I sometimes worry a little at how differently I treat Gleek and Patches than I treated Kiki and Link at the same ages. I know that they are different people and require different interactions from me, so I guess what really concerns me is that I might be reacting to thier behaviors rather than considering and carefully choosing to act in the ways that will best help them to grow and learn. I remember spending lots of time thinking and planning how to teach and nurture Link and Kiki. Now I seem to function mostly on instinct. Some of those instincts are good ones that I spent lots of effort to train into myself when Kiki and Link were young. Others are instincts that I took lots of effort to supress, but somehow failed to suppress into non-existence.
These days instead of spending lots of time nurturing and interacting, I spend significant amounts of time trying to occupy Gleek and Patches so that I can go and do my own things. There should be space in my life for both. I should be glad to spend time with my children. I should be involving them in my projects so they can learn how projects work. The my projects would become our projects. It would be so wonderful if I could always greet my children with a face which says “I’m glad of you!” rather than “You’re annoying me again!” I haven’t been doing that and I need to figure out how.
Don’t forget that you’re a different person now than you were then.
And you do need some time to do your own thing and so do they.
The great secret
When you figure out a good way to consistently be able to glad rather than annoyed, please make sure you post it. We too at my house suffer from much the same problem.
I have one thought on this, not that it really helps but it occurred to me this morning that our family, and especially our kids, are the one form of service over which we frequently have no say. What I mean is, with any other form of service you choose to give to the world at large, you get to choose when and if you will give it. With your kids, once you have them, you rarely get to choose. They have needs, and it doesn’t matter whether you are tired, cranky, stressed, or whatever, they still have the needs and you, the parent, still need to serve them, whether you are in the mood or not.
With babies, this is obvious, but at least with the first ones, you don’t tend to feel resentful of this, but as you have more kids and life gets more complicated, the inner voice rebels and you want to say, “What about me? Why do you need me now, and now and now?” I think this is the source of the problem. What I’m not sure of, is, what’s the solution. I think it is a mindset thing, but how do you get that mindset. That is the question.