Don't sweat the small things

The thing with always being home with JED is that there is ample opportunity for them to annoy me and get on my nerves.

They fight on a daily basis. Many times a day. In various combinations.

They are disobedient. I tell Jordan not to play with the box that is her brother's. She hears it as "Play with the box that is Evan's".

They are noisy and have no volume control. That I don't mind so much except I think the neighbours mind. Many a time, a grumpy grandma ambles over and mutters an entire string of dialect, much of it I don't get but what I get from it is that my kids are noisy and they wake up her son who works at night. (Hmm, actually, I do understand quite a bit of it)

And then, there is the worry.

I worry about their school. I worry about the fact that Jordan has a slight lisp. I worry that Muffin's words aren't all that clear. He still replaces the "tr" in truck and embarrasingly for me, replaces it with an "f". I worry that Evan's handwriting is slip shod and will cause his teachers aneuryms.

In the long run, I worry about how they will grow up, what kind of people they will be and whether or not they will grow up to be those little self-entitled brats I come across often enough.

But in the last two days, I've had a sobering epiphany of sorts. I've been praying for a relative of a good friend. I'd been talking to her quite a bit because she was expecting twins and I even went to see her so that I could talk to her face to face about what to expect when her twins were born. That night, she went into labour and the twins were delivered at 34 weeks. Both twins are in NICU and one twin is faring better than the other. The other hasn't fed in 5 days and has a gastric bleed. There is a litany of thing wrong with him and he needs specialised neo natal care that can only happen at the tertiary hospitals. I don't even want to imagine the prognosis.

Every time I think about her and her twins, I think about how easily that could have been me with Jordan and Evan. I am eternally thankful that they were born at full term and went home when I went home. I think about all the things I was telling her about feeling distant with the twins and them being more than two hands full and I know that she cannot help but wish that she had the opportunity to feel that instead of the intense panic and anxiety she must feel now.

So, in the last few days, I've shed tears spontaneously, taken longer to fall asleep feeling helpless and worrying about another mother and her babies. I catch myself in unconscious and mid supplication. I've always been the kind of person that can switch off things I don't want to see. But with motherhood, a little dink has been made in the kevlar. Anything to do with children, any suffering and any pain, I'm right there with them. And this time, even more so.

I don't think I'll ever stop being OCD about JED. It's in me to worry and to want them to grow up in a particular way, but I think it's time to complain less when they get itchy and swollen eyes, coughs, pee in their bed, fight with one another and drive me batshit crazy.


 

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