I Miss My Family and That’s Okay
Why I don’t feel bad about feeling bad
My partner, my child, and I were all supposed to fly to northern New York for a week to visit my in-laws last Saturday. Then I got sick, and although it wasn’t Covid, I ultimately decided it was irresponsible for me to go. I was able to change my ticket to early October since my sister-in-law is getting married then, so we didn’t lose any money, but now partner and kid are there without me and I’m…surprisingly sad. I’m lonely and jealous and I miss my family.
I thought I would be excited to be on my own for a week. Shouldn’t I be excited? I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, without having to take anyone else’s needs into account. I can’t even remember the last time I was able to do that! I thought I would be able to connect again with the person I used to be before I got married and had a kid.
But the reality is that I have changed.
Having a child may be the single most transformative event I’ve ever experienced. I don’t just mean giving birth, which is its own kind of transformation, but the whole process of becoming a parent. I have learned so much, about myself and about people in general, from experiencing it.
The first thing I remember learning after my baby was born is that love is not a static or finite resource; it grows and changes. This lesson was much welcomed, because I didn’t feel like I really loved my baby at first. I felt the attachment of a really good babysitter, not a mom. But when my baby was about six weeks old, I felt something shift, a tiny blossom forming. I had him in my arms and I was taking a picture of him, and I thought to myself, “Wow. He is so beautiful.” I remember telling my partner about the moment nonchalantly, but the next day, there was more love for my baby there than the previous day. And it just kept happening, day after day, until I eventually had a massive garden blooming and overflowing with love.
Sometimes the love I have for my child is so scary, I feel like it might kill me. I don’t like to feel vulnerable, and having a kid was like having a second heart outside my body, doing whatever it wants, totally out of my control. I am the type of person who really enjoys the illusion of control in pretty much every setting I can think of, so as he gets older and more independent, I get more and more terrified. (I am working on it.) I was already a little bit terrified a while ago, when I was going out of town for the weekend with friends, because it would be the longest I had been without my child. And then, two days into the trip, my spouse called me and told me he thought the kiddo broke his arm.
To say I was upset is…a little minimizing. I cursed and cried, then basically hung up the phone like “what are you doing talking to me take him to the emergency room” and started packing. I cried more at the intrusive thoughts of what he might look like and what he might be feeling. How much pain was he in? Was he scared? Did he need me? I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t stand still. Like most parents I know, I feel like I would do anything for my kid. Luckily, the friends I was with are all moms, so the only question anyone asked me was “what do you need?”
Ultimately, the break was just a small fracture, my child was fine, and I didn’t need to go home after all. But the solidarity of my friends, the consideration they showed me in those moments despite what it could have cost them, meant a lot to me. It was a consideration borne of experience. They all know the terrifying reality of loving someone so much.
My friends’ actions were more than just understanding, though. My friends also know how to think about other people, as they have shown me countless times before. This is something else I have learned more thoroughly after becoming a parent, because living with other people means being in a constant state of compromise.
I thought I understood this lesson before I had a kid, but it turns out that living with a roommate feels a little different than living with my spouse and my child, who is completely dependent on me and for whom I am legally responsible. Taking other people into consideration went from being an occasional annoyance to a way of life. I am always considering someone else’s wants and needs, and it’s not in the socially altruistic way I did in school. It’s no longer an idealistic type of consideration, like, what career will do the greatest good for the greatest number of people? It’s a very tangible, immediate sort of consideration, like, what can I make for dinner that everyone will eat? Or, how many loads of laundry need to be done today? How many appointments need to be made or attended? What does everyone need from the store?
This is not to say my partner does not also do these things because he does. But I don’t even think that’s the point because the lesson is more universal than that: no one ever really gets their way because we are always taking others into consideration. I know my son feels this because he tells me all the time about how he doesn’t want to do the things I tell him he has to do. He doesn’t want to take turns while playing his favorite video game, or wait until his dad is done working to ask him a question about birds, or share the last cookie with the person who actually made them (me). I want to tell him, bad news, kiddo, because it’s not just in our family or families in general. Being considerate of others is necessary for living in a society.
Again, I thought I understood this lesson earlier, but becoming a parent has made me see it from a different perspective. Being responsible for raising a child into a functional adult made me really consider my values. It feels more important than ever to teach my child empathy, to think of others, and to accept not getting everything he wants all of the time. Did you know you have to teach them not to be sociopaths?? Thank goodness I had an honest friend who told me this before I had a kid; now I feel like slightly less of a failure when my child says or does something slightly less-than-empathetic.
Understanding that my child doesn’t come pre-programmed with a set of morals leads me to another thing I learned through becoming a parent: none of us really knows who we are or what we’re doing. Like I said before, I mean this in a universal sense, not just for parents, but becoming a parent really showed me just how little self-awareness I have, often in humiliating ways. Like so many parents that came before and will come after me, I had a list in my head of all the things that I would never do/say/allow. I was confident in the parenting style I had chosen with my partner, I read lots of parenting books, and I felt very well-prepared. (Did I mention that I like control?) But from my child’s birth onward, all the plans and ideas we had just blew up in our faces, one by one, at all the different stages of his life so far, and probably all the stages for the rest of his life:
- Baby born on-time in early January after my semester is over? Nope.
- Gonna breastfeed and it’s gonna be super easy? Nope and nope.
- Gonna make all his baby food myself? Nope.
- Potty-trained by age two? Hahahahaha nope.
- He’s gonna eat what I eat? Absolutely not.
- Limited educational screen time? His three favorite things are making videos, watching videos, and playing video games.
- Gentle parenting? Yeah, for maybe thirty non-consecutive minutes a day.
This discrepancy, between who I thought I would be as a parent and who I actually am, is jarring. My expectations often do not line up with reality, and that is very uncomfortable. Parenting can be incredibly selfless, but it’s also surprisingly self-involved because we are all trying to figure it out, in real time, from the inside out. It’s a humbling experience. I thought I knew who I was, but who I am to my child is less about what I know and more about what I do. To him, who I am is about my behavior, not my thoughts.
I know this because I can see it with my own eyes. My kid called himself an idiot the other day and that’s on me. I don’t actually like the word ‘idiot’ because of its historical use, and I don’t really believe that I’m an idiot, but when I do something that I deem extra…silly?…I have been known to call myself an idiot as kind of an exclamation. I may also, on occasion, refer to other people as idiots if I am doing something stressful, like driving a car or reading the news. So when I heard him make a silly mistake in his game and then call himself an idiot in the exact tone and cadence that I do, I wasn’t exactly surprised. But I knew I had to address it, admit I was responsible for it, and then go inward and try to figure out why I still have this negative, ableist self-talk after all these years. Will I ever figure it out? Probably not. But the self-reflection is invaluable.
So you know what? I’m not upset that I can’t just go back to a previous version of myself when my family is gone. I’m not going to worry about whether or not I ought to be excited, and I’m just going to feel the way I feel. I’m a different person now, and it makes sense that I’m sad: my best friend and my heart are on the other side of the country, I don’t remember how to be selfish anymore, and I don’t know who I am or what I’m doing! But there is one thing I do know: in my little family, I am never alone, even when I am actually alone. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.
