Tag: Children

Love Child

On By Swarn GillIn Parenting, Philosophy, Psychology4 Comments

After my son was born I suddenly realized how people could be baby crazy and wrote an apology to all those who I thought were insane.  🙂

In that same vein I would like to continue with this topic as I reflect upon the love I have for my son right now.

It’s insane.  The love is like no other.  It feels so strong that it’s like it could literally jump out of my chest and wrap itself

My son at 9 weeks
My son at 9 weeks

around my boy.  I am not going to say it’s better or worse, but it’s unique.  It’s like falling in love, but as I mentioned before, even when you fall in love it feels like it’s based on something in the other person that is describable, even though the love you feel is more than the sum of those tangible criteria.  This feeling is totally biological.  My son barely has a personality, has barely acknowledged my existence, knows nothing about me, and we can’t communicate, but my love grows each in every day.  So much so that it scares me.

I’ve always tried to understand the darker nature in ourselves and what I am feeling right now helps understand some behaviors better, while others I am even more clueless.  For instance I don’t understand how people can do unspeakable cruelty to their children; beat them, scream at them, shake them to death, forget about them.  I am not talking about parents who work very hard to try to provide for their kids and whose hearts are broken that they don’t get to spend more time with them.  But real abuse.  It feels as wrong to me as 2+2=5.  It’s just not an option.

On the other hand I get a glimpse into the type of parent who would do very irrational things to protect their children.  Or parents who would make their whole world revolve around their children to the point of their detriment.  I am not condoning these behaviors only that I see it.  It’s not an abstract thing to me anymore.  I can see how the intense love you feel would make you do some pretty stupid things.  As intense love is prone to do, for whomever you feel it for.  But it is still very different from that intense love and passion of romantic love.  Perhaps I lack some depth of feeling but there is something about falling in love with an adult that is different because the other person is an adult.  You have the feeling that they can take care of themselves, they have the ability to make their own decisions, and there is a certain understanding that you can’t control the other person (healthy love anyway, obviously many try to control their partners and this usually become dysfunctional quickly).  The helplessness and the innocence of a baby turns your love into such a fury of protection that it’s without measure.  As my love grows I get so scared about what would happen if I lost him.  I already have no idea how I’d emotionally deal with something so big.  I hope I never have to pass through such a trial because I am not sure I could carry the weight.  So I get it.  I see it as though I stand on the top of a hill and see how slippery the slope is to just doing stupid

Trying to convince my son to smile...he wasn't quite ready at 5 weeks. :)
Trying to convince my son to smile…he wasn’t quite ready at 5 weeks. 🙂

things out of love.  And whenever this happens I am thankful for it because I know I have increased my capacity for forgiveness.

And though I see such things I know that I am capable of keeping my sense of reason.  It is precisely because I love my son so much that I know that if I really want to give him the best opportunities in this world he needs to have a dad who maintains a measure of reason in the face of overwhelming emotion.  So I must continue to be vigilant and direct my love into ways that will strengthen him and not weaken him.

Just a number

On By Swarn GillIn Philosophy2 Comments

I hit that age on this past Sunday.  The big 4-0.  I celebrated in in a fashion that can be best described as lame.  But more aptly as a new parent, in the middle of the semester with work to do.  I relaxed,  had some delicious waffles and stayed in my pajamas most of the day except when I had to go take out the garbage.  Normally I do that in pajamas too, but it was cold and the snow was a bit deep. 🙂

The age I am sure doesn’t mean quite the same thing as it did to my parents or my grandparents.  There is a good chance it will not be on average the half way point to the end.  We stand on the precipice of some amazing advances in science (as perhaps anybody could say I suppose from any time) that may allow us to live longer lives.  Society makes a big deal of round numbers in our base 10 numbering system.  Personally I think perfect squares would have been a numerically more satisfying way to mark off “big” birthdays.  You have a lot of them while you are young, but thankfully get much further apart as you get older.  So I’ve decided to fear the age 49 instead. 🙂  Society tells me there is something special about 40 so I thought it was a good time to reflect and so I gave in to society and tried to take a look at my life.

The reality is that today is only a few days different from when I was in my 30’s and honestly I loved my late 30’s.  There is a certain peacefulness that comes in your late 30’s when you’ve sort of experienced a good portion of the crap that life throws at you so that it doesn’t really throw you for a loop anymore.  Things unexpected happen, but I guess you just learn to expect the unexpected.  Things don’t seem quite as hard.

