Always 10 steps ahead

I fast forward a lot. I extrapolate, two, five, ten steps ahead of here and now.

Sometimes it is helpful, with a hint of side-show freaky. Like when I have 6 different
errands all in my head, mapped out (usually within a few seconds) based on not having to make left turns in a car. Or the order in which to do 10 things before boarding a train, to minimize how long it will take.

I do this with some sort of "when it is all done, then I can relax" notion in my head, I think. And unless I am alone, and not responsible for anyone else but me, and in a sealed room with no phone,...it works just like that. As soon as another person or the outside world, or heck, even a flu virus, get wind of this thinking, they all rush in and ruin my perfect little world where I get that International Foods coffee moment at the end of all the effort.

And this has been causing me a lot of grief with parenting. Even knowing that the crappy fake but sweet and easy coffee moments don't happen, the 10 steps ahead stuff gets me into trouble. Like this evening.

Baby A had what I might actually call her first tantrum when she woke up from a late, much needed nap that had been really hard to get her to take in the first place. Let's just say, he didn't wake up in a good mental space. One of those, inhale sharply, pop up on all fours immediately wakings she does so often that would have benefited greatly from me popping up and rocking her back to sleep for another 5 minutes even.

Well, I didn't do that this time, because it is hard to tell, and it was late in the day, and if she slept too long then what happened to her being hungry and me needing to give her that medicated bath for her horrible rash that isn't getting better, and I didn't want to bathe her after a meal because what if she threw up in the bath and I had to start over and I'm already tired, and she doesn't feel good, and M is out of town and I should try to keep her to a schedule because I don't want her to freak out too much and make bedtime even worse for her which will make me upset and I'm on my own with this and I get angry sometimes and I so don't want to be that way tonight and....

So I was going to talk about the screaming in the bath and my decision matrix failing me at that point, but apparently my issues with the fast forward are quite adequately covered by the 5 minutes before the bath.

The more I go down this path (and I'm a long distance runner where this stuff is concerned), the worse place I get to in terms of being flexible. And being flexible seems to me to be one of the best skills to cultivate for myself with baby A. And then I'm right back in this nasty power struggle place, where I'm fighting some "good fight" to keep the baby seated in the tub even though she's tired and upset and nothing is calming down. It really bites me in the ass, this tendency. A lot right now.

And as with many other mental habits, it was really useful at some point in my life, in another situation. To get a bagillion things done in a day. Okay, it was at least helpful toward that goal. The goal itself was a bit messed up. But it is so completely un-useful, to the point of being harmful to my connecting with my kid and noticing what she needs and letting myself do that. And it is faulty reasoning, because I have NO IDEA what this kid will do next, and I'm still learning, and she's changing all the time. My intuition can be totally wrong in these situations.

So I'm trying my best to keep reminding myself to just fix the situation in the moment, without all the what-ifs and but-thens. To trust baby A instead of my fears of some dystopian, Nanny 911 family. It is amazing how quickly I can get from a screaming child in a tub to visions of a future sociopath I raised who is being hunted by the Law & Order police. Why I go to those places in my mind, I'm not totally sure. Probably something to do with the "evil all around you just waiting to tempt you, bait you, pull you down" messages I learned as a child.

Anyway, that's my "work" right now. To stop jumping out of the moment. To just stay put, and do the best things to calm down the current situation in front of me. And I find it extremely hard. Surprisingly hard, given how useful it would be to stop jumping ahead like that. Bow to your sensei.