A fatherly capacity for neurosis

The second baby is less stressful.  You’ve burned all of your neurotic oil on the firstborn.  You bring perspectives and the accordant wisdom to the younger.

Ha!

Nathan never really freaked me out.  At about two months he developed a bump on the side of his head that doctors told us was almost certainly a subdermal hemangioma that would resolve itself, but we’d better get an MRI to make sure it’s not some scary on-both-sides-of-his-skull shit.  It wasn’t, his body ate it, and the hell with it.  It was stressful, but short-lived.

No, Aaron’s been the guy.  There was his tachycardia.  I wrote about that earlier.  That turned the seven days of leave I had taken from the anticipated low-key and joyous time with my family into a frenetic bunch of in-and-out at the neonatal ICU, followed by several months of angst that included one panicked trip back to the doctor.

Don’t think about it much now, though we still check his heart rate when he’s fussy for a reason we cannot determine.  It’s always fine.

Then I was sure he was autistic, or had a related disorder.  I talked to Lea about it a bit, but kept most of it to myself.  Why’d I think it?  Well, his language development was considerably behind Nathan’s, for one thing.  (Never mind that Nathan was consistently way ahead of where he was supposed to be, and Aaron was never behind on development charts.)

That was only so much comfort, because I was sure he was also nowhere near as fond of sitting still and cuddling as was Nathan.  The kicker was that he lined up his toy cars precisely, and came totally unglued if you moved them.  That’s in every description of autism you ever read.

He still does it once in a while.  I took this photograph tonight:

Only now I chuckle.  Agewise, Aaron’s out of the woods on even the most liberal interpretations of a developmental disorder.  He’s clearly a happy, bright, well-adjusted, socially engaging four-year-old kid who simply carries his father’s affection for order.

Time will tell if he also inherited the gene that makes him think up shit to worry about.

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4 thoughts on “A fatherly capacity for neurosis”

  1. I have the genetic material which causes one to think up shit to worry about. Everything is okay? Well, that’s proof enough that something under the surface is terribly wrong, isn’t it?

    Reply
  2. Parental neurosis comes with the territory. You’re either worrying about something, or worrying because there’s nothing to worry about.

    My son, who is also my second child, didn’t say much of anything till he was 2 years old. Just grunted and pointed. (His sister was talking in complete sentences when she was 18 months old.) I was convinced something was wrong. Now he’s 6 and I can’t shut him up.

    Reply

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