The real alpha thing is how calm your kids feel

My first memory is probably from when I was about 4 or 5 years old, and my mother was reading to me at bedtime. My favourite book series at the time was something to do with children who were butterflies and went on adventures in gardens. I knew every single detail about them, and would often correct my mum if she read a line wrong, or if my interpretation of how one of the butterfly children said a line was different from hers. It’s a mellow corner of my mind.

Off, then on

While the technicalities of that period of my life are vague, there’s a moment where the lights of memory simply switched on. Gradually, then suddenly. The reason why we start remembering stuff around this time is because we start knowing how to express our thoughts through words, both verbally and in written form. Which means we can better express what’s going on inside our minds. Which means stories emerge. And stories are the cornerstone of memory making.

We could even argue that anything before that time, for all intents and purposes, felt like a dream. Broadly there (the body has memory too), but not specifically there because we lack the words to express what was going on. And this feeling of liminality is what I tend to observe when I see my own daughter falling asleep now.

As I write this, she’s 4 and almost a half. She’s pretty fluent in both Portuguese and English, but is still learning to write. So she’s building her memory making toolkit as we speak. But there will be one day when whatever she or we are doing will become the first core memory she can vividly access. The stuff she can narrate back to herself and others. And the both wonderful and terrifying thing about it all is that it’s completely outside of our control when that happens.

Soft core

So, every time I lay my kid down to sleep, and read her a story, and create the environment for her body to unwind (a process that begins long before bedtime itself, anyway), I think about when the light of memory will flick on. One day, the way I am reading to her about Elsa and Anna and Olaf’s birthday, even though he didn’t know what a birthday was, might become a sensation turned into words. Which both raises the pressure, and softens everything.

My favourite detail of my kid falling asleep is when she’s closing her eyes. But then not yet. And then slowly again. Not yet. And then once again, softly. Nope! Not yet. And this dance between being awake and asleep creates an atmosphere that I can only describe as being in-between dreams. She’s already there, in dreamworld, but also on the verge of memory making, not yet fully formed, and yet not inexistent either. It’s a liminal space where everything feels soft.

Re-defining alpha

We often see, in popular culture and advertising, portrayals of what kids being asleep feels like. They’re relaxed. You’re relaxed. You can reclaim some time back, and it’s a simple emotional benefit. But I can’t help but wonder if sometimes the feeling right before that, where you see them winding down, and perhaps the way you’re speaking to them, or looking at them, or caressing their foreheads or cheeks, is an even more powerful emotional benefit that comes from your ability to calm down another human being.

There is an immense sense of power and agency in knowing we can be the authors, or enablers, of our children’s own moments of calm. I certainly have always felt this as a dad, if nothing else because in the early years I didn’t have my wife’s breastfeeding abilities to soothe any and all pains my child might have felt – a wonderful last resort for when everything else fails. All I had was effort and patience to try different things until some of them stuck. Including getting really good at doing squats with a child in my arms, and learning to sit with hypersonic screams because what’s really important is that my kid feels ok enough to express pain and frustration, before we start some breathing exercises and later we can talk about it.

We used to joke that my wife had the nuclear button to end all tantrums, but all I had was raw technical ability on the field. And while the metaphor of war is not quite right, there is an emotional truth to it that I think is worth celebrating. Because there is a sense of personal achievement in this ongoing daily existence with kids, that shows a version of masculinity where power and influence and action are less the product of domination, and more the product of mastering techniques to make small humans feel calmer in your presence. Maybe this is what an alpha male mindset should be all about.