Anxiety, panic and relief – all part of the ‘baby eating a rice cake’ experience...
DOUBLE TROUBLE FOR A FIRST-TIME DAD OF TWINS
A CENTRAL theme to raising children is anxiety. Since the twins arrived, I’ve experienced a wide range of emotions, most of them loosely connected with fear.
It’s worth pointing out ‘anxiety’ is a very general term.
What’s struck me is how many different variations, grades and combinations of it there are out there. Let’s start with panic and terror, which are often closely intertwined
The best example is Thomas swallowing an entire baby rice cake. It started with terror as to what may happen next. Will he
swallow it, or will he choke?
Instinctively, I started Googling ‘baby choke Heimlich’ just in time for Thomas to start coughing.
This sparked the panic, which reduced me to hopping around the kitchen, not quite knowing what to do, while a YouTube video of a man resuscitating a baby played in the background.
Thankfully, before I had to do anything, Thomas was sick everywhere, thereby dislodging the rice cake, which was a surprisingly joyous moment.
Who’d have thought a baby being sick would spark such relief.
The next level down is the fear of watching them try to hold themselves up on something. You know they’re going to fall but you’re hoping to catch them before they injure themselves. This is again different to the creeping sense of unease I feel as they play with the same toy together.
There’s no immediate danger here but it’s only a matter of time before one attempts to take the toy for themselves and hurts the other.
These are all examples of immediate dangers, but what about all those general concerns.
Personally, I enjoy the angst of thinking about their development and looking on the internet forums to see if other parents can make me feel worse. Victoria enjoys ruminating on their exposure to germs, illnesses and whether they’re sickening for something, sick now or fighting off sickness.
In the background, we’ve got the solid stalwarts like “are they eating too much or too little?” and “are they too big or too small?”.
Another concern creeping into general life is how many times should a baby go to the toilet (answers on a postcard please)?
Naturally, my old personal fears such as money, health and money again have been relegated to more intense periods of introspection, rather than just appearing on a daily basis.
Although, this is the circle of life and one day, I’ll be an old man and the twins will be grown adults, hopefully indebted for my caring concern. It’ll be their turn to worry about me falling over, eating too much or too little, fighting and going to the toilet.