39. Parenting Made Me See My Own Programming

This episode is about parenting, affirmations, the stories we tell ourselves, and how the messages we hear over and over become the water we’re swimming in. 

Most of us have beliefs we never chose. 

We just absorbed them from our parents, our jobs, our relationships, or whatever environment shaped us.

You see, I made my daughter cry the other day.

Not in some dramatic, horrible way. 

But in a way that made me realize I had been accidentally teaching her something almost every day of her life.

We’re in the middle of weaning her from breastfeeding. She calls it “chichi,” and we’ve been telling her that she’s a big girl now. She has teeth. She can eat food. The chichi magic has to go back to the moon so another little baby can use it.

Pretty cute, honestly.

Except she started pushing back by telling us she’s not a big girl. She’s a little baby. No teeth. Needs milk.

And then it hit me.

For two and a half years, I’ve been picking her up, snuggling her, and calling her “Daddy’s little baby girl.”

Every day.

So here I am telling her she’s a big girl, while I’ve been affirming the opposite her entire life.

That wrecked me a little bit.

Maybe you’re not walking around saying you’re a baby with no teeth.

But you might be telling yourself you’ll always be anxious. Or broken. Or that good things never last. Or that healing works for other people, but not for you.

And until you notice the story, you can’t change it.

Thanks again for listening!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So I did something the other day that made my daughter cry. And I actually realized I've been doing this almost every day of her life. Now it's not as bad as you think. So my daughter is two and a half years old. We are currently weaning her from breastfeeding. She calls it Chi Chi, which is very Mexican slang. And what we did is like we've kind of weaned her down a little bit. And right now she still gets Chi Chi to fall asleep, but then not any other point in the day. And we were like cleaning out a bunch of stuff in our house the other day, and we stumbled on these bottles that we bought when she was like a newborn. We never gave her formula or anything, but we would freeze some extra breast milk and I would give it to her in a bottle sometimes, like very infrequently. And so we found these bottles the other day and she like immediately fixated on it. She wanted them like right away. And she drinks a good amount of milk, just like regular, you know, cow's milk from the store. And so she wanted us to put milk into this bottle so that she could like you know drink milk from a bottle like a baby. And she started going, she's she's like, Sita, little baby, Sita needs milk, and she would like fake cry. And now this all happened around the same time that she also objectively had a really bad stomach ache. She had some stomach issues, so she was kind of like crying and uncomfortable for a few days. When that was all going on, she was really like latching onto me, looking for me, looking to me for comfort. And I think that kind of happened right alongside the weaning where she's realizing not that her mother's not there for her anymore, but she's kind of naturally looking to me even more for comfort as well, just because she can't go to her mother for breast milk the same way that she always used to. And Sita's hilarious. She loves taking care of like other babies and animals and everything. So she'll have like her all of her baby dolls. And if she drops one on the ground, she'll go, oh no, it's crying. And she'll fake cry. She'll go like, wheh, wh, is crying the baby. And then she'll give it a kiss and then give it Chi Chi. Like she'll pretend to breastfeed the baby, or she'll bring it over to me or her mother, Cordy, to pretend to breastfeed the baby. And so she does this like fake crying thing all the time when she's playing with her dolls. And recently, like within the last four or five days, she's been doing this fake crying thing like all the time. And at first, I thought it was real crying, and maybe it actually was the very first couple days, because it coincided with this stomach ache that she had, where she would periodically get like these waves of pain, and she would cry, and she would come over to me. And I think, you know, she kind of recognized that when she does that, dad drops whatever he's doing and comes right over and gives undivided attention to her. And again, I think this started off legit. She had a really bad stomach ache, and obviously I'm concerned about her, so I would drop whatever I was doing, but then her stomach is better now. Like she's fine physically, she's fine. But she would continue to do this like little cry periodically, and I didn't know that her stomach, you know, like how how are you supposed to tell that a stomachache is gone? Uh I don't know what she's feeling, right? So I would just go over and pick her up and like comfort her. And I, you know, we started to kind of suspect that she was hamming it up a little bit. But what really convinced me is that she spent, I was I was like up here in the office working yesterday. She spent almost the whole day without me, with our nannies and with uh with Cordy, and she didn't do that fake cry a single time when I wasn't around. And then as soon as I come downstairs, she hits me with it. And we kind of put that together. And then I said to her, I said to Cita, I was like, Are you crying because you want me to take you? And she's like, mm-hmm. And she'll do this thing where she'll go, Sita little baby, because we keep telling her that she's not a little baby, she's a big girl, and there's this book called uh Booby Moon. I think that's what it's called. We call it Chi Chi Moon. It's this whole like this whole thing about weaning, and we're actually gonna do this like ceremony in a couple nights where on a full moon we're gonna get a helium balloon, we're gonna attach a light to it, and we've been telling her for the past couple months that she's a big girl now, and the way that it works is the Chi Chi magic has to go back up to the moon once you're a big girl, so that the moon can give the magic back to another mommy who has another baby somewhere else, and the little baby needs the milk because little babies don't have teeth and they can't use forks, and so they need the breast milk. And she like understands that. I think it's a pretty cool idea, actually, to make like a little ceremony around this to demarcate the transition. And Sita's so smart, like she remembers everything. So I know that after this, we'll be able to explain like, don't you remember we gave the Chi Chi magic back up