The next thing
your mom was supposed to do is not exactly a news flash either.
She was supposed to think you were really special. Everyone knows their
mom is supposed to think they're really special, although this is one
of the characteristics that can go easily wrong. Because it rests on
rather thin ground. Occasionally, or actually even frequently, an otherwise
messed up woman can produce Unconditional Love chemicals as a result
of labor. But the specialness factor is not quite as strongly chemical.
What happens is
that, right after labor, in a dazed, disoriented and naturally high
state of confusion, exhaustion and exhilaration, your mother looks down
and there is an infant! This is absolutely astounding!
Your mother may
have seen infants on numerous occasions, admired a few, read some helpful
books on childbirth, seen pictures of fetuses, gotten an ultrasound,
but she never really believed that she personally would actually produce
an infant from her own body! It just seems unbelievable. It is, in fact,
a very hard thing for the human mind to wrap itself around. It's not
that big a deal when someone else does it - but when you do it...it's
absolutely amazing.
The mind just drops
its jaw when it sees what the body has done. How did it do that?
it thinks to itself. It must be a miracle! It really does seem miraculous
to anyone who's seen childbirth up close, at least at first.
So what happens
is the mind comes to the conclusion that this particular infant must
be incredibly special - because the person the mind belongs to produced
it. This train of thought produces a kind of awe in the mind and an
adoration feeling. When this feeling takes, it can last a lifetime.
Many people believe throughout their lives, that their single greatest
accomplishment was having children. (Dads get this feeling too, particularly
if they are present at childbirth - how did I do that? they think).
The utter incomprehensibility
of having produced a child makes the mind want to just stare at the
child adoringly for hours on end. It wants to stare at it in delight,
because it knows that no matter how long it looks, it will never really
be able to figure out how that infant got there. The mind really didn't
have much to do with the process. It didn't give detailed instructions
for the construction of the infant, it really didn't exert the effort
and control it exerts in so many other arenas. And here is an infant
anyway! How did it do that???? It can't figure this out, and the mind
is very pleased by things it thinks it can almost figure out, but not
quite. It races around in happy circles saying 'I have a baby! This
is my baby! I did this. I actually made a real live baby.' And
it doesn't really stop getting excited for a long time.
Almost everything
the infant does just seems tremendously exciting. How did it do that?
Did you see that? It smiled!
Now of course
you know this in a way. Anyone who's old enough to have nieces,
nephews, kids, friends who have kids, cousins who have kids, whatever,
will at some point run into this phenomenon. The parent is just so excited
by everything the first kid does. The parent's mind never really believed
this miraculous infant would be able to do anything - because it seemed
so unlikely there would be one at all.
Now naturally, if
a particular infant is a miracle, and tremendously special because its
parent produced it - well it deserves extra special loving tender attentive
care, now doesn't it? Of course it does. If something is a miracle,
a special miracle, obviously it must be cherished and honored.
This particular
feature sometimes takes hold a little better in people who are a little
smarter than those who don't really experience the full effect. It's
a mind thing, and the mind has to be able to process it. It's designed
to encourage the lavishment of resources on the child - and of course
you've at some point run into parents, or heard of them, who will not
under any circumstances shut up about how special their children are,
or who lavish a grotesque amount of resources on them. I really don't
know whether evolution intended people to go overboard with this - perhaps
it did.
But even a modest
amount of that 'you're just so incredibly special for no reason other
than you're my child' tends to feel good to the child in question. And
the child expects it actually. Perhaps logically enough. I suppose in
one sense it's not a stretch to say each person is a miracle in some
fashion. Perhaps it's not illogical to want a little acknowledgement
of that fact. And of course, underneath it all, the organism is greedy
for those extra resources its specialness entitles it to.
Sometimes 2nd and
3rd kids, or middle kids suffer from the 'I Guess I'm Not Really All
That Special' syndrome. They don't care for it particularly. Actually,
anyone can suffer from it if the Specialness Factor didn't take.
It's not only moms who have already had a child or two who occasionally
fail to be all that surprised that they are able to produce children
at all. Sometimes mothers are actually bewildered and grumpy and unhappy
that they produced a child, when part of them was sure it would never
really happen, in spite of being pregnant. Some women, particularly
if they have a great fondness for crystal meth, don't actually notice
that they've even produced a child. This sort of thing happens rather
routinely. This is not, of course, ideal.
