By the way, apparently I was a "crawl into parents bed when unable to sleep in under five minutes"-kid, and they solved it by setting hard limits. Aka: they told me I'd spend the night in the dog's shed if I did it again. So I did it again, and they put me there for ten seconds - long enough for me to believe they'd leave me there - and then I never did it again. I didn't actually comprehent my parents as seperate people with their own needs at the time.
That’s terrifying. We also don’t have a dog- and I really couldn’t bring myself to even pretend to leave my daughter outside for the night. I’ve seen what raccoons and coyotes have done to animals in our yard D:Ophelia’s old enough (coming up on nine) that she’s absolutely aware that her being awake is bad, and sometimes outright unhealthy and painful for me- it’s actually a big issue with her is that she gets caught in shame spirals;
“I can’t sleep” > “Mom can’t sleep if I don’t sleep” > “I’m hurting mom” > “I’m ashamed of not being able to sleep” > “I’m so ashamed I can’t calm down” > “I can’t sleep” > “Mom can’t-”
This makes it a lot trickier to work with because she’s 100% aware of the things around her, the problem is unfortunately that things have become difficult lately with her other grandparents (IE us cutting them out of her life because fuck those people) and even if we’ve talked a lot about it, that sort of stress is something a kid can still pick up on very easily- coupled with the fact that I would put money on her having inherited some of the general anxiety disorders me and her father both have stacked up on either side of this family tree.
Listen, we already won the genetic lottery by her being physically a shitload healthier than either of us ever were. We were constantly in and out of emergency rooms and ENT specialists as kids, and she’s like “hey what if I basically never get sick and am super active and athletic without that asthma stuff you guys have? Haha nice.” - maybe losing the Mental Health Lottery a little isn’t so bad.
At least we’re better at recognizing and starting to deal with this stuff than our parents were, at her age.
