You've never met a transcendental equation before, have you?

Baby A is doing better.

And now I know what normal parenting tired feels like. I still don't quite get enough sleep. She's practically walking without help, and the child does...not...stop. I call her my force of nature. Every waking moment is spent upright, engaged, moving, testing, eating, pulling, screaming or babbling. So I get the tired thing.

But this tired has nothing whatsoever to say to the tired of the first 5 months. They don't talk, they don't speak the same language, and they probably have totally different life goals. That tired was hellish. It made me nauseous and still does when I think back to it. It was in-human. And it was not what "all parents go through."

And just as with many situations we find ourselves in, especially those which are not common among people but are difficult, once you've been there, you can usually tell other people who have been there, too. You start to tell them your story and very quickly get "oh my god, I know!" or "Yes, that was really hard!" Phrases like that. People who have been through some other version of that stage of life, on the other hand, seem to have a very different reaction.

It is as if they have lost faith in other people's different experiences. If they had an easy time with their baby and breastfeeding, then what are you doing stopping at 4 months? If their kid sleeps anywhere and everywhere, maybe you're just too sensitive when it comes to your kid and should stop spoiling them. And if they just solved for "x" by isolating it one one side of an equation, then what the hell are you doing having such a hard time with your "transcen"-whatever? See, in calculus, just after I got the hang of solving for "x", I met the transcendental equation. Try solving for "x" in:

x = cos(x)

Good luck with the dividing both sides by...anything. You solve it graphically, or with Newton's method. But someone who hasn't gone through it before will say very different things about an equation like that than someone who has. Just like with babies, marriage, depression, moving to another country, etc.

I know what it is like to try getting pregnant for many years. But, I have no idea what it is like to have had a miscarriage. Or to go through a divorce. And that means that I don't have the experiences of those things in context. And have no business judging someone else going through them. I know empathy is about putting yourself in someone else's shoes, but I think we've forgotten along the way that we can't actually do it.

Well, we can put ourselves as we are, with only our experiences, in those shoes. But that is completely different from actually going through those things. So we need to trust the people going through them when they say it is hard, or say something else about the process that we find hard to believe.

Can I tell you how relieved and affirmed I felt the first time I talked with another mom with a sleepless baby? About how hard it was. How depressing. We had so many experiences in common that it suddenly felt like a situation I was in and not so much like my lack of fortitude or calm. I mean, we kept saying "I know!" and "Yes, yes, yes" to each others stories, down to the every third day showers. Not "lucky if you shower by 4pm" but "negotiating which spouse showers that day based on who is leaving the house."

The context of the situations in which people suffer, great or small suffering, is everything. But we forget this, and wind up judging the people for failing to sufficiently handle a situation we have never been in. Instead of assuming that the situation is hard and that we would act almost the same way if it was us. If you can't solve for "x" by dividing or multiplying, you must not be very smart.