Why So Soon?

Sweetpea has taken to playing the strangest ‘game’ lately

She throws herself onto the floor, arranges her body ‘just so’ and then starts to grunt and groan as if she has fallen and hurt herself. She will keep up the grunting until I hear her and come ‘rushing’ to her rescue, which, if I am engrossed in my writing or reading, can take five or ten minutes. She will lift her face to me when she hears my reaction; I pick her up off the floor, sweeping her body to mine, and ask questions of “what happened baby girl?” and make soothing sounds with my voice. We then spend several minutes locked in a tight embrace as she whimpers in my ear and pats my arm in the same rhythm that I pat her back. After a while she will slide off my lap and go back to playing as if nothing untoward has occurred. Fifteen minutes later the same grunting can be heard with her little body in a different place, but the same arrangement obvious. We can go through this sequence of events two or three times in a row.

I've been thinking about what satisfaction this activity is providing her, and when the answer finally came to me yesterday it struck me quite forcefully. At 18 months my child has already learnt the game that she will engage in for the rest of her life. It’s the game that everyone who doesn’t have to fight for the basics of survival (food, water, shelter) plays. The game of ‘do you love me enough and will you be there for me no matter what?’ game that thanks to some doctor of psychiatry we call self actualisation. Sweetpea wants to know that the one person in her world that she counts on will be there for her no matter what. She is looking for Mummy to rescue her and keep her safe, to comfort her and be her safe place to fall. And aren’t we all searching for that safe place to fall?

As young children in a healthy home environment, it must seem obvious that the parents are the cushion between pain and self. It is the parents that will ease the grief and make things better again. Its only when we get older that the game becomes more confusing. As adults the uncertainty of when players on the field change and the utmost assuredness that we feel when we are babies with our parents is harder to recover. But our search for it grows more and more urgent, if not downright frenzied the longer it takes to find, if the people on pop psychology shows like Dr. Phil are anything to go by.

And somehow the fact that my Sweetpea has started this kind of behavioural playing makes me sad. As her mother I had wanted to shield her from what I perceived as the pain and nastiness of this world for as long as I could. I wanted to protect her from ever feeling that there might come a time when there won’t be anyone to save her and make her feel better. But she is already testing the theory of emotional safety for herself. And I dread the day I don't hear the play grunts and her little heart is broken.