Deep in your
heart, you would much prefer to be a miracle. However, miraculousness
is a byproduct of unlikeliness, and unlikeliness is frequently a by-product
of hardship. For example, (note to squeamish - avert your eyes), if
your umbilical cord got wrapped around your neck & cut off the oxygen
to your head until your eyes started to pop out of your skull and everyone
thought for sure you were gonna die, but for some miraculous reason
you didn't and instead became a larger brain-damaged human being whose
primary activity consisted of drooling - you would be special. And
in fact, your sheer unlikeliness may make you very very special to your
mother, who may dote on you for the rest of her life. This is very sweet
of your mother to do so, but perhaps, just perhaps, it's a good thing
for you in some ways that you are actually not all that special.
Specialness has
its advantages and disadvantages. Arguably, the Special Olympics is
more fun than the regular Olympics and arguably, if half your face was
missing or some other thing had gone horribly, specially wrong with
you, it might encourage your family members to cherish you all the more
intently. Arguably. But maybe not. Evolution is a funny thing. Sometimes
special hardships call forth, logically enough, special efforts to bring
forth resources. And sometimes these things call forth a survival response
to ditch the drooling brain-damaged child with half a face. And on that
sobering note -
Aren't you glad
you aren't any more special than you already are? Of course you
are. You are now tremendously grateful to be exactly the way you
are. And this is exactly the way it should be, no matter what your mother
was like.
And this warm
feeling of gratitude may last for up to 45 seconds, before your brain
goes back to its default mechanism of wishing you were someone else
entirely. Because no matter how good you've got it, part of your
brain's job is to scout alertly for folks who have it better. Just in
case it should be able to secure that enhanced status and lifestyle
for you.
And since being
someone else who has it much better than you do frequently involves
unrewarding effort or wholesale and impractical changes in your entire
way of being, frequently your brain will sigh grumpily and covertly
blame you for not being someone else. This is why many of us like nothing
better than to witness the Horribly Misfortunate. An activity
the local news is more than willing to help us engage in. Witnessing
the Horribly Misfortunate scares your brain into momentarily deciding
it's not all that displeased with you after all. At least it doesn't
have to deal with those Horrible & Frightening Misfortunes and perhaps
it should be nicer to you.
This is such a deep-rooted
mechanism that the government, the US Federal Government, prints pamphlets
from time to time on dealing with depression in which it will overtly
urge you to Help the Less Fortunate, on the theory that exposure
to the Less Fortunate will scare your brain into straightening up and
flying right and treating you with the respect and admiration you deserve
and just knocking it off with that depression stuff. This, of course,
has nothing to do with your mother. But you have to admit that now
that you have taken a brief tour of the Special Olympics, met a few
people with missing faces, and given some thought to the reality of
drooling, your mother, whatever her faults and failings, almost doesn't
seem so bad anymore, now does she? I am always looking out for your
interests here at prettyfedup.com and if I have to mention to drooling
to make you feel better, you better believe I will not hesitate to do
it.
All righty then,
so your mother either treated you like you were special or she didn't.
If she didn't, from time to time, your brain stem will get a bit bewildered
and panicked. It will think to itself, 'I wish I was special.
Everybody would love me better if I was special.' It may whine, it may
get discouraged, it may patronize websites who promise to send you encouraging
thoughts of the day to remind you how special you are, and so on. Specialness
is just one of those things that makes the brain a little less anxious.
In the US a fair amount of social effort is devoted to trying to convince
large segments of the wary but wishful population how special they are.
Entire self-esteem
movements have been built on the human desire to be special. And
this is the point at which I could easily tell you to just get over
it. Get the hell over it. It's not that big a deal. And so on.
But I'm not.
Because why would I tell you to get over it when getting over it is
hard and indulging it is easy. This site is all about easy. And the
fact is, big deal or not, this is one of those automatic brain stem
things that will just want to keep popping up asking 'Am I special yet?'
The brain stem, naturally enough, doesn't want to be forgotten, left
out, or herded into a cattle car with lots of other people and sent
to a concentration camp. Since being left out, forgotten, and herded
with lots of other people into terrible circumstances actually does
happen, I am in no way going to argue with your brain stem's preference
to be special to at least one person, even if your mother sucked at
it. Being special offers a little extra protection in a scary world.
So if your mother
wasn't willing to pretend that you're incredibly special, you're just
going to have to pretend yourself until someone else gets the hint and
starts treating you that way as well.
And since specialness
is one of those common problems, rife with misconceptions, and one of
those strange topics of discussion in American or perhaps Western life,
we are just going to have to go the next page to straighten it out on
a factual basis. This could be boring or it could be exciting, still
how can one resist instructions on how to be special in an unspecial
world?
The answer to that
question is, one can't.
The
Specialness Factor
prettyfedup.com