When I was a teenager I saw the person I wanted to be, but I felt like that person was trapped inside.  It was only once I moved away from home and took my own path in life that the person I wanted to be has come out.  I think I’ve become that person, but I am better than what I envisioned because when I was a teenager I saw that person as an endpoint.  But for any human being who walks through the world there is no end to the journey.  You will always change. At least you always should.  Most importantly I’ve learned how to see the ways in which I want to be better and have the patience to realize that these things don’t happen overnight.  I have given myself the identity of an unfinished project and that is who I always will be.  Because I’m comfortable with that, I think that has given me the ability to enjoy the moment that always worry about the future.

Of course just having a child gives one much more pause for that.  I am sure there are many at my age who are close to seeing their children move out into the world on their own.  For me that journey is just beginning.  In some ways it’s tiring to think about.  Thinking about how old I’ll be when my son graduates high school and all those other landmarks events in a child’s life.  Wondering whether I’ll even see grandchildren if my son chooses to have children and if he waits as long as I do.  But mostly it’s rejuvenating.  At 40 I get to see through the eyes of the young.  At 40 I am reminiscing about my childhood in ways I have never done before.  And if I wasn’t so sleepy I’d feel so completely young right now. 🙂  I’ve decided though, what does sleepiness have to do with the joy in my heart.  And much of the sleepiness is of my own making.  He is sleeping right now and I could too, and simply wake up with him when he needs fed.  But I love just being able to look at him, to watch him sleep.  To be reminded that there is peacefulness, and the simple joys in this world that we forget far too often.

And there is nothing like having a child that makes you take stock of who you are.  That peacefulness that he represents is because is innocent.  Unaware of hate, and racism, and all the things that make the weight of the world seem so heavy.  His shoulders are completely free of it all.  I think we all know a time will come when that innocence is lost.  I get why people try to preserve it as long as they can.  There are things in life that you cannot unlearn or forget, and so it is almost with envy that I look at my child.  I do not begrudge him though because all will happen in its own time.  And maybe it is only in our eyes that we see them so free of the pain we all carry about the harshness of the world.  But perhaps tears over being hungry or a wet diaper is no different than the tears we shed over death, misery, and tragedy.  Our pain is all relative to what we know.  Nevertheless, knowing what is to come and what he will learn, I must look inward.  Knowing that I will be one of his primary examples of what a man is.  He will learn so much just from watching me.  So I know that I must continue strive to be a better man, because the world needs better men.  Gender inequality still exists in almost all corners of the world and even in the freest of societies.

I shall end this off with the obligatory advice that my 40 years of wisdom has brought me and that is simply to tell you to embrace change.  Take it to heart.  Change is evitable and so if you embrace it, it becomes as comforting and secure as anything else.  Life passes us by when we trade away change for the security of the static and predictable.  Variety is truly the spice of life.  Keep trying new things.  Learn something new.  Get inspired.  You will find that time begins to slow down and then you won’t wake up when day and you’ll be 40 or 50 or 60, because you will have enjoyed each moment.  And remember one of the best ways to enjoy each moment is to make each moment better for others.  I am well aware that I am truly blessed for where I grew up, and the family and friends I have had along the way.  Always share that joy if you have been fortunate enough to have that joy shared with you.

Love and the Future

On By Swarn GillIn Parenting, Philosophy, Psychology, Science6 Comments

Lately and perhaps not surprisingly with a newborn in my arms I have been pondering love again.  This, in addition with a psychology class I sat in on last semester about the subject, and some other articles I read recently, has led me to feel like exploring my thoughts a little.  Not too long ago I was conversing with a fellow blogger who posted some writings from a Buddhist about love that said something to the order of “true love can only exist in the present”.  As I paused for thought, I appreciated the truth of those words in an ideal sense, but it struck me as not how love seems to

From www.mindbodygreen.com
From http://www.mindbodygreen.com

work.

