Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Chris answers a question about being summarily rejected by one's own flesh-and-blood.
Nick:
Seemingly since birth, my 2.5-year-old daughter has had a very strong preference for her mom—and to be honest, I get it! Her mom is great—she's caring, patient, fun, etc. Sometimes, she'll wake up in the middle of the night and, after I walk in, start screaming, "No Dada!" and will be inconsolable until my wife comes to get her. If both parents are home for the night, she'll refuse [to] do bath time or bedtime with me. (When her mom is out for the night or traveling for a few days, we get along great!)
I know this isn't uncommon and, thanks to reddit, I know other parents deal with much worse. But the "No Dada" stuff gets to me because it reflects on my ability as a dad... even though I know it doesn't. I've had friends say things will change and she'll grow out of it. I don't doubt that, but the grind of two-plus years of rejection wears on me.
My daughter is a wonderful, healthy, funny, smart, kind person, so all in all, I can't complain... even though that's what I'm doing here. Anyways, any advice?
Nick, I had this same experience. I know the pain, man. It really hurts your heart. I want you to know that I have closed myself into various rooms of my home and cried big searing sobs over the question of who and what I was becoming in the story of my family, if the little small person that I love the most in all the universe could not bear to have me even as a source of comfort in a dark lonely bedroom in the middle of the night. When I leap out of bed and sprint down the hallway because every instinct inside of me tells me to go and help her, and she sees my silhouette in the doorway and it registers as worse than being left alone, that is a blunderbuss to the heart. Completely devastating.
For starters, I would talk with your wife about whether it is a good idea to have her swoop in and rescue the child from her father in the middle of the night. I think you should have a rule: You will switch which parent is on wake-up duty each night, and only that parent gets out of bed when the child wakes up, unless there is some major emergency. I know—God how I know—how painful and stressful it is to be in a room with a furious toddler who does not want you and will not accept you. But your child will 100 percent make it back to sleep eventually, and each time that this happens some part of her brain will bank the knowledge that she can get all the way back to sleep from a huge emotional storm, and that Dada can help her. I think you should very softly and patiently explain to your poor sweet child that tonight is Dada's night, that Mama really needs her sleep, and that you understand why your daughter is upset, that you love her very much and want to help, and that the two of you will get through it together. Then persist with empathy and patience and so much love. It's worth it because, among other things, you don't want your daughter to develop either a sense that Dada categorically cannot help her back to sleep, or a sense that by screaming and crying she can successfully reject a decision her parents have made and achieve a preferable outcome. Also, not for nothing, one or the other of you parents should be sleeping. Your wife needs sleep.
As for the broader dynamic: I think your friends are right, more or less. Without the opportunity to interrogate the specifics of their claims, I can attest to the fact that things will change a lot, even between now and the time when your child starts primary school. They will not necessarily change such that your child one day expresses love to you and your wife in the exact same way, or on the same terms, or in equal amounts. Nor are things likely to shift into a new shape and then maintain that shape indefinitely. In my experience, things change, and then they change again, and again and again and again. Sometimes that change feels amazing and I want to cry from relief. Sometimes things change too much and I get more than I bargained for and I feel a different kind of pain. And then sometimes things change right back to some previous state, and sometimes that feels very discouraging.
But fluidity in this realm is a good, healthy thing, if not necessarily always enjoyable. Parenting a child, as you and I have already discovered, is sometimes very hard, and it requires the best of us. You are almost certainly not doing anything to cause your child to express a preference for Mama, but there will be times, for sure, where your child prefers Mama precisely because Dada was the one who said no dessert tonight, and there will be times when your heart breaks for Mama because she's the one who had to drag your child along for a day of miserable errands and now your child wants only you. Sometimes the best of a parent, doing the very best thing for their child, means disappointing that child. It means conflict and accountability, but also repair, and in all of that a child, still learning how to be an emotional being, is going to feel things super intensely and express things wildly and hurt a parent's feelings. Sometimes a lot.
After she was delivered into life, almost six years ago, my daughter and her mother lay there, naked and spent, bundled up in fresh sheets, and slept skin to skin. Sometime overnight my daughter stirred and found a breast and had her first drink of milk. The two of them stayed in something like that basic arrangement for some delirious stretch of time, possibly days but also possibly months, while my wife recovered from (a difficult, post-term, unmedicated) childbirth, and my daughter recovered from having been born. I, meanwhile, changed sheets, did laundry, cooked food, brought water and medicine, and in every other way worked to keep the house running and these two vulnerable people, the loves of my life, healthy and comfortable. Always I was hovering around the bed, sleeping in chairs or on the floor, darting up at the slightest sound, determined to prevent any single moment of need from developing into even the merest discomfort.
