, emotions, feelings – were not supportive for myself nor for my child, and so to instead push and move myself to be here in every moment, to be clear and directive. I didn’t know what I was going to be doing, or ‘how’ I was going to be – but I knew that holding on to what I was doing was not going to work.

So looking at it now, you need to change the conditions that facilitate the ‘growth’ of Parenting as Self Expression – just as you would prepare the soil/environment for a new plant/seed to grow. Where for the Seed of Self-Expression to germinate and flower – breath, presence and directiveness representing the ‘optimal conditions’ within which Parenting as Self-Expression can emerge. Whereas holding on to thoughts, beliefs, morality, emotions and feelings – is like pounding a bag of salt into the soil and never ever providing water to your seed, pretty much killing any opportunity for your seed to unfold – you will remain stuck in status quo.

So it’s not about what and how you will do things, but directing who you are in every moment. If ‘who you are’ is in place, the rest simply follows naturally.

Continuing from: Day 66: Why Do I Hate Being a Mother? | Parenting & Fairness
Another dimension I would like to explore / open-up in relation to being unhappy or simply having resistance from time to time towards tending to your parental responsibilities is that of parenting being a ‘duty’ versus parenting as self-expression.

Often I found within myself, when there was resistance or a nagging sensation within myself within moments where I had to tend to my baby, that I within that moment was approaching parenting/tending to my child as a ‘duty’; and so as something that I ‘have to do’/’must do’.

Parenting then becomes a ‘duty’, where you are ‘paying your dues’. The problem with ‘duty’ is that you will only do what is due, when something is due – where your starting point is determined by a negative energetic experience. Once you have ‘paid your dues’ – you stop. There is now nothing left to move you – all dues are gone, you are no longer obliged to move and so you don’t. You stop being a parent the moment the need for it is removed. You are parenting at the bare minimum, where self will do what needs to be done – but please don’t ask me to do more.

What’s fascinating about this – is that your range of movement as a parent is limited within a scope of negativity to neutrality. You will only ever ‘be a parent’ as ‘performing parenting tasks/points’ when there is a need for it, and this ‘need’ is channelled through a negative energetic charge within yourself, by your very starting point. Then when you have completed your duties, and all is back to neutrality – you stop being a parent the moment your duties are over. Now you go back to ‘being me’, ‘doing what I want to do’. Implied within that, is that you will only ever experience Parenting as being something negative, as a burden, as a duty – because you yourself set yourself up to only play out your parenting role when there is a need for it. And this need is always situated within a context of negativity, where you can only remove what is due/the negative by performing your duty. Now the child has stopped crying, now I can return to what I was doing.

If you look at dues and debt – you will only ever pay what is due. And you pay your dues because it is written somewhere that ‘you have to’. There’s an actual figure indicating/showing you what is needed from you, and as you pay your dues, the negative figure decreases until it reaches zero and then you stop paying your debt. You don’t go on paying more money once you’ve reached zero!

So when you parent from a starting point of duty – you do the same. You do what needs to be done but once the need has been removed you stop, you retreat. Parenting is then a formality, you do it because ‘it is written somewhere’ that you have to do it. You don’t do it from a point of understanding, you don’t put anything from yourself into it, you don’t allow yourself to explore what is possible when there is ‘no more need’, you don’t do it just for the sake of it – the very notion of spending more time/moments with your child, giving more of yourself is seen as ‘a waste’ (just as you would paying more than what your debt told you to pay). And every time you ‘pay your dues’ as ‘tending to your child’ – you take note of it, you keep a record – just like you would with a bank account where money movement is involved. And then later, when you child is older – you can remind him/her of these records and what the child now ‘owes you’ in return. Look at all these things I did for you – now what will you do for me?

This is parenting on automatic mode – there’s no life in your actions, in your attention. You are simply reacting to impulses. The impulses stop and you stop. You did not do those things ‘for the child’ – you did them out of duty, you fulfilled your duty – but you did not fulfil your child.

