Different Babies

I think I am getting there. I have certainly felt a lot happier in the last couple weeks. I'm starting to look at my kids and feel joy again rather than utter stress. It's been such a relief - I feel like, slowly but surely, I am getting my life back.

I believe that I really took for granted having an easy baby. I have begun to realize that my struggles have not stemmed simply from having two kids, but instead from just having a flat-out difficult baby. I've found through this experience that with Liam, I didn't have to search within myself to find my zen; he made it easy for me. This time around, whether it's because Macy is more difficult, because we have two, or a little bit of both, I'm really having to work hard at controlling my stress level from within.

One of the points that really stood out to me in my ScreamFree parenting book is that your children are not responsible for your emotional well-being. In retrospect, it seems a bit obvious, but certain things you don't consciously realize until someone articulates them for you.

I find that as my children get older, this is an increasingly difficult concept to master. I am nowhere close. We fall into that trap as parents where we seek validation through our kids. All is right with the world when we snuggle up to them, and they make us feel so darn good about ourselves because these little people love us so much.

Enter the day your child says "go away Mommy!" for the first time. Or when he says "I want Daddy," and he wants nothing to do with you. We certainly address the behavior itself as being unacceptable, but to convince yourself that it's not age-appropriate to expect your child to understand how this makes you feel is extremely difficult. It's near impossible not to run into the other room and cry because your child is trying to assert his independence from you in the only way he knows how.

When it's 3am and your baby has been awake for an hour and a half and you've concluded that she has no intention of going back to sleep, it's so darn difficult to take that deep breath and say "it's all good - I can do this." Or when it's the 6PM infant witching hour and you're running around the house trying to get two kids fed, bathed, and in bed by yourself, meanwhile trying to keep an irritable baby from melting down, it's hard not to look at the baby and expect her to make this easy for you.

I'm constantly having to remind myself that how I feel is up to ME, not THEM. I think that this is the part of parenting that is only going to get more difficult over the years, and the one that I need to start practicing ASAP. I need to prepare myself NOW for the day when one of my kids inevitably says "I hate you, Mom." They don't hate me, I haven't failed as a parent, and I wouldn't be normal if I never heard those words.

In the last month or so, as Macy's temperament has turned into personality, I am getting a better understanding as to why she has been so much more difficult than Liam (and don't get me wrong; I am speaking in relative terms. She's not the cake walk Liam was, but she's just not easy. I imagine there are MUCH more difficult babies out there, and God is just using her to test my own personal limits).

Liam was always extremely laid-back. He was like "I don't care if I can't roll over. I'll roll over when I'm ready." And "yeah, I want that thing over there, but I can't get there. Whatev. I'll crawl one of these days." I always thought that he was bi-polar because he was SO animated and SO happy at times, and then it was like a switch was flipped causing him to just start screaming for a little while. The utter happiness that his life defaulted to was overstimulating.

Macy is much more even-tempered and serious. She gets her mind to do something, and she must do it. As she's started to pick toys up and play with them over the last couple months, you can see that she's got something in her mind that she wants to do, and you can see her concentration and her mounting frustration. She'll think "I can't roll over from my tummy to my back, and all that I want to do right now is roll over from my tummy to my back. I am going to keep trying, I am going to let everyone know that I am getting pissed off here, and I don't care one bit that it's 1:30 in the morning." All she wants in this world right now is to become mobile. Honestly, that's all I want for her, too, because the more independence she gains, the happier she is overall.

She's not as talkative as Liam was at this age. Liam would talk up a storm as soon as he woke up in the morning. He had all kinds of syllables and inflections. Macy's happy when she wakes up, and she coos, but in a much more reserved manner.

It's interesting seeing Macy's personality emerge and finding that my children really are SO different from each other. Other than Macy being more irritable than Liam was, up until recently, I never thought they terribly different babies.

I'm glad that her personality has begun to shed some light on the reasons that she acts the way that she does. I am starting to understand her better, and that seems to be a good step towards understanding how to handle her and treat her. One of the most difficult parts of transitioning from one to two is realizing that your attitude and behavior towards the first child isn't necessarily right for the second one as well, and figuring out what changes you need to make.

I had this theory that people say "if I'd had my second one first, I never would have had a second" because subsequent children are born into to a state of utter choas. Your first child is born into this quiet, soothing, comforting environment with relatively stress-free parents who rock them to sleep only to the sound of Mommy or Daddy's voice. The only thing a second child knows is the sound of another kid running around the house, parents raising their voices, and stuff getting banged around. They go to sleep wherever their parents can get them to sleep, to the sound of Mommy or Daddy's voice, dissonant against some cartoon jingle blaring through the house. After experiencing it all first hand, my theory was 100% correct.

It's been quite a ride, and I am so glad I am beginning to truly enjoy it. I don't know, though - you might get a completely different blog post from me if I were to write it at at 6PM!