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I’ve been thinking about my reaction to friends’ children and the feeling that presents itself most forcefully is stress. I think this partly ties into the fragility anxiety touched on in the other thread.
For example, a friend came round few weeks with her 6 month old son, and suddenly our flat looked like a death-trap – a veritable assault course of pointy corners, sharp edges, precarious weights and dangerous substances. His mother seemed unconcerned, but as he crawled around, bumping into things, investigating anything within reach, putting stuff his mouth, I’d have put even odds on which of us would fill his pants first. For the whole afternoon I felt like we were seconds away from tragedy and it really wound me up.
That’s not just me is it? It would be even more acute for the parents, I’d have thought. How do you cope with it? Do you just get used to it? Does your expectation of injury or death just diminish as accident-free days clock up? Do you feel that tension in environments that haven’t been child-proofed? Can you relax, focus on anything else when your child is in the room but out of arm’s reach? |
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