Before our little ones learn to voice their needs, wants, and concerns; they communicate by body language, pointing, or in my son's case taking my arm and "controlling" it to the item he is wanting at the moment. For example, we were eating at the Texas Roadhouse in California with a cousin and her daughter. Logan wanted to eat the peanuts from the bucket on the table but they were out of his reach. He took the sleeve of my shirt, lifted my arm and placed it in the bucket. I, in conversation with my husband and cousin, without thinking grabbed some peanuts, cracked them and gave them to Logan. Our cousin watched all of this and while laughing compared me to a marionette with Logan controlling the strings.
I have been accused for Logan's lack of verbal communication because of this; and though I was offended and a little angry at first I realized something. We are all in a way some sort of puppet. As parents we love our children unconditionally and want to give them everything - whether that be love and support and/or all the materialistic things we didn't have growing up, therefore we leave ourselves vulnerable.
Children learn at an early age which "strings" to push or pull in order to get what they want or need. They know the strings to our emotions, our hearts, and they know how to manuever the strings to toy with our feelings.
Though Logan is becoming a little chatterbox, somehow I don't think our family will ever let me forget how I am a puppet, and my soon to be two year old the puppet master.
1 comment:
They are all puppet masters, at age one or 43. It is the nurture in us, the need to feel needed that makes us thier puppets. And dont worry about Logan not talking, James only started to make sense to the rest of the world in the last 6 months or so. They will talk in their own time. Today he told a total stranger his name was "James Leslie Morrison, he lived in Snohomish and do you want to have cake at my house?" at full volume of course. Great, he finally knows his full name, where he lives but I dont know of cake in my house...does he know something I dont?
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