This parenting thing never starts feeling familiar. Sure, you learn to establish a routine and you begin to understand your child’s cues – when they are tired, when they are hungry, when they are in the mood for destruction – but that’s just force of habit. Despite the routine, despite your ability to read your child, that same child will always find a way to pull the proverbial rug from under your feet and surprise you.
Before parenthood, I remember thinking kids can’t be too much work in the beginning. You just feed them and play with them and put them to sleep and change them and wash them and help them get dressed. You do that for a few years because they are helpless babies. They’re not actually little humans until around age four, when kindergarten starts. I truly believed all that.
I never would have thought babies have personalities. Opinions. Flashbulb moments that have them jumping up suddenly, discarding whatever toy they were playing with and running to the other room, where they plop down on their miniature sofa to read a random book. Thoughts like that just occur to them.
They have moods. They have a sense of humour. They understand the concept of gratitude. Now, when I give Baby A her breakfast or her water bottle, she says “thank you”. Well, it sounds more like “cank coo”, but it counts. Gratitude! That almost makes it all worth it. Almost.
I am still amazed at Baby A’s communication skills and the fact that we can have a legitimate conversation. She prefers one dress over another, or demands to pick out her shoes, and she lets me know. She already has an imagination. She even dreams. She woke up from a nap the other day and when I inquired about her dreams, she clearly said, “Canada”. Baffling.
For some reason, I didn’t think babies were even aware of the concept of lying until at least age four. But that’s my mistake. I made an assumption. Never do that. Because it’s all just one big mystery with kids. There are no rules. You have to play it by ear, go with it, and try to stop feeling so surprised all the time.
Take Baby A’s aggression. My kid can throw a punch. I never thought I’d be the parent of a child who hits – and so purposefully. When it’s an accident, she immediately says “shorry” and tries to kiss and hug her poor victim. But when she means it, when she’s acting out and intentionally slapping a poor child (or poor me) around, she refuses to apologise and just stares me down, defiant and daring. Who would have thought this is normal behaviour for a child under the age of two? (Yes, it’s normal, all the parenting sites say so, and she’s going to grow out of it, I swear.)
I just didn’t expect to start disciplining my baby so early. Which is just silly, really, considering her first word was “no”. Obviously, all we ever do as parents is discipline, teach, guide, draw boundaries. And while we’re doing that, we don’t even realise we’re doing it; we’re just improvising as we go along. It’s kind of refreshing and kind of scary.
And all babies do, as babies, is ignore us.
Good times.
Hala Khalaf is a freelance journalist based in Abu Dhabi