Bonds

Coddling your child is all about banking up the good bonds between you, in order to spend those good bonds by being there for them, by their side, in their scariest moments.

But, if you don’t periodically spend down those bonds, if they just bank up and up and up, it spoils. And the only way to spend those bonds is for your child to experience shock and fear and pain.

It’s just a hypothesis. But saying that here just now got me thinking, caused me to imagine what scary situation in which I willingly place my child would most test the fortitude of my fatherhood.

I have to be the one who holds them down while the doctors run a panel of allergy tests, who looks them in the face while they cry out in shock and fear and pain, hoping that your face is enough to ease their suffering. But if it means giving them a chance at a better quality of life? I have to do it, I have to hope I have the bonds to spend so we both end up alright. (Hypothetically.)

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Feeling like I’m getting to the point where I could write a whole manual for how to hold your toddler while they fall asleep. It’s all about understanding how their weight is distributed across their skeleton, across the pressure points of where you’re supporting them. If their neck is kinked, adjust your arms and legs and body so that their neck is no longer kinked like that, so it looks like it feels comfortable. Try pulling them closer into your chest. Or try gentle compression, holding their arm snug against your body, to maybe induce some swaddling-related relaxation instinct.

But! If they ask for water (“wudur”), and you don’t already have a bottle of drinking water in the room? Pick them up, walk out to the kitchen, get the bottle of drinking water, and go right back to where you were. Don’t risk them having something in their throat, or in the more-likely scenario where they’re just trying to get you to bring them back into the play room, reinforce the knowledge that you are always there to provide for their basic needs. It doesn’t matter what the situation is, or if emotion or energy was big, make sure they have what they need to feel safe.

Bonding is not a one way street. As you hold them, as they look and fidget and squirm, as they beat back the sandman, as they fail to keep their eyes open, as they fall deeper into sleep… soak it in, how it feels, how they are—carve it into your memory, sear it into your brain. So that you can’t ever not love them more than the world.

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I nearly lost you there
and it’s taken us somewhere
I nearly lost you there
Let’s try to sleep now
—Screaming Trees