When I was little I was taught that you don’t bring work problems into the home. Work should remain at work and bringing those home will be the equivalent of bringing home bad karma. The way I would manage this would be that if I had a bad day at work, I would retreat inside me, go to the bedroom right after dinner, read a book or somehow engage in Lisa-time and internally recharge. Doing this would ensure that the next day I would be back to normal and Dennis would not have to hear about “so and so at work”. Lately, though, I have found that even though I retreat to my personal recuperation area after a bad day, I can’t seem to replenish my energy like before. When Dennis asked me about it I told him that I wasn’ t sure what was going on and that it was confusing me. This is what he wrote back:
I know what you mean. There is a feeling I have with Alan that wasn’t present with Lucas….. since we aren’t planning to have more kids and Alan is our last baby…. When Alan reaches another milestone of development it’s like we lost that part of his babyhood forever…. It wasn’t like with Lucas, where, when he started crawling we were most concerned about the extra energy that was needed to keep him out of trouble. With Alan, it’s different. Instead of lamenting the extra energy it will take to watch him AND his brother, I’m more sad about the loss of the stage he’s leaving behind, knowing that we no longer have a cute bundle of joy sleeping peacefully in the crib.
Maybe it is this loss of innocence that is driving your mental state lately. I know that it was really difficult for me to write that last paragraph, thinking back on when Alan was our newborn baby. And maybe this is why people love becoming grandparents – they’ve forgotten the joys of those early stages after so many years without them.
Perhaps it is like a drug – and it becomes an incentive to want to have more kids. Having that baby in your arms and seeing those baby features must cause hormone release in you that makes you feel complete, and after several months of that, you get less of a high as they grow. Our nature is to seek more of that pleasurable feeling and the only way to do it is have more kids. (Not that I’m suggesting it, just thinking out loud)
The other way of looking at it is that if Alan is our last child, then you and I have passed a big milestone in our lives….probably the biggest to date – and the next big milestone isn’t really on the radar like all the past ones have. For example, ever since you have been a little kid, your ‘big’ life events have been the following:
- Go to school
- Graduate high school
- Go to college
- Graduate from college
- Start a career
- Get married
- Have kids
So now what? Obviously, we raise the kids – something that will take us at least 18 more years, but now we have completed all the major events of our young lives – all the things that have been out on the horizon for as long as we can remember.
Even though we can physically have more kids for several more years, we have made the decision to not do so. There is a certain finality to that decision that perhaps brings to light the fact that we have no more big events left of our youth…the next stage is middle age, grandkids, and then our final years. With Alan leaping through all the developmental hurdles that took Lucas much longer to reach, we feel his babyhood slipping through our fingers much faster than we expected – and I don’t think we were ready for that.
Now that I have written this email and given it much thought, I begin to see that this email is very heavy but very relevant to where we are right now. Do you think that there is some truth to this email? Could this be what is driving you into constant recharge mode?
–Dennis
I asked him for permission to post his email because I was so taken aback, so touched by the fact that Dennis is so incredibly insightful that he can reach into my soul and show me feelings and emotions that I couldn’t even decipher on my own. Our baby is growing up fast and our acceptance of that is not. I can’t go on my own and recharge because this has nothing to do with work and all to do with us. This is not a one-day thing, it’s a years-long thing. The only way to get out of this funk is to accept, embrace and enjoy that in the next blink of an eye, we will be done with babies and babyhood, and smack down in the long process of raising children.
Very touching.