Communication

One evening I was alone with my son and my wife was out with friends at a womens group. My son and I were having a lot of fun and things were going well. At some point he started being quite fussy. I tried what I thought was everything. Foods, toys whatever came to mind.

He was getting worse and worse to the point that nothing was okay. I must interject that at about 1 year we decided discipline would be started, no more fits or things would be tolerated. So after trying for 30 minutes to mollify my child I spanked him and gave him a time out for a few minutes for him to calm down and for me to calm down.

When he got up he was still fussy. To the point that he was hitting me in the face. This has only happened on a few occasions. He just doesn't have that disposition. So I spank him again and more time out. Well when I got him up again I tried to understand what was wrong and went through the regular list; food, water, toys, comfort, diaper...well it turned out that unless you took off his diaper and inspected rather than the peek down the back the issue would not be discovered. He had been sitting in a bit of his own waste for hours and was extremely inflamed/red/rash to the point that touching, holding or anything near caused him extreme agony.

At this point I feel like I have failed in life. I clean him up and put some ointment on it and take care of the issue. I should have realized or learned from that point on that he was trying to tell me he had a problem, not just being fussy. Even though he could only cry at point he had different ones for frustrated, hurting, and angry.

I failed to understand what he was trying to tell me (luckily he still loved me) for over an hour. He both deteriorated to not really being kind and things fell apart on us.

At this point I think that I began to have a desire to really right this book that had come to mind earlier before he was born.