When I’ve fallen in love before, and others that I’ve talked to share similar experiences, thoughts of the future seem to go with it.  I often described it as painting pictures in your mind.  You fall in love, you start to see happy times, future celebrations, children, growing old together.  These pictures seem extremely vivid.  Like memories you’ve built on events yet to happen.  From a biological sense this seems to make sense because that is how love should work.  Love builds attachments, and attachments in this world give you strength.  If love did not make us feel this way it seems like we would lose an important part of what love is really for; to give us companionship and togetherness, and increase our chances of survival in a world filled with uncertainty.  Feelings of security and visions of the future seem so tangible to me, I wonder if it is true to others who have been in love.  Nevertheless, if you could truly stay focused on the present, maybe this could take away much of the pain when a relationship ends.  And I think sometimes this is why a relationship ends.  You focus on the future that you take the other for granted in the present.   And the loss of a relationship leaves you with vivid visions of events that will now no longer take place.  Those events are in your memory and I’ve always felt that recovery from a relationship literally requires erasing those memories.

As I look at my son in my arms, I am filled up with love.  Of course this also makes sense from a biological standpoint.  I think the love of a parent in animals is somewhat proportional to how helpless they are when they are born.  Human children are completely helpless such that any indifference on our part would lead to less care and more infant mortality.  Some creatures have the ability to “hit the ground running” parents are protective to a certain degree, but especially if you are born prey, the kid has to kind of take care of himself a bit too and learn to run as fast as possible.  Love comes in many forms and certainly the love for one’s child is different than romantic love, but  I started to ask myself, what is that I love about my son?  If asked the same question about my wife I could point to a large list of qualities in her, I could recount numerous wonderful memories and happy moments. There are of course physical attributes too as a basis for attraction. The love has a clear basis.  No quality is perhaps unique in her, but all together she certainly is unique.  The fact that I love her is not surprising, and the fact that there aren’t others out there who I might love or have loved her is not surprising either.  But as I look at my son I wonder what is it based on other than a biological drive to love my child.  I find him beautiful of course.  Every parent finds their child beautiful.  Once again if we didn’t, we might be less likely to want to take care of them.  But he has no personality to speak of.  He hasn’t been alive more than a month yet and we have few memories together at all.  We have nothing in common except some DNA.  We can’t really do a whole lot together.  It is a purely one sided relationship.  We give and he takes.  If this were anybody else, friends would say,” you need to get out of that relationship.” Lol

I then read a story about someone having twins prematurely and losing one of them and of course I naturally thought about how I would feel if

My wife and our son
My wife and our son

my son were to die.  Of course it would be grievously painful, but I thought to myself what would I be grieving about?  If I lost my wife, the pain of numerous past memories and a deep sense of loss over qualities she possessed that I would no longer be privilege to would flood my mind for many years to come, in addition to the loss of the future I dreamed of us having together.  It seems that if I did lose my son the majority of my grief would be grieving the loss of his future.  For as someone in love with his child I see a future filled with vacations, camping trips, teaching him science, helping him with homework, going to graduations, seeing him grow and hit milestones in his life as we all do.

The future is truly uncertain and so loving only in the present seems wise in some respect, but I’m not sure it’s possible.  I think the best we can do is try not to build those hopes and dreams so solidly that we allow them take different shapes.  Nevertheless a part of me feels like the love I have right now for my child seems less solid somehow because it seems largely based on a feeling completely intangible and dreams of the future.  However, I know that as he grows and I spend more time with him it will simply gets stronger and I know that as we do build more memories and I do get to know him as a person that I will be more and more in love with him.  Given how much I love him already the thought of that fills me with nothing but pleasure.  That is at least one vision of the future that I can hold on to without fear.

Unhealthy thoughts

On By Swarn GillIn Parenting, Psychology2 Comments

A friend of mine gave us this adorable little lumberjack outfit as a gift for the birth of our child.  It’s probably going to be a year or so before he fits into it, but he is going to look so cute when he is wearing it.  In my mind I was picture how handsome he is going to look and then all of a sudden I was thinking how adorable he would look in all sorts of outfits.  He’s such a beautiful baby.  I wouldn’t be surprised if professionals wanted to take his picture.  He’d become a baby model.  Then I started picturing him as this little toddler, hair-styled, posing for pictures in magazines and advertisements.  The world confirming how beautiful my child is, and me feeling good the whole way.  Then I started imagining become all self-centered and narcissistic about his looks and this horrible teenage model who all the other kids hated, and I was the cause of it all.  Then all of a sudden the metaphorical sound of a record scratching occurred in my head, and I was like “Whoa, where did that come from?”

