Because Self-Therapy is Free

If you search my blog for “loud” you get a handful of returned entries, 90% of which are about Fresco. Also, they are dated one per month, roughly around the 20th of each month. So this is a bit early but here is your monthly installment where I complain about how loud my baby is.

I know, it is so pointless to complain about a loud baby, or a baby of any “kind”. Can I put it this way, does it sound less whiny: imagine you have a baby who is in some fundamental way the opposite of you. You are inherently happy; he never smiles. You are a sports fan; he likes opera. You have a degree in Linguistics; he doesn’t speak until age 3.

Saint Aardvark and I are quiet, conflict-averse people. We have a shouting baby. It is stressing us out. Since I cannot change the shouting baby, I have been thinking about me, how I can change my approach so that I do not go crazy.

We attribute complex motives to the shouting, which says more about us than him. At nearly 8 months old, his motives are pretty clear cut – food, sleep, clean butt, love, entertainment. At X:00 am we are irrational, accusing him of extreme attention seeking behavior, having no self control, no ability to self-amuse, all of which, from us, are some of the worst qualities, other than a tendency to favour Harley Davidson motorcycles, that you could possibly exhibit.

I am struggling to think of him as a person who has a collection of attributes, rather than as a fully formed personality who is defined by his attributes. He likes, dislikes, not he IS, he WILL BE.

And what do I fear about that handful of characteristics anyway? Isn’t it true that we dislike in others what we dislike most in ourselves? Am I an attention hog? Am I unable to self-amuse? Am I (gasp) needy?

I think a lot these days about how we grow up; what we are born with and what we gather from our experience. The person I am now a product both of genetics and of my experience as an only child of (loving), sensible, strict parents. Where would I be now if I were more assertive, less conflict-averse, more willing to make noise, say, Hey, OVER HERE, once in a while instead of demurring, No, I’m fine, everything is fine. If I had been less obedient (to a point), more overtly rebellious instead of taking my rebellion under cover; stealing, lying, hiding food under the bed. I don’t remember why I did those things, I only vaguely remember doing them. Writing it out and analyzing myself I would guess that it was my way of expressing my anger, my frustration, my darker self, without making any noise or attracting any attention while doing so. Be a good girl. Mind your manners. No I won’t but I’ll make you think I am.

(Why do I write? Am I afraid of the sound / fury of my own voice? Do rage-fueled blog entries count as shouting? I don’t think so.)

Better to shout then. Better to express, be bold, be boisterous, take a stand.

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In the summertime, Trombone, Fresco and I were at the park. It was around a long weekend and Trombone found an empty popcorn bucket on the ground. He picked it up and put it on his head, said, this is my popcorn hat. I said, OK. We walked uptown to get some groceries and he wore his popcorn hat the whole way. We were on the receiving end of a lot of smirks, shrugs, outright laughter. A toddler with a slightly soggy popcorn bucket on his head is pretty amusing. But he didn’t look at anybody. He was completely serious about his hat. And I thought, I love that my kid wears a popcorn bucket on his head. He doesn’t know it’s funny. He is just doing it because – well, who knows why. But he is not afraid to do it. He feels compelled to do it and he just does it.

I want to be like that, I thought. I want to be brave like that. I want to wear a metaphorical popcorn bucket on my head.

Then I forgot.

But now I am remembering.

Metaphorical popcorn bucket.

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Anyway, it was probably just his teeth. He actually gnawed on my wrist knuckle (is that what they’re called? the knob on the wrist?) today and it hurt like a bad ass full of cannon fodder. Only time will tell if I have the only baby in the world who has NO TEETH at all but the lungs of Braveheart.