To be continued…

In my previous blog I ended off with how one can become reactive and resentful within wanting to hold on to one’s ‘off time’ when a child needs your sudden attention. This point also links in with a previous blog I wrote, Day 51: Why Babies throw Tantrums | Parenting & Fairness, where one can become ‘unhappy’ and throw inner tantrums when you compare the moment/situation you are in vs. the situation/moment you would rather be in as what would make you happy (eg. Current moment ‘changing frantic screaming baby’s dirty diaper’ vs. desired moment ‘sitting down, reading newspaper with cup of coffee’).

Within this blog, I want to investigate a different dimension that is connected to this point of being unhappy when faced with parenting responsibilities and wishing that you could be doing something else that would make you ‘happy’ – specifically looking at: what determines our happiness?

If we go back to the scenario of the previous blog where we have the two parents relaxing / enjoying some off time and both not wanting to give this up when being faced with a needy child; we can already see/identify a first ‘clue’. Here, I am looking at how one labels/compartmentalizes one’s time in ‘work-time/child-time’ and ‘off-time/relax-time’.
When we create labels for what we are doing, because they refer to distinctly different experiences of ourselves during these different time-periods = something’s up.

In terms of the scenario, self had created a polarized experience, whereby tending to the child was distinctively ‘negative’ while ‘not tending to the child’ as ‘off-time’ was a distinctively positive experience. So in this case ‘not tending to the child’ makes self happy because then you can do ‘whatever you want’ without being limited by a child who needs your attention.

So, why does this make you happy? And why does tending to one’s child make you unhappy?
If we have a look at what determines our happiness, we need to look at the things we find valuable in life, what we find meaningful. When we identify the variables of value and meaning, we can determine what makes us happy, where if x (value) and y (meaning) is in place = I am happy.

If we look at what society promotes as being of value and meaning in life, we come up with factors such as:

- freedom (of choice)
- money
- beauty
- career/status
- individual identity
- partying/events
- consumerism
= ego, freedom and selfishness

So when we take these ‘values’ and translate them into parenthood then...yes – life is hell.

Because parenthood means:
- absolute responsibility for another life
- being practical with money
- dealing with body changes / minimal time towards looking presentable
- spending time home / with kids
- personal sacrifice
- being on a schedule / getting all the sleep you can get
- cleaning up after another / managing a household
= humbleness, responsibility and selflessness

So if we look at what society promotes and values, we find these things to be completely absent within the world of motherhood/parenting. Being a housewife / stay-at-home-mother has become stigmatized and looked down up – why would anyone ‘give up’ doing something meaningful with their life to look after children and staying at home?! You could be having a career, be productive, going out and do things whenever you want!!

So then looking after a child, changing diapers, wiping butts, making food, cleaning up, feeding and whatever else is involved in taking care of a child becomes an experience of being ‘degraded’ and ‘suffering’ because it doesn’t fall within the category of value and meaning that has been fed to us through and by society. The worst part is that one actually believes self to be ‘unhappy’ and ‘not doing anything of value/meaning’ and not seeing/realising that self was not the directive principle within deciding for oneself what you find valuable and meaningful in life, but instead went with the ideas, pictures and imaginations sold by our consumerist and capitalistic society. Society’s values are all about accumulating, while that of parenting is that of giving away.

This schizophrenia of values reminds me of an article I read a while ago, where a person went into a hospital for a hip surgery but ended up dying from dehydration. Why? Because everyone thought that getting the patient water was ‘beneath’ them, after all they are a surgeon/doctor/this or that and surely it’s not their job to do something ‘ordinary’ like bringing someone water? Surely someone with less important things to do can take care of this?

And then the man died.

This nicely illustrates how within our obsession with career/status/prestige, our individual identity and self-importance – leads us to neglect important, life-enabling factors such as providing someone water because it’s ‘too ordinary’. We look at things in terms of specialness and ordinariness, and make our decisions according to what we believe will add to our own splendour.

