[sterlingice]

This is going to take a long time for the train to get into the station here, but follow me, if you can, and maybe it all makes sense in the end?

I remember when we had our son, there's just a general haze around things. Life just didn't work right. There was a constant buzz that took up anywhere between 30-100% of my brainpower just to deal with this new human that I had to care for.

Just lots of stuff didn't work and I remember one in particular: I dropped at least 4 pint glasses during that year. Like not "chuck them at someone in anger" or "squeeze so hard they break", like literally "oh crap, that just slipped out of my hand when getting out of the dishwasher/taking it to the table/etc". Apparently, my body wasn't used to not having that full 100% brainpower so I guess motor coordination was at the top of the stack and failed sometimes. Kindof like when you're a kid and you grew an inch and were always hitting your head on stuff because, even though that inch wasn't noticeable, it was there. Other times, it was more obvious - no brainpower for creativity, shorter fuse, etc. But the glass one has always stuck with me.

I haven't dropped one since (I'll probably drop a glass at lunch today because I've been thinking too much about it, but maybe that's also just because of leftover trauma). The first year of our kid was just abject hell, between the sleep deprivation, the new responsibilities, changes in the relationship with my wife, and the illness, oh, the goddamned illnesses. As an aside, I don't think I'll ever understand the "cute baby phase" some people go through or the whole "well, I saw a baby and, honey, can we have another kid". We stopped at one kid and, no, not for that reason (as it is just temporary), but we viewed the first year as "if we want to go through with another kid, we'll do it in spite of year one not because of". It's not like if someone handed their baby to me, I'd spike it on the ground in terror, but just general feelings of "better you than me" and "it gets better".

As for the stress, I think I've eventually whittled that back to 10-15% at the bottom (still 100% at the top of the range) but there's still a constant buzz of stress. Always. And I don't think that ever goes away. But i can feel it. Generally, whenever my son is around, I can physically feel it, that added tension, that added stress.

I don't know if I've shared it here, but I lost my Dad unexpectedly last year. After a while, I started noticing some of the same types of things going wrong - no broken glasses - but a lot of the other similar symptoms. However, the weird thing was - I didn't feel the underlying stress, the underlying physical buzzing that I do with the stress from caring for my son. With him, I can start to feel when I'm starting to get that short fuse or whatever and mitigate the response. With this, it felt like same response out of the black box, but there was no warning - it was the strangest thing to me and it took me a while to understand it.

I imagine that losing a spouse would be even more intense. Like, at least with my wife, she can comfort me about the loss of my Dad. Not that my Dad couldn't do the same but you see your wife constantly whereas my Dad, less regularly - that's just a part of life of having one's own family as you get older.

So I guess this is all a long way of saying is that I have found stress from grief to be incredibly sneaky, even when compared to other stresses that are similar in feel and intensity.

SI