to the moon, so there's no more Chi Chi? And you'll be very sad, but the Chi Chi is gone, and so we can say thank you, Chi Chi, right? All this stuff. Anyway, sometimes in response to that, she will literally say, Sita, no have teeth, Sita little baby, no teeth. Right? Because we're making this argument, like you're a big girl, you have teeth now, you can eat food. Babies don't have teeth, so they need the they need the breast milk still. And she'll go, Sita, Sita little baby, cita, no teeth, when she wants to get breast milk. And so she I came down from working the other day and she started crying, and I had that talk with her. I was like, Are you just doing this so that Dada will come take you? And she's like, Mm-hmm. And I was like, But you're a big girl, and she's like, No, Sita little baby. And it hit me that all the time, literally all the fucking time, when I'm playing with her and I'm like picking her up and and snuggling with her and stuff, I'll say things to her like, Your daddy's a little baby, aren't you? Or like your daddy's a little baby girl, and she'll be like, mm-hmm. And she's like so proud of that. And like I looked at Cordy and I was just like, fuck, like I did this. Like this is my fault that she's doing this, because I would always say, You're daddy's little baby girl. So I was like telling her, like, you are my baby. And so now here I am also asking her to be a grown-up and be a big girl and not be a baby anymore. When I've literally always told her, like, you are my baby. And so that's why she's saying, like, Sita baby, CT needs milk, right? And uh of course I do other affirmations. I didn't even realize that was an affirmation because I would also say, like, Sita is so smart, Sita's so brave, Sita's so kind, Sita so caring, giving, generous, curious, nice, smart, funny, whatever, all these things. Beautiful too, but you'll notice like just calling her a pretty girl is like one out of 27 different adjectives that we use for her. The point being, I didn't even realize that her whole life, like literally the last two and a half years, I've probably said that to her at least once a day, if not like 30 times a day, that like your daddy's a little baby. And it just it fucking hit me. It was just like so crystal clear. Maybe because I had just smoked a little bit of weed actually and worked out, but it was just so crystal clear that like I did this. I made her do this fake crying thing to get my attention. It's not like she needs to do that. I give her my undivided attention all the fucking time. But I I don't know, I guess clearly there was something special about when she had that stomach ache and she cried and I came to her that really stood out and she wanted more of that, but like I made her think that she is this little baby. And we use affirmations in our microdosing program because I hold that affirmations are the most powerful tool to change your definition of yourself and your beliefs and views about yourself. Like the story that you tell yourself about yourself and the place in the world, affirmations are the most powerful tool to change that. I have told her this story her whole life that she is my little baby, and so she gets to cry and pretend that she doesn't have any teeth and still need breast milk or need milk from this little bottle. I don't know. I'm probably not doing a good job of expressing how like earth-shattering this was for me to realize that I had done that, and how insidious it was, because you know I try to instill that she's smart and funny and brave and curious and kind and generous and beautiful and all these other positive things, but alongside that I didn't even realize that I was doing this one thing. Um there's a uh there's a story, a little anecdote that I love. It comes from uh David Foster Wallace gave a speech that Akira the Don turned into a song called What the Hell Is Water? And the story is that there's an older fish swimming down the street, because you know, fish have streets, and he passes by two younger fish and he says, Good morning, boys, how's the water today? And he swims on by. And the two younger fish look at each other and they go, What the hell is water? And I love that because there are things around us that we are so steeped in that we don't even realize are around us and are shaping our entire environment and our entire worldview. And I had no idea that I was doing this to my daughter, and obviously it's not a huge deal, but it just really fucking highlighted how insidious this stuff is, how how difficult it can be to realize it, and just how profoundly the messaging that you hear shapes your beliefs about yourself. So I am going to be a lot more careful with how I speak to my daughter, and I would invite you to think about what kinds of messages you have internalized from your parents, from your upbringing, from society, from your work, whatever, uh, that you are telling yourself, maybe convincing yourself that you're also a little baby with no teeth who just still needs breast milk. Probably not, but perhaps convincing yourself that, I don't know, you don't deserve to find happiness deep down, that anything good that happens to you will be followed by something bad, that nothing good comes to you without a struggle, that you will just always be fucked up and you'll never get rid of this anxiety or this depression or whatever other cycles or patterns are defining your life. It's a very foundational thing that we teach inside of our program. There's a lot of nuance to it, because honestly, affirmations sound like bullshit off the bat, and most people have had a bad experience of trying to use affirmations because they were never taught the proper way to do it. Um, that's a whole other episode in and of itself. Um But yeah, reflections from parenting for you. Fucking being a dad's crazy. So I'm really glad that that happened because it made me more aware of it. Um we'll see how our Chi Chi moon party goes in a couple days when we sorry, environment, but I'm going to release a helium balloon into the air because the balloon will carry the Chi Chi magic back up to the moon so that Sita has something to symbolize the departure of her ability to breastfeed. There's some cool lessons in there too around like the significance of ritual and ceremony, but I've already rambled incoherently enough for one podcast. So thank you for listening to my musings. I hope this was valuable. Uh, if it wasn't, tell me, and I'll fucking stop rambling. But until somebody tells me to stop, I'm gonna keep rambling because I actually do hear occasionally from people who enjoy this stuff. So thank you for listening. Until next time, peace out. God bless you.