Parenting meltdowns and.. twins

I know I’ve only just talked about him (Looky Daddy!) and it is too soon to be plugging his blog again, but I have a total weakness for parents writing about their meltdowns and this post is beautiful, as all grimly honest and tender posts about one’s meltdowns are. If you’re a first time parent reading this and right now you’re in that rollercoaster first year, and barely hanging on, then.. my heart goes out to you, and I know this whole parenting thing is very tough, and I can honestly tell you that you will survive it. Really. Because we all did, kind of.

Those were the days in which I used to eat my breakfast cereal dry, because adding milk meant I had to finish it before it got soggy. Milk gave the cereal a deadline that simply was not realistic. And even dry, some days that cereal bowl would still be sitting there, full, when my wife came home from work that evening. Those were hard, hard days.

So it was one night that week, one of many, that I was up with the twins,  strapping them into their carseats so at least the rest of our shore rental house would be spared their 3 AM infernal wailing, that I passed the lime on the counter. It had three or four wedges missing, but it was still there, waiting for the next round of drinks. And I lost it. I drove around Ocean City that night, back and forth on the deserted roads, with the twins in the back of the minivan slowly trading in their cries for sighs and sleep, and I bawled.

Looky Daddy! is the stay-at-home father of twins and a third daughter, and I do like to go on about how hard I have it and I’m aware (occasionally) that some parents have got it so much harder. And speaking of having it harder, here is Domestic Blister talking about that first year, only with twins, and autism, to boot.

The other day, Mr. and I came across some video clips of Neener and Roo when they were seven months old. The same age as Squiggles now. Seeing those videos affected me very deeply, and in ways I had not anticipated. Of course there was the warm fuzzy nostalgia of seeing my firstborns back when they were relatively new, giggling and wiggling around. And naturally, it got me thinking about those early days.

The unexpected thing that dawned on me was that those videos were from the ‘Before Time.’ They were made about two months before we knew we were looking at a diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy for Roo, and long before we knew anything about Autism.

But almost immediately, I felt a pang of envy watching that younger, more naive me playing and singing with my babies. I was gloriously unaware that raising those babies would be complicated by the many bumps and detours in Autism Land. Carefree compared to the me of today. Seeing the bliss in my own past ignorance made tears well up in my eyes.

I don’t write nearly enough here about the issues facing those parenting children with disabilities, mostly because I don’t have first-hand experience and so like any able-bodied ego-centric it doesn’t pop into my head often enough. I should make amends because the politics of this caring work has got to be one of the most neglected aspects of parenthood writing and it is a campaign that must be taken up by more than simply the exhausted carers themselves.

Finally, quite a fascinating post about fatherhood (and not at all about meltdowns) here at Daddy Dialectic, in The astonishing science of father involvement and it is relevant not only because I’m posting twice in a row around a fatherhood theme but also because it has something to say about another recent topic of mine, the importance of parental leave. See? Kinda relevant to this post.