Yeah, a few a day is a bit higher than I ever get, too.
But one can do better than a few a month. It's a learned skill.
There is a trick to catching those moments, a techique. Just about most importantly, you need to give yourself a permission to have a glorious moment, even in the midst of total suckage or overwhelming apathy. You need to derive it from tiny, trivial things, because large glorious things are indeed few and far between. And then, you need to not dismiss it - it's all too easy to roll right through it and move on, forgetting it in a minute.
Or perhaps you need to be a sort of person for whom this mental trick works, because there's never a one-size-fits-all of keeping oneself relatively sane.
I sometimes wonder how someone could possibly say something like, "I loved every single second of parenting my two girls. Every single moment." I'm definitely glad I had/have my kids. But there were many seconds I could have done without.
Like the one when we were in an indigenous Mexican village with no toilet facilities. My son had diarrhea, but refused to just go out of doors as those who lived there did. So he ended up soiling all his clothes, then having a tantrum so extreme that I had to pin him down to the ground. And then looked up to find most of the village circled around staring at us. And I had no way to explain what was going on, because they all spoke one of the Mayan languages.
And I just wonder whether the ones who claim to have enjoyed every second had extremely tractable children, or just have major gaps in their memories.
I think anyone who claims to love every second of ANYTHING is having a serious case of rose colored glasses. Which is not inherently a bad thing - remembering the good and allowing the bad to fade is a really useful mental mechanism for longterm sanity - but it sure is annoying to those for whom the experience is still quite fresh.
Comments 6
more like a few each month, in a good monrh.
not enough to sustain.
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But one can do better than a few a month. It's a learned skill.
There is a trick to catching those moments, a techique. Just about most importantly, you need to give yourself a permission to have a glorious moment, even in the midst of total suckage or overwhelming apathy. You need to derive it from tiny, trivial things, because large glorious things are indeed few and far between. And then, you need to not dismiss it - it's all too easy to roll right through it and move on, forgetting it in a minute.
Or perhaps you need to be a sort of person for whom this mental trick works, because there's never a one-size-fits-all of keeping oneself relatively sane.
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Like the one when we were in an indigenous Mexican village with no toilet facilities. My son had diarrhea, but refused to just go out of doors as those who lived there did. So he ended up soiling all his clothes, then having a tantrum so extreme that I had to pin him down to the ground. And then looked up to find most of the village circled around staring at us. And I had no way to explain what was going on, because they all spoke one of the Mayan languages.
And I just wonder whether the ones who claim to have enjoyed every second had extremely tractable children, or just have major gaps in their memories.
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