It's not that I was the backup parent, but my tiny little child was breastfeeding from a profoundly exhausted mother. The easiest thing was for them to just remain in immediate proximity whenever that was mutually comfortable. Unfortunately, most of the time when it was not mutually comfortable, it was because the exhausted mother needed rest, and in those circumstances my most important job was to reach down there and physically remove the baby. Thus a dynamic was established: Mama was the soft warm thing at the center of the home bed universe, one that made cooing noises and dispensed milk, and Dada was an upright, disheveled, and often smelly thing that descended at awkward moments and took the baby away from the home bed universe, and away from Mama.
My child would panic and rage, and I would coo and swaddle and pace for hours and hours, a huge effort of stamina and patience that made me feel very much like a battered and unheralded hero of the household. As was the case with all my hovering and chore-doing, I was allowing my love and care for them—so astoundingly strong and nourishing in those dazzling days, like a new superpower—to guide me into every cranny of space around their two-body core, to make it my duty to nurture and protect them, both as a sacred conjoined physical unit and as individuals, somehow even when those two objectives were in obvious conflict. This infinitely precious little thing in my arms would panic and rage, and I would try to think the words into her heart, It's all for you, I swear it is, and still she would panic and rage.
In my daughter's second or third week of life, a lactation specialist showed me how to use the tip of my finger as a pacifier, and I tried it, and my daughter accepted it, and the surprisingly forceful tug of the vacuum caused by her little mouth caused in my chest this overpowering rush of joy and relief, and then I looked down at her little tiny face, and she was scowling up at me with total disapproval, and I thought to myself that this was the final crime, that now in addition to being the Takes Me From Mama Guy I was also the Gross Salty Dry Nipple Guy. A couple nights later, I had walked myself absolutely ragged trying to get my daughter to sleep, in a separate part of the house from her mother, who was desperate for some hours of relief, and finally they both dropped off, and I sagged against a wall and slid down to the floor and lay the baby in my lap and cried and cried. I thought about how rapidly the trials of early parenthood were cycling through and defeating my intentions as a father, how very soon I would be left only with my bare instincts as a person, and how scary that might quickly become. Swaddles and bottles and fingertip pacifiers; different body positioning, different lighting, different fabrics; songs, nursery rhymes, soft and quiet monologues, and even outright pleading, and still this little person reserved a particular kind of emotional storm only for me. I had to admit to myself that on this night, in a bewildered state of total emotional resourcelessness, I had felt, for the first time, a flash of resentment, and possibly even anger, toward this brand-new and completely vulnerable thing that I was holding in just one hand.
It might have all been down to acid reflux. It passed, in that form anyway. In any case, I can promise you that as a robust six-year-old she has stormed like crazy on both of us so many times that I can no longer even hope to tally up which one of us has endured more punishment. She has also smushed my face between her hands and smooched me on the lips and then recoiled giggling and given me shit about my mustache. A couple of weeks ago she would only accept Mama at bedtime, and I was a little bit stung. This morning, she was bereft that I could not be the one to drive her to kindergarten. I was out of the country last week and I opened my bag looking for Chapstick, and found a note that she'd folded and stuffed in there, for a surprise:
I obviously have no idea how neatly your experience of early fatherhood maps onto my own, but I want you to know that I remind myself of those early experiences, the hard days when my daughter most obviously preferred her mother to me, precisely when I am feeling hurt about some episode in my present relationship with my daughter. You and I probably have a lot of this basic stuff in common: Your daughter was germinated inside the body of the other parent, emerged into life from that body, spent some critical part of her first days exchanging hormones with that body, and took nourishment and sustenance from that body. The first thing your child really understood, in their time as a breathing organism, was that body, the safety of that warm place. You were always a little bit trickier to understand. During the part of your child's life where it was incapable of assembling concepts of any real complexity, you were simply something other than that one life body, and so you were always going to have a little bit of a longer road to insider status.
Even if none of that is, uhh, science, I urge you to bear it in mind as a kind of prompt. That's how it works for me: I want to earn the trust and affection of this person and to make her feel safe. I don't want this at the expense of her mother, of course, but I do rally myself by saying that I have the additional challenge of having once been the person who had to remove my daughter from her mother and prevent them from being together. Whether it describes your exact situation or not, it's intended as a motivator, because however much it stings to be the un-preferred parent in a given moment, the emotions to focus on are those of your child. She would rather not be panicking and crying. She would rather feel comfort and safety. And so that's your job. Following the same love and compassion that inspired you to put yourself in that doorway, you are now going to work to make your child feel maximally safe and nurtured in your presence. If you think of it that way, as a case of you having sort of heroically accepted a big challenge on your child's behalf, I bet you will make the right set of decisions for building, over time, a strong and affectionate relationship with your kid.
