I sat down a little while back for a talk with friend and retired Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf on his podcast Cleared Hot. We talked a bit about the journey of parenting and our experiences in the service. Something he told me has rattled around a bit for a few years now.
When he was an instructor at BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition School) the legendary SEAL indoctrination training, his job was to make it as difficult for candidates to make it through the program as possible. And the most effective way he found was to get them to expand their mental horizons during difficult evolutions; to help them see what they were going through as something that lasted far into the future.
It wasn’t just this thing. It was that this thing would last all night. It wasn’t just tonight…it was hell week. And it wasn’t just hell week. They had you for months.
One can’t stack the burdens of the future neatly and carry them through the difficulties of the present. They weigh too much. And we collapse under the strain.
We quit.
The key in specific situations of strain is to make your horizon as small as possible. To see the moment as a moment, and not a small part of a grander struggle.
It’s not easy. It takes practice. But if you’re on the journey of special needs parenting, you better get used to it.
Lying in the darkness with my son on a particularly difficult night, trying to get him through one of his fits that keep him from sleeping, the key is for me to stay calm. And for him to match that calmness and eventually settle himself. Though it doesn’t happen that often anymore, it used to. And it could take hours. And there’s a thought that I know breaks me down.
This is my life. This is it. I’m going to be doing this for 50 years. Lying here in the darkness for hours, every night.
Like water seeking into the cracks in a rock, that thought breaks me.
I’ve stacked the problems of the next 50 years on top of me. And I collapse.
At its core, when it comes to special needs parenting, or anything really, the thought is a false one. Seasons of struggle are rarely permanent. When they are, we find ways to adjust and so their impact on us isn’t permanent. But while we’re going through them, they feel that way.
If you buy into them, this life slowly breaks you down. And you quit, evolution by evolution. And then all together.
You can’t carry the thoughts of future pain into your present. They’re just too heavy.
So just put them down.
—
A version of this post was previously published on Fatherhood2dot0 and is republished here with permission from author.
—
◊♦◊
Have you read the original anthology that was the catalyst for The Good Men Project? Buy here: The Good Men Project: Real Stories from the Front Lines of Modern Manhood
◊♦◊
Talk to you soon.
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want to join our calls on a regular basis, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—
Photo credit: istockphoto