DON’T PANIC
if only Alana could read.
She panics a lot for no reason. Wake up – panic! See you leave the room – panic! Get put on the floor – panic! Have the spoon full of food briefly removed from her gaping maw – panic! Everything in the world is cause for panic.
How is a panic different from a shriek? A shriek is a reaction to pain, a deeper appreciation for the pain one is undergoing having learned that pain is not pleasant, which causes further pain. It not actual owie owie pain…more anything that is antiPod pain.
A panic is pissing your pants over the potential for pain before it even happens. And obviously, I mean that literally, as i can’t believe i forgot how many times you have to change a diaper.
On one level, I get it. She is not-dull enough to recognize needs and almost-complete inability to satisfy them. This is very disconcerting to anyone. Grown men will cry when in the back of a squad car for only a few minutes.
On the other hand, if she is dull enough to forget that her needs have thus far been addressed in a reasonably-efficient and humane manner…she was just 8, after all, 240 days she’s made it so far without lifting a finger on her own behalf…she is dull enough to forget that i ignored her while she was needlessly panicking.
i know she is only panicking, and there are no genuine issues, and I’m sick of her panicking, so i let her panic a little more. I think she is not as happy to see me as sometimes she was. I don’t know. I kinda don’t care. I only have her about 1.5 days a week now, but with Beckie on business trips and , they are extremely fucking intense 1.5 days a week. I’ve been trying to do right by her when she needs me too, but its functional, not maternal.
The strategy has worked on Genevieve, the independence forced on her by me makes her so obviously different when she is around Beckie who is much more nurturing. Perhaps I am still assuming a lot more reason exists currently with Alana than actually does, the first shreds of cognition such a salve for my weariness I wish them to be more than they are. Though in fairness to me, I’ve seen her crawl almost 9 feet before having a panic attack when I went from the office into the kitchen. She started to moan, I called to her, she slithered from the office doorway to the kithen. She would never have found those 9 feet were it not for my respect for her potential, which is a fancy way of saying lazy parenting.
A recent teaching moment while feeding her went like this: give me the spoon, give me the dish, give me the tray. fuck it…i’m grabbing all of them, the shit could come down any second now! I tried to show her there is no cause for alarm, there were more spoons and an entire tupperware full of food, but as though chugging a pan galactic gargle blaster, she is addled about the head. No explanations or higher learning will help. Only simple guidelines: DON’T PANIC.