You'll have so many chances. My own father was sort of a tyrant—this is part of why it was so scary for me to discover that my own playbook of best practices seemed to be failing, leaving me stripped down to raw emotions and impulses—who badly struggled to establish himself as a safe person for me and my siblings. And, man, as a child, even when he scared the absolute shit out of me, I just loved him so incredibly much. I assume you are not terrorizing your child, which is good, but even if you were, the heartbreaking bottom line of it is your child would still give you basically infinite redos. It seems to me the right way of looking at the "No Dada" thing at night is as follows: Your child feels insecure and wants to feel safe, and the very safest thing they can imagine is Mama. Because your child is still so small, it's a biological thing, beyond reason. Your job, therefore, is pretty straightforward: Help her to feel safe with you, not just when she is upset at night but all the time. With patience and care, your child will learn that she is also perfectly safe with Dada. That may never bring into complete equilibrium what each of you means for her. I don't think that's what you're supposed to be doing, anyway, and besides, it would be a completely unrealistic goal.
My daughter had a weekly Sunday swimming lesson at a recreation center near town. Sunday is one of my wife's work days. Every Sunday, I would get my daughter ready and then drive her over there and watch her learn to swim. We'd high-five at the end. Then every Sunday we would go together to a nearby café and share a grilled ham-and-cheese and she would have an orange juice, and we would talk about swimming, and I would let her take my wallet and pay the check. Then we would walk over to the nearby courthouse and play hide-and-seek around the building. Then we would take a meandering path back to the car, and I would let her choose which shops to poke our heads into. Sometimes we bought stupid little things, postcards or cheap plastic keychains or whatever. I would let her push all the buttons at the crosswalks. It was a great little ritual, and I loved it. Even after the lessons concluded, we would still go for a grilled ham-and-cheese and hide-and-seek and a nice long meander, every Sunday morning.
Then I left town and my wife took the weekend off, and she and my daughter tried to repeat the Sunday ritual. And they got it all wrong, in a million tiny, inconsequential-seeming ways: Mama didn't know she was supposed to order the grilled sandwich sans onions; they sat inside instead of outside; she didn't know our exact suite of silly rules for courthouse hide-and-seek and my daughter didn't know how to explain them. By the time they went to look at shops, they were both feeling frustrated and at odds; by the time they got back to the car, my daughter was overwhelmed, and crying. She wanted Dada. That night, they called me and I sat on my hotel bed and listened to my little daughter sob and beg me to come home, so distraught that she couldn't even describe what had gone wrong. My wife was pretty well crushed.
I don't want to say that I was happy about all of this, but it was one of those encouraging moments—and there are lots of them—where the success of my efforts to build a rapport with my child was undeniable, where in addition to loving me because she has no choice my child wanted me specifically, even when Mama was an option.
When I got home, a couple days later, my daughter wanted me and only me to do bedtime, which was a relief to my wife, because after a few days of solo parenting she needed a bath and a glass of wine and some time to herself. The next night, when my daughter asked who was doing bedtime, and I told her it was still me, because Mama had been on duty for so many nights in a row, she said (and I'm quoting), "Yesssssssssssss." A week later, I don't even know what happened or when, but when one of my nights came up again, she had the opposite reaction, explosively. That's when I reminded myself that a parent-child relationship cannot always have just one static set of emotional contours and isn't supposed to, that a child is always encountering emotional needs beyond even their own immediate comprehension, that I endured hell to get here, and that my job isn't finished. More healthy rituals, more fun, more of Dada's patience and love, more good parenting, some inevitable thing that puts my wife in the crosshairs, and I'll be back on that summit. Eventually you do sort of have it all. In the meantime, she likes it when I make her school lunch: Inside there, wrapped in parchment, is a grilled ham-and-cheese. Mama lightly disapproves.
Most of what I've said here amounts to you are a good parent and eventually this will all accrue positively, for the benefit of your relationship with your child. It won't happen overnight, and I know that sucks. No change will be permanent, which also sucks. In the meantime, start thinking about some weekly thing you can do with your daughter, some unambiguously fun and enriching thing for just the two of you. Take her fishing, or let her paint your nails, or take her with you to the grocery store every Wednesday and let her pick out an iced cookie and then the two of you go share it someplace peaceful, where you can chat and giggle together. Or simply let her wail on you in the front yard, in a way that Mama would never permit. And if your daughter still prefers Mama in the middle of the night, remind yourself that there's more work to be done, and that Mama would certainly rather be sleeping.