Similarly within parenting/motherhood, we have forgotten the value and importance of tending to a child, performing ‘ordinary tasks’ – because they create no grandeur, they don’t add to your amazing personality and no-one’s there to pat your back and say how amazingly productive you are.

Parenting is the business of life. And life is not about all the imaginary concepts we’ve promoted and elevated to godliness. Life isn’t about personal grandeur, beauty, freedom and self-interest. It’s about eating, shitting, sleeping and looking after each other. It’s about guiding one another and creating responsible human beings who in the future will ensure responsibility towards themselves, others and their environment.

With the values we are currently upholding, the only thing we are ensuring is for life to go down the drain. Everyone’s so busy going ‘me! Me! Me!’ and ‘Money! Money! Money!’ – that we forget to look around ourselves and spend our (oh so precious time that we could be spending doing whatever the f*ck we want) time towards life-enabling and life-supporting goals such as ensuring proper housing, proper food security, proper education, etc. – all these ‘ordinary’ things, all these things which are absolutely vital to life.

So we are not just dealing with a value crisis in parenting, but a value crisis over all – which becomes reflective within parenting.

To be continued

 In some of my previous blogs (Day 60 , Day 61) I wrote about how comparing yourself and your responsibilities to that of another, specifically the father of your child – can be a source of inner conflict within self.

Because being a mother is a very specific role, you cannot compare it to being a father – and even more so if you as the mother are the primary caretaker of the child while the father is primarily the breadwinner. You’re both looking after your child(ren), but in different ways. The mother through a one-on-one direct approach, the father through creating financial stability to ensure a proper environment for the children/family to live and grow up in.

Another point which I identified within this framework of ‘fairness’ and ‘comparison’ (well, they’re really one framework, comparison always precedes fairness) is that of ‘fear of missing out’.

Having children/a family can be a stressful situation. Especially if not so long ago it was just you and your partner, there were fewer responsibilities and fewer financial pressure. When a child enters reality, both these aspects grow exponentially. Suddenly you are overrun with things to do in relation to your child, and your spending pattern suddenly takes a surge. What I found here is that in essence your ‘survival mode’ knob gets switched up a bit higher, and both mother and father are more tensed.

Then, when there is a moment during the day where both parents can relax / take some time off from one’s responsibilities and ‘switch out’ from survival mode; both parents will tend to want to ‘hold on’ to that time/moment. If then your child suddenly needs attention, obviously one of the parents needs to attend to the child and step away from one’s relax/fun time. And here something interesting happens, where neither of the parents want to go and stand as the point of support for the child, because both parents believe/perceive that they are entitled to their own ‘time off’ and that it is ‘the other’ who should go and stand as the point. This is even more so, if you are still holding on to comparisons between yourself and your partner, where you’ve still been comparing your responsibilities to that of your partner and believe that you got the short end of the stick and that within you ‘suffering more’, your partner should now go and you should be allowed to stay in your ‘off time’. Within this fairness point playing out, there is also a fear that if one goes and tend to the child, that there is a chance your partner was more rested/more up to it than you are and so ‘more suitable’ to go tend to the child than you are, where you fear that your partner is now enjoying himself ‘unduly’ – time that *you* could have been spending enjoying yourself in some time off. So with this added dimension, where you fear you are being taken advantage of – you will resist tending to your child not because you’re not physically up for it, but because you don’t want your partner to ‘cash in’ on your actions; where there’s now this whole mental competition game playing out between the two parties involved, where each one will be reluctant to do what needs to be done because each one is suspicious of one another and fear missing out.

This then opens the door for strange behaviour such as insisting that ‘both go’ so that ‘both miss out’, believing that this creates a more ‘equal scenario’, whilst this only satisfies one’s fairness construct. Or the opposite where one insist on making plans where both can have ‘off time’, not because you necessarily want to spend time together, but because you don’t want to experience yourself as ‘missing out’.

To be continued…