Filled under:
 1 year old, behavior, Musings, Parenting, Playing
2 Comments

Don’t Tell Me To Relax!

Email
Print

You know what is not relaxing at all? Someone telling you to relax.  It makes me feel really amped up and violent when someone responds to my anxiety by saying “Toni, relaaaaaaaax…. It’s no big deal,” like the longer they draw out the “a” sound, the more it will lull me into a state of serenity.

I know that acting stressed out never helps a situation because all your energy is displaced into victimizing yourself rather than trying to solve the problem…  So I try to maintain a relatively calm disposition in moments of stress because that makes me nice to be around, and the suppressing of my rage is good for my bowels.  But it isn’t always that easy, and so the times I do unleash my fury it is not a pretty site. Picture watching a birth backwards in slow motion.

But passionate people often feel a complexity of emotions that may not always be reasonable, but is fueled by the same part of their being that makes them creative, driven, and productive.  It is not exactly realistic to expect someone to maintain composure with the negative moments of life, but unleash their explosive appetite in only the appropriate moments.  Although being in a constant state of crisis is unhealthy, I respect people who let themselves be spastic every so often.  It makes them more dynamic to me, and I gives me a chance to later talk about them behind their back.

As The Munch gets older she gets more and more wild by the day and I am sort of on the edge of my seat wondering what she will do next.  Sure, she has picked up some civilized traits like not throwing food, cleaning up her toys, and never drinking martinis without olives… but her energy is something from the jungles of Borneo.  It is really inspiring to watch, but can also be insanely annoying.  Yet I don’t want to tame her into acting more calm because it seems like infringement on her spirit.  I want my kid to behave, but I also want her to enjoy that hyper-activity that is childhood because as an adult I feel like life is always glazed with a slight sensation of tiredness.

Munch will, however, relax when watching videos of herself going down the slide on auntie Gita’s phone :)

 

Share this article: ,
RSS 2.0 feed | Trackback
  • http://WebsiteURL holly

    Send me the video of her going down the slide! And I’ll take vies of you going down the slide to help you chill.

  • http://WebsiteURL gita

    there aren’t words for how cute munchie is, chillin on the couch. if i were that cute, i’d wanna watch a video of me on the slide 25 times too!