While I was traveling to see family recently, I encountered a parent with her little boy of about 18 months of age, the child being extraordinarily fussy. I found him deeply annoying, and reflecting on this reaction, I wondered how my mother might have felt—not to speak of my older brother and father—when I, as a sickly child, no doubt fussed like this. I was told that sometimes I cried as if I were being tortured. I silently blessed my family for what they must have gone through with me. It might be difficult to openly delight in a kid who is such a trial. It is enough just to keep him alive! It was a pity, because it left me with more than a trace of an inferiority complex. <\/p>\n
A related element is the way I don\u2019t consciously remember my fussing or being so trying, but recognizing that this was probably true, at least part of the time, might have contributed to a variety of possibilities. Related to this heart-opening (now) on my behavior is the associated dynamic of \u201cdenial\u201d (would that be a fair word?) over what a trial I was, and it made me wonder about denial in other conditions—addiction, etc. I wondered for the first time, listening to that fussy little boy, \u201cwhat if you were that bad and worse?\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While I was traveling to see family recently, I encountered a parent with her little boy of about 18 months of age, the child being extraordinarily fussy. I found him deeply annoying, and reflecting on this reaction, I wondered how my mother might have felt—not to speak of my older brother and father—when I, as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-literacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1341"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1342,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341\/revisions\/1342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}