It’ll Happen When It Happens
“She’s hitting every benchmark out of order and I love it!” My friend said of her new baby, having no idea how much the “and I love it” bit would heal part of my soul. Don’t get me wrong my parents were wonderful, just anxious as fuck with my development. With ADHD and a rare joint disorder*, I was just not the kid to be anxious as fuck with. Parenting books and experts often imply there’s a specific order for everything. I talked too early, walked too late and too rarely (I’d still climb & descend stairs like a scene from The Exorcist if I had the choice.) I couldn’t write legibly until the 3rd or 4th grade. Child development books, conventional wisdom, even clinicans convinced my parents I’d NEVER be a functional adult. Yet here I am.
I’ve seen many clients have baggage around the same things from childhood. It just seems like people rarely tick the right boxes on any ‘template’ for human development at the right times. We’re late or early bloomers. We straggle behind in some school subjects and excel in others. Nothing is even, easy or by the book. School teaches us there is a “right” way to hold a pencil, tie your shoes, type or tackle math problems. There are even “right” and “wrong” friends to have, (though those depend on who you talk to.) We’re inevitably not going to fit the mold at one point or another. When archaeologists dig us up, even our bones won’t hit all the right marks (there was a reckoning in the field as to why they kept deeming too many skeletons ‘male’ compared to population rates. Besides, when I was born the doctor called me ‘floppy’ so they’ll be hella confused by my joints alone.)
About 4 years ago, my partner and I took in a feral kitten. We were told & read in countless sources that at his age he should be tamable within a few months at most. And he was, for Kitten (our existing cat whose name’s because my partner didn’t think he’d keep her- she turns 15 this month.) For us, it took like a year to tame him. And around strangers, it took four. It took a friend evacuating from the LA fires sleeping on our couch for a week and being assigned the same cat sitter by a service for 2 weeks in a row. If these things didn’t occur by pure happenstance, it might’ve taken Roo even longer to pose like this for a stranger:
Orange cat on tan cat tree showing cat sitter the white belly of surrender
I suppose my point is, whatever place you think you ‘should’ be in life, wherever conventional wisdom around your career field, age group, social life etc. says you ‘should’ be might be totally off. It could be off with your child or even your pets and that’s totally ok. We’re all individuals. You probably know this deep down but when arbitrary benchmarks keep being stressed around us, we start to believe there’s something wrong with ourselves despite that knowledge. So this is your reminder: where you ‘should’ be is arbitrary. Where you are and where you want to be, these are all that matter.
*Also Graves disease. Tip: If your last name is Graves and you discover a disease that’s not terminal, don’t name it after yourself.
