hi warmup,
Got past the intensive 100 days of steady effort and high-stakes (high-steady) work. Idea of symmetry crept in: will those 100 days be joined with 100 days of recovery?
New grant award getting started with a 2-day launch in late June. Intuition is this won't be that much work. So, open to new work not quite recovered enough to actively find it.
June was my highest income month from consulting, ever!? I need to test raising my rates so I earn the same with less drivenness. Lots of joy and pleasure at the successes, but also needed to complain every so often to my support peeps to keep going.
This got me thinking about the whispered comeback of "you chose it, so stop your complaining" That off on 3 levels. 1. when we chose it and when we complain are to distinct times. One is before, and the other is during or after. 2. We chose it for the romance of the joy, status, money, or freedom we imagined. Except for martyrs and masochists, we no choose for no pain. 3. Allow people their complaining, it helps them endure and carry on.
Yet, when I read about parents and their years of low & non-sleep due to the rigors of babychild care, I fall silent. I see from their view they ask, "What are you complaining about, exactly?" In this complaining tournament I cede and they move to the next round.
Yet, method matters. Reading Rachel Cusk's book on her pregnancy and child raising, I cringe when she gets to the chapter on nonsleep. Several times she calls in the word cruel when she hears her daughter crying and because of the culture or medical advice from a person or book, leaves her crying.
Think of it from the baby's point of view: it's dark, I'm left alone with no human warmth or even the voice of my mother to comfort me. I miss that, I need that, I cry out. And nothing happens. Nothing? Am I forgotten? is the family/tribe/village forever gone away? I cry more, they need to hear me!
And in the other room, through doors and walls, Rachel counts down minutes as per the advice in the book. Once after three hours of enduring this the baby is at last silent. Is she asleep and "self-soothed" in the euphemism of some texts? No, she's fallen asleep, standing in her crib with her face on the rail looking at the door. Where in heck is that woman I call mom?
Cusk even cites the practices of less 'advanced' (how anyone can dare to use that term for cultures with practices like this is beyond me) cultures where the children are much closer at night to the parents in a variety of ways. So she knows, and yet ...
In this pattern we are forced to "get" as babies that we're alone and must somehow from this small and vulnerable place learn to:
fend for ourselves &
vend for ourselves
Cusk lives in England, which right at this moment has a national campaign by The Coop with the Red Cross to address isolation and loneliness.
No kidding, Sherlock!?
Revu2