Being parents

I left with little S after breakfast this morning and we came home again in the afternoon. It's a fact of life in our family that we all actually have a better time if we split up. It's sad and not at all how we thought it would be to be parents, but it is what it is. We do things all three of us every now and then but we need a lot of time apart too.

So in  a way it's been a really good day, little S and I had a good outing and now she and Mistress are playing downstairs before bedtime and I'm relaxing upstairs. I think the little one has had a good day, and both me and Mistress has gotten time on our own and a chance to rest and recuperate. What we haven't got is anytime together.

We said a brief good morning before breakfast, but we can't have any normal grown up conversations over the meal or around it. And when we came home we pretty much changed shifts at the car. Mistress stayed outside and played and I went inside and rested. Before bed I'll watch a video with little S in bed and tonight it's my turn to read the bedtime story.

When little S is asleep, it's our time, we can be grown ups for an hour or so, and say anything we need to say. Cuddle and hang out and possibly doing something sexy or kinky. But we go to bed at around ten, and we would even if we didn't have to go to work or school because little S always wake up early and can't abide one minute without a parent.

One way to look at it is of course that we have a spoiled kid, that if we just raised her better she would be able to let other people finish a conversation uniterrupted or stand that her parents hug each other. Another view is that she's perfectly normal and behaves like every six year old and that the idea that parents would be able to exchange a sentence during a day together is asking for too much (that's my mothers' view, by the way).

I honestly don't think there's all that much we can do differently, without resorting to threats or physical violence. We've tried a lot of different tactics and I'm pretty convinced little S does everything she can to please us and do what we want her to do. I also don't think she's exactly like every other kid on the planet. I've seen the other kids, and even more, I've talked to their parents. They can do stuff we can't, without even thinking about it.

I do think we have an intense kid with a high need for social interaction and with a low impulse control for her age. She's all over the place and need a lot of time and attention in order to manage ordinary everyday things. If we don't support her, her anxiety levels goes through the roof. She's also really smart, kind, sweet, a good friend, has a great imagination, she's brave and caring and wonderful in many ways. But... no. She's not like most kids.

And that means that we can't do things many parents, many families, can. Get five minutes, or even one minute, alone together during a day, being the one we miss the most. We need to arrange things, make sure we get that time, because it doesn't just happen.

On the other hand this spring we went on a trip to Iceland and we rode Icelandic horses all three of us. Little S rode on a horse on her own, trotting and galopping and climbing the rocks and wading the rivers just like the adults. She had better control over her horse than most of the adult tourists on the tour. There's things we can't do, but there's a lot of things we can do and do that other families wouldn't. I don't want to change her a bit. I just want her to go to sleep soon so that I can cuddle with her other mother...