I was pregnant with my second son León in 2022, walking around the central Italian town of Perugia with my friend Tanmoy, the author of Sanity, a journalism platform on mental health that you should definitely be reading (and supporting). It was our first in-person reunion since we had met in September 2019. We were deep in conversation, and the cobblestoned alleyways were a picturesque backdrop to our meeting during the International Journalism Festival.
“Why are you walking so fast?” Tanmoy blurted out. “We’re not in a rush.”
He surprised me. I hadn’t even noticed I was walking fast. I tried to slow down, but he caught me several times regularly picking up my speed — for no reason whatsoever. Not even my first-trimester exhaustion would slow me down.
Fast forward a couple of years. Recently, I was at the airport in Naples, hanging out with a friend, passing the time before I had to go through security.
“Non così veloce, Irene,” she said, touching my arm. “Not so fast.” She was not only very pregnant, but she is also a yoga instructor, very aware of her body. “I don’t want to move so fast.”
I stopped immediately, laughed at myself, and at how natural this fast pace comes out — but those words kept resonating in my head. “I don’t want to move so fast.”
I’ve told you in the past that I am the mother of two very physically active and restless children. We often joke that they have an on/off button. They don’t do cool downs or warm ups. Even when we read before bedtime, Lorenzo, who is five, is fidgety, and restless, and moving. When he finally catches a longer breath, when we remind him, his body changes, and he falls asleep in a few seconds.
When they wake up, it’s the same. In Argentine Spanish there is an expression that I love (which comes from Italian): hacer fiaca. It means to rest in bed after you’ve woken up. To me, it means to lie down to transition slowly into the world of the living. My children don’t have this concept inside of them. They open their eyes and they literally spring into action, jumping off the bed and going off into the world.
Do they simply have no deeper feeling of what a slower pace is? And is it something they were born with, that I’ve handed over to them through my DNA, or is it something they are learning from my fast pace — which I am often unaware of?
Fire-fighter mode
We have a new babysitter, and she is amazing — smiley, fun, caring, attentive.
One of the first things she told us is that she doesn’t like how she reacts to being rushed and to please give her advance notice if we need to leave the house at a certain time or get the children ready for an outside activity.
She is 20. I wish I had had her awareness at that age — or that I had it now. The truth is that I am always running around, but that hurried pace usually comes hand-in-hand with a lot of deeper feelings that I don’t like much. Particularly when people hurry me, I go into unnecessary fire-fighter mode, I sweat, and cannot breathe properly, and start getting tunnel vision — and yet I find it hard to set limits around that — to tell myself, and others, that “I don’t want to move so fast.”
The situation gets even worse when the kids are involved. Typically one or both are making loud noises or screaming at me, demanding that I look at them, or hand something over, or that I do something for them. Instead of trying to take some distance, and calm the situation around me, my faster heartbeat makes me panic, and I just get everybody more worked up.
Emotional regulation
Emotional regulation: “the ability to exert control over one’s own emotional state. It may involve behaviors such as rethinking a challenging situation to reduce anger or anxiety, hiding visible signs of sadness or fear, or focusing on reasons to feel happy or calm”.
We typically develop emotional regulation as children — and it is, as other outcomes in early childhood development, a mix of nature AND nurture: both environment and genetics are at play, as advances in brain imaging, genetic studies, and longitudinal behavioral surveys keep showing.
When it comes to emotional regulation in particular, the idea is for children to learn the skills to be able to manage their feelings. “Kids are born with all the feelings and none of the skills to manage them,” says Dr. Becky Kennedy, a U.S. psychologist who is a household parenting expert, in this long (and insightful) podcast.
Some children — if they are neurodiverse, or highly sensitive, for example — may have a harder time learning how to manage their emotions because of their nature. Others may have a harder time because they don’t have adults around them who can model a better approach to managing emotions.
Life-long habits
Whenever I have a chance to remind people about just how important early childhood is, I like to tell them that we were all once children, and that the habits we developed then often stay with us throughout our lives.
One of the things I know about myself is that my emotional regulation is faulty. Unless you have lived with me — I have a long list of former flatmates who can attest to this — you won’t have seen my mood swings or moments of rage or how badly I can fare under stress.
Partly because I am very good at hiding them, especially at work: for decades, my work was based on being able to go into firefighter mode and react to the news, be cool-headed, get places in no time, understand what was happening and react to it live on TV, or radio. Deadlines, breaking news. I kept it cool. And then crashed.
The truth is that I can now recognise and name all the things that happen to me when I am stressed. My heart starts beating faster, my movements accelerate even if I am trying to cut an apple. I become clumsier, I stop breathing properly.
The problem is — as many adults may find out once they become parents — that being in charge of young children puts you on the spot and under stress in ways that even a very difficult career may not (unless you are a teacher, of course!). And since children rely on you and your responses, as well as learn from them, if you have trouble self-regulating, staying cool, and looking at things from a distance when tiny little daily stressors arise, you are in trouble. Daily life can then become a negative cycle of stress and more stress.
And your children may learn to overreact instead of self-regulating and calming down.
What does this have to do with slowing down? I know that if I am not in a rush, and if we don’t have to get places by a certain time, or I am not feeling hurried inside, I deal with my emotions better.
When I give myself space and time, good things happen. When my despaired voice arises and I don’t know how to calm myself, I can’t find an external figure to rely on — my parents were hardly the emotional regulators in my life. So I am learning to remother myself.
And that, my friends, is an endurance sport, as my wise friend Tanmoy pointed out. “The urge to run to your parents and ask them to hide you from this world where you don’t feel safe. The realization that you can’t because you are reparenting yourself, so you have to soothe your inner child who could never really be a child.”
Little did he know that by slowing me down in the streets of Perugia, he was giving me a valuable hint on how to tackle this difficult endurance sport of reparenting and be a little kinder to myself.
With love and care,
Irene
📣 The First 1,000 Days is edited by community member and friend, Shaun Lavelle.
📹 zhendong wang on Unsplash, A collection of colorful miniature animal figurines, with a green turtle in focus at the center.