My sweet beautiful innocent child has one reoccurring nightmare. It is that we (I assume it’s her parents tho I can’t be sure) will not allow her to scoop her own ice cream
So I just need you to imagine a tiny child just screaming like she’s being murdered at 4 am “NO NO NO I NEED TO SHOOP IT FOR ME YOU NEED TO LET ME SHOOP IT”
like heart breaking that this is happening to her but damn girl
Could not get her to calm down as she’s prone to night terrors so I had to lay in bed with her and take her arms and pretend scoop giant ice cream with her tiny hands and THAT WORKED being a parent is insane
We have also entered the “you may only show affection if I am involved” stage which is so funny. If I so much as kiss my husband on the cheek there’s just a tiny voice screaming “WHAT ABOUT YOU LOVE PENNY TOO!?”
She’s become like an unhinged self insert fanfic author
“Okay now you kiss dada”
“Okay now you KISS ME!”
The ice cream thing resonates with me so much. The first full sentence I ever said – after “see bird” which I don’t think really counts – was “I do it myselb.” I used to have nightmares as a kid of all the things I was not allowed to do for myself, and all the things I could not take care of for myself.
One of genuinely the nicest things my dad ever did for me as a small child was when I was convinced there were ‘so many bugs’ in my room at night (the way that you can see little wiggling dots of color in a totally dark room) was to 'give me an invisible bug spray for the invisible bugs.’ He would make sure to “set the can of bug spray on my nightstand” when he put me to bed, and said they’d hear me in the middle of the night making the PSHHHHHT noise with my mouth and then going back to sleep. We did similar things for our daughter when she was the same age, so she had the tools to manage her own fears and feelings.
Moving her arms with your hands while she’s sleeping is helping her fix what seems like the problem, which is that when you’re 4, there are so many things you have to let other people do and you really feel like you are too small and not at all in control.
So, yeah, parenting is nuts, but you are doing great, tbh. :]
Adults often forget that the things children endure on a daily basis, out of necessity – being denied permission to do simple everyday things that adults take for granted; being unable to perform basic tasks of self-care– ARE the stuff of nightmares.
Most adults, if trapped in a living situation that actually treated them like children, would be absolutely miserable.
I think that for children it can be just as bad.
Sometimes less bad, perhaps, because the child has never experienced anything better to compare it to.
But also probably sometimes more bad– because the child has also never experienced anything worse. Every bad thing a child experiences is much higher up the list of “worst things they’ve ever known” than it would be for an adult.
Respecting that feeling, and doing whatever you can to help alleviate it, is SO important.