Hello, welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. This week I've been thinking about something that I saw downtown a couple of days ago, three or four days ago now, and it was, there was a youngish mother of two and she was sitting in a park. I was sitting in the park too, just taking a break from all the different chores and running around that I was doing.
It's my favourite park, a lot of kids playing, parents interacting. It's just a lovely place to be and I was noticing this mother sitting on the bench with some others and she was getting, she had a little baby and she had maybe a four year old and she was just getting a ton of advice. You know, mothers from older kids were clearly asking her about this and about that and about nursing and breastfeeding and was she and wasn't she and was it on schedule or on rhythm or was it on demand and she was just, I could see, you know, she was just on the bench opposite me and I could, you know, I could see that she was, she was sort of being polite but she was getting a lot of advice, all sorts and then all sorts of stories from the other mums about their experiences and when they started turning into, you know, slightly more difficult like, you know, the horror stories of, you know, very, very early childhood when you're trying to figure it all out with a baby, I could see that she actually wasn't enjoying herself at all, the poor thing.
And, you know, it set me thinking that we can often feel subjected to an information or advice overload and this mum, you know, clearly she'd raised a friendly, fun-loving little four-year-old daughter, I could, you know, four years or so that I could see playing. She wasn't a rookie, it probably would have been even more intense, of course, if she had been a first-time mum. And it did set me thinking of, you know, how do we deal with that? How do we get through that kind of thing? Because every single mum that was there was well-meaning, no doubt about it.
But they, of course, started to get caught up in their own stories and in their own experiences. And how can you sort of stay conscious of that, you know, that they're just trying to be helpful and work with the either annoyance that can come up or the feeling of, well, I don't know anything, everyone knows so much more than me, or the kind of pushback, look, I know what I'm doing, that kind of feeling, there's a range, isn't there? And we've all experienced it to one extent or another. And one of the things that I was, when I was looking at this little baby, just there, just sitting on the mother's lap and just gazing up at her mother's face, is I was really struck by how the baby very rarely ever looked at any other parent.
If there was a dog barking or a sudden movement, the baby might, you know, turn to it. It did a couple of times, but not much. She was really watching her mother and her mother was interacting with her and just rocking her a little bit and just, you know, touching her cheek.
And there was clearly a strong and beautiful bond between the baby and her bigger sister who would come up and the baby would then look at the sister. And amidst all this swirl of advice and war stories of mothering infants, there was this almost like cocoon-like presence around these three, the four-year-old, the baby, and the mother. And as the four-year-old would go out and play, she would come running back with lots and lots of stories.
And then she would go out a little further and play for a little longer and then come running back. And I thought, you know, there it is. This four-year-old is showing what the answer, showing the answer really is that she's really attached to her mom and her mom has bonded and attuned to her just as the mom was attuning to the baby.
And no matter how much advice you get, even right in the thick of it, there was the answer because one can take this advice on, you know, open oneself to it without any, really without any little danger that it will overwhelm a parent because we are the base camp for our kids. We just are. This little four-year-old was showing it.
She was showing it right there physically, running out, running back, running out, running back. It was beautiful, you know, how she was connected to her mother. So I thought to myself, you know, dear mom, you don't need to be annoyed at all with these people.
You are, you're doing so well. You know, you're connecting to your baby. You're obviously well connected to your, your older daughter.
It's all going well. No matter how much advice you're given by anyone else, rest assured you're doing well and in that, in that very simple attachment, simple and deep attachment that she, she was, you know, showing. And therefore the advice might be knowing that consciously, the advice that one gets, you know, you can file it in the, that's interesting.
Oh, I wouldn't do it that way. Oh, that's really interesting. And one can open oneself to it without the feeling that it's going to knock, you know, one's parenting off course, because that's the, that's the feeling sometimes that one's being hit with a, with a parenting advice tsunami and that, and that you'll lose your track, that we'll, we'll not know where we stand as, as a parent.
And I'll get confused, that kind of feeling. And you know, if we can understand that if we stay close to our kids, as most parents strive to do, of course, and we connect and attach and attune and bond to our children, then all the advice that comes can be of interest because it's not, it really isn't going to knock us off course. Okay.
So that's the, that's the rather simple, but I hope helpful reflections for this week in the Simplicity Diary. Okay. Bye bye for now.