For a second I got inside the mind of those crazy parents who rear their children to be in beauty contests, or TV children from the outset.  Maybe in some ways that was a good thing as I always like to try to understand people, even where what seem like a ridiculous and foreign notion comes from. Then there it was, popping into my head though I was diametrically opposed to such practices before having a kid.  Well I still am, but I think I saw the beginning of the reasoning.  Love is a strange thing.  If you’ve fallen in love before, you know that you sort of just expect everyone else that you know to love that person too.  Maybe the love I feel for my son is making me want others to love him just is much, which neither practical or realistic.  But that is probably a more innocent explanation.  Individuality takes time to develop in a new life.  Somewhere around 6 months a baby will realize that it is a separate being from the mother.  They learn individuality from watching their parents of course, so even individuality is something that is learned through others.  In the time before they see themselves as extensions of their mother.  I pondered that perhaps the relationship works both ways.  It’s something that I have noted before having a child perhaps, but didn’t really understand.  How long does it take parents to not see children as an extension of themselves?  For some parents it seems to never end.  As a professor I have had to deal with many parents who will not let their child make a decision for themselves even though they are college aged.  It is clear to me that the mother who enters who daughter into beauty pageants from the age of a toddler is clearly not respecting the individuality of the child as is doing it for themselves.  Parents who force their kids into one profession or another also are projecting their wishes on their child.  So I thank those unhealthy thoughts for putting what I knew in my subconscious into my conscious that I better always remember to respect the individuality of my child.  I still can’t wait to see him in that lumberjack outfit though. 🙂

Agrajag: Defenseless

On By Swarn GillIn Humor, Philosophy, Science2 Comments

Being in Australia you’re supposed to represent my near future, but your blogging into the wee hours of the morning sounds more like my recent past.  Thank you for your wonderful reply. 🙂

Your post can certainly be about racism as it has been on my mind obviously a lot of late.  Not only the last few days, but ever since the Travyon Martin verdict too.  Not sure if that news story hit Australia, but it was a rather sad case where a 17 year black kid was shot by a Latino man on a neighborhood watch because he thought he look suspicious.  He called the police and the police told him to stand down and that they were on their way.  Instead he went after the kid and when the kid attacked him after a forced confrontation and the guy pulled out a gun and shot the kid, claiming it was self-defense.  While I don’t believe the guy was racist, the judicial system certainly is, not to mention the gun laws in the state of Florida supported this man’s actions and he was acquitted of any wrong doing.  Racism is a fine topic to begin with.  Who knows where we will end? 🙂

I don’t think 24 resilient, thinking humans is going to be enough.   We’d probably be exiled, because that would be the stupid thing to do to your last 24. lol What you describe is the premise for a movie called Idiocracy actually.  Not sure if you’ve seen it.  Basically since non-thinking people seem to be outbreeding the thinkers that in the future the population will be dominated by idiots. lol  It’s quite amusing actually. 🙂

Human babies are quite defenseless.  It is true.  I suppose there could be lots of reasons why.  The first thought that comes to my mind that the simple bonus of having a higher intelligence as an evolutionary advantage allows us a greater variety of options in protecting our young, so the young don’t need to just get ready to flee like a fawn or colt.  In addition the fact that we are social animal means that children are also protected by the community and not just by parents.  Humans developing physical attributes quickly simply wouldn’t have been a necessary adaption.

Defenseless Baby (Photo Credit: http://www.dangerouscreation.com/2009/02/so-innocent-so-defenseless-so-gullible/)

If intelligence was favored by our species then we have the ability to also teach more through communication and personal guidance.  We can communicate more complex thoughts and ideas than other animals, but this learning too takes time and perhaps at the cost of the development of physical skills as well.  I would imagine that a human child growing up in the wild with parents would be more independent than ones growing in a more sedentary lifestyle.  That being said, I think it’s interesting how the helplessness of the human child promotes a more sedentary lifestyle.  I guess we were destined to farm and create civilization.  lol

Guns, Germs, and Steel in addition the Douglas Adams speech that I linked you really are the two things that led me down an intellectual path of looking at society in a completely different way.   They were an intellectual springboard I have to say. 🙂  I completely agree with your statement “that change is the only constant”.  It’s especially a good statement because of its seemingly paradoxical nature. 🙂  And you also expressed it quite beautifully when you were talking about using the physical universe to guide our decisions.  It seems so odd to me that, it is quite fearful to people.  It is grand and always changing and I guess that is the source of fear.  It’s probably the change most likely, because after all God is a fairly grand idea and many people believe in God.  Of course the nature of God has changed throughout history but people prefer to see him constant or unchanging.