Paul: Unreasonable Care
Any observation about parenting that can be made has surely been made a thousand times already, but here’s one anyway.
Yesterday as I was washing yogurt-and-breakfast cookie residue off of his favorite little backhoe toy, it struck me—as I was taking special care to avoid getting water inside the friction motor internals of the mechanism—how absurd the relative degree of care I take with my son is.
I don’t mean in the sense of how much I love him, but rather the extent to which I routinely go in service of his low-stakes happiness or well-being. Sometimes when he wakes up from his nap he's upset and hungry and crying, so I'll bring the chopping block down to the floor and make him his little sandwich right there in front of him where he can see me do it, just so he doesn't have to cry in suspense. I try to make sure his little clothes aren't too bunched up under the car seat straps when I buckle him in. I lift him up to turn the lights off when we leave the bathroom after his bath is over, just because he likes doing it.
I've remembered moments in my own childhood where my mother or father went to one extraordinary-seeming length or another to do something that would make me happy, or to take special care of me, and prior to having a kid of my own I'd always felt inwardly sheepish about such moments in retrospect, feeling like I couldn't possibly merit such care and attention.
Now, of course, I understand why someone would go to such lengths for their child—It's their child. I care about my son's emotions automatically and axiomatically; taking special care of him is such autonomic limbic system stuff that I feel like I can barely claim credit for it.
I've been thinking more broadly about moments like that, though. There's certainly an extreme it can be taken to, as anyone who's learned to be careful about expressing a passing preference in earshot of a serious people-pleaser knows. But I think there's something nourishing about going out of your way for someone else for no other reason than to improve their world that little bit, and one thing parenthood gives you, I think, is ongoing exercise of that particular muscle. The trick is to remember that it's there and available outside of my role as a parent.