every day in every way...

[metaphortunate]

I was saying elsewhere, in context, that I have a job and a toddler and I just do not have time right now for personal growth and learning. I've been thinking more about that. It's a lie. Let me do myself - and Mr. E - justice. Right now we are both having personal growth out the ass.

See, we had a really good decade-long relationship based largely on extremely good boundaries about our personal decisions and understanding what wasn't any of each other's goddamn business. That sounds harsh, but it really isn't; it's based on respect and mutual trust. You might be surprised how many decisions just don't have to be joint ones, even when you live with someone, if you don't want them to be. And when we did make joint decisions, we had developed this skill of being able to tell pretty well who the decision was more important to, and having that person make the decision. I mean, as a system it sounds really vulnerable to abuse and I guess it is, but if you're both doing it in good faith, it works great. It did.

And now we have the Junebug, and every single goddamn decision about him is a joint decision. Every single decision is both our business, and we both care. We both care so much. So we're having to develop entirely new ways to talk to each other and make decisions and manage conflict and I'm so tired. I mean, and I'm so lucky. I know that. I'm so happy I have a partner who cares that much. I'm so happy I have another parent for the Junebug instead of a guy who "helps". But my Christ, are we having personal growth.

There's no personal growth from fun that I know of. You never hear people say "You know that relaxing vacation where nothing went wrong, I wouldn't give up that experience if I could, it made me who I am today." No fucking growth in your comfort zone, you have to have it in your Uncomfortable As Shit Zone. Which is where I live now. To be fair, I must admit that the company is great here. But the theme activities suck.

Comments

[lovepeaceohana]

More and more often I think when people (*cough* my mother *cough*) say stuff like "children keep you young" I think what they actually mean is that having kids actively regresses you to childhood, and so you deal with shit like getting extremely irritable when you haven't napped and oh yeah, growing pains, remember those? Weren't those great? Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

*solidarity*

[metaphortunate]

ahaha there is certainly something to that. :P

[karenbynight]

I've been growing this theory that a lot of the things people say about parenthood are actually koans where you have to meditate on them to figure out what they really say, and it's nothing like what they appear to mean when you first look at them. Like the way I was appalled to discover that "parenthood really changes your priorities" did not mean that I would suddenly have a clarified priority list with kids at number 1 and everything else falling neatly in line like some zen scheduling master. It meant that there would now be kids' needs perpetually in spots 1-5 and everything else could fight in some messy eternal death match to see if there even was a #6 spot to take.

I'm totally adding "children keep you young" to my list of parenting koans, thanks!