I guess that you also Understand how it is to have a child that almost dies too...huh? Tell me what you know of that. Been to the hospital and waited...what? I am waiting...
I do.
And although I've had nearly a decade and a half to absorb and assimilate the "lesson", I cannot for the life of me tell you what it was supposed to have taught me.
Has it made me a better parent to my now-fully-recovered child?
Not really. It made me overprotective and overbearing to the point that he had no choice but to rebel, no choice but to become deceitful and sneaky, since I allowed him no breathing room.
The lesson I am now learning- being
forced to learn- is how to let go.
All parents have to learn it eventually; parents of a child who was once critically ill no doubt have a harder time with it than most.
I look at my six-foot-tall son, a boy in a man's body, and I see a critically ill infant who will die without my constant, 24-hour vigilance, and might die even
with it.
This infuriates him. He doesn't remember
being that baby, of course, and he doesn't
want to be constantly associated with it. He doesn't remember ever being anything but tough and strong and healthy, and he doesn't want any reminders that he was ever fragile and desperately ill. He doesn't want or need my constant vigilance, my protection. He wants to be acknowledged and respected as the independent near-adult that he is. His previous health problems make this difficult for me.
But there's nothing I learned from this experience that would necessarily be applicable or useful to another parent of a critically ill child.
There's no secret knowledge that only you and I- as parents of critically ill children- are privy to. We have little in common, and we don't seem to agree on much. Going through similar experiences apparently left us with entirely different viewpoints.
It's that way with everything; everything in life.
My experiences are not applicable to anyone but me, and neither are anyone else's. And two people can go through the exact same experience, and learn two totally different lessons from it.
I, for instance, have never considered parenting either a "job" or a "profession", and I already stated that on another thread. It's life. It's not "a profession" (which would indicate that you could stop doing it at some point).
It's no more a profession than being female or having brown hair is a "profession". It's who and what I am. It's not a job- it's my life. Being a parent is not a job, either. It's who and what I am.
I understand how it may seem like a "job" to new parents, to parents whose children are still infants... but that's because they do not yet realize how long forever is.
I don't think, in a decade or two, they will still think of parenting the same way (although i could be wrong).
