Introverted Eva about extroverted daughter: ‘My life as a mother is completely different than I imagined’
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As an introverted parent you need time and space for yourself, without your child. And that brings challenges, knows the introverted Eva Lohmann – who raises her extroverted daughter (7).
“Everyone who has a child imagines what it could be like. Often you wish it looked a little like you. In my case I had imagined a calm, dreamy child,” says Eva Linda. “I saw us lying on the couch together. Philosophical. Reading. We wouldn’t need words to understand each other.”
Unusable tips
That was a bit different for Eva. Her daughter is hyper and bounces around all the time. “She doesn’t want to be spared crowded parties, she wants to dance until the party is over,” writes Eva in her book Taking a break (from my family): experiences and advice from an introverted mother. “All those tips and tricks for introverted children that I have collected all my life turned out to be completely useless for me as a mother. I didn’t find it difficult to accept my child as it is. But my life as a mother is completely different from what I used to imagine.”
“Because my child functions differently than I do, I don’t intuitively understand her needs,” says Eva. “Fortunately, that has gotten better over the years. While I’m not the one who dances with her at parties, I can make sure someone else is there to dance with her. Her father is just as outgoing as she is; he often takes over.”
Eva’s daughter does not do the busy, social things with her, but with her father. She prefers to do other things herself. She says about that: “You can also have fun with me. Maybe it’s less loud and takes less time. But when we do puzzles or read or go to the theater together, we also have fun”, a tip that is also in her book. She writes, “The less energy-consuming the time you spend with your child, the longer and more enjoyable that time can be. The trick is to integrate the child into the activities that you like to do as an introvert.”
scream
About setting your own needs and boundaries – which is very important for an introvert – she says: “Know yourself and recognize that you need a lot of rest. Writing my book has made me look very closely at my character and my needs. If it’s been a long day of work, worry and play, I’ve often used up all my energy in the evening. Then I can’t anymore. Then if one more thing happens, I’ll start screaming. Then I can say to my daughter: ‘I’ve reached my limit, how can we get through the rest of the evening?’ If the solution is television, then so be it.”
“Simply put, the message should not be: you are too much for me, but: it is just too much for me. It is not the intention that the earplugs completely muffle the sound your child makes; just that they soften it up a bit. A toddler can produce 120 decibels. For comparison: a circular saw makes a noise of about 100 decibels,” she says. “My ears were literally ringing from my daughter’s screams. I needed those earplugs to calm my child down without going crazy myself.”
Expectations
Wearing earplugs as a parent does not seem very accepted yet, as Eva experiences. She says: “As a parent you have to be gentle with yourself. Don’t set the bar too high for yourself as a parent. Introverted parents aren’t exactly the kind of parents others expect us to be, but that doesn’t mean we’ve failed. We are okay the way we are.”
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Source: Linda.
