Last night I had some quite distressing news. I got this news while I was helping Penny finish off her shower, and suddenly everything about bedtime was like cloudy insignificance.
Thing is about bad news (or good news as well actually), is that it doesn’t mean much to Regi, and she doesn’t quite know how to react. If you ever watch reaction videos of baby announcements of family for example you’ll see that her reactions look quite forced and in some cases there is little enthusiasm. When bad things happen and I can’t help but immediately sob, she knows that she should cuddle me and ask what’s wrong, not that this will mean she will empathise with how I am feeling, it’s just learned.
In this sense it’s easier to not talk about it, and make her evening easier rather than expect her to listen to my sadness and therefore act/behave better because she feels bad for me, because that’s what I used to do thinking it might help. In any case that’s basically emotional blackmail and I shouldn’t do it anyway.
What it does mean is that you have to fake this emotional front to get through the bedtime task. There’s just no point allowing myself to feel the sadness because it will mean I am not focussed and I will not be able to complete bedtime effectively.
Where Penny noticed the wobble in my voice and checked in with me, and consequently took care in her reactions to getting ready for bed (not because I asked her to, because she cared to), when I went to ask Regi to come upstairs with me there was no flicker of an interest or care in the fact I was on the verge of tears. She duly continued her usual rituals of curling up on the sofa into a blanket blob, and I packed up all my sadness so I could go through the daily motions of finding a way to get her upstairs, get pyjamas on, clean teeth, and get to bed without screaming inside for just an hour to myself so I could have a good cry. I had to push past my sadness and forget about it to get through.
It’s not just sadness. It can be anything. Feeling ill, needing to get ready to go out, have friends over…which actually I tend to just not do anymore because there’s just no point.
These are some of the hardest moments. These are the moments where I would genuinely fall apart without God’s grace and patience available to me.
Just insight 