Always and no longer a parent

Smallsteps and I had lots of things planned for this weekend. A birthday party for a friend's child today, ice skating for the first time, playing at an indoor park and of course, Daddy/ Daughter coffee and milk in the city together. She has been ill all week with a bed cough so all the plans have been scrapped. Instead, it will be building lego and singing instead.

There have been five days since August where she hasn't had some kind of flu - we know because we have to track everything and have every meal and reaction recorded since January 2017. Persistent illnesses make it hard to get out and enjoy the outside that much. It is a nice sunny day which is why skating was the plan but even sledding is our of the question.

When she was born she spent the first weeks in intensive care and this was after the last 6 months my wife had been in chronic pain due to the pregnancy and had been in hospital herself. A doctor friend of mine said at the time, "you guys have had it rough but it means that it will get easier later". This is true but "easier" is a relative term that is based on experience.

I have no doubt that life will get easier but it might not change that much, it might just get easier to deal with. Again, resiliency is a learned skill that is based on experience and what is unbearable for one could be another day at the office for another.

For the most part though, the world as a whole is improving and slowly more and more people have access to various forms support, whether it is financial or social. It likely works in waves though with a two steps forward, one back kind of deal. Much like the markets that keep creating new floor prices as more come in to stabilize the base. Ups are higher, so are the lows.

I am hoping that this will be the case for my daughter's health as well as my family's general position where while there are going to be many lows to come, each is not as low as the last and perhaps, not as frequent either. Small steps for @smallsteps and her parents.

The entire evolutionary process that has taken all things has come through incremental changes that build to become significant factors over time. The evolution of the individual throughout a lifetime is no different, from learning to walk to walking in space, it all takes a progression of skill and no one can do the learning for us.

Knowledge however can be learned from another and be repeated without every needing to be applied. The internet is filled with repetition of other's words but very few create much of their own content through lived experience. Maybe it is part of people spending so much time finding shortcuts to getting what they want and leveraging technology in various ways that means they do not need to learn the skills themselves.

I know of parents that have beds that rock their child gently to sleep while they are on Facebook or sit children in front of a screen so they can do their own things undisturbed. Parenting via proxy. At what point does the parent no longer qualify for the 'parent' label?

To each their own right? What skills will these children be missing, what understanding will be lost when their early experiences with people are outsourced to machinery? We are finding out now as there are the growing expectations that provisions in this world are supplied and guaranteed by someone else.

Unskilled reliance on skills.

Who knows what will happen in @smallsteps' future but I try to prepare for the worst as best I can while working toward the best, the best I can. Even sick, she is consistently going forward self-directed and curiously. That is a good sign in my book.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
_{(posted from phone)}

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