by lintamande » Fri Jan 20, 2017 11:19 pm
So the thing about Maitimo's relationship with his parents is that it's not that they are negligent, it's that he /knows when he is not the most interesting thing they could be doing/. Like, most small children go through a phase when they want to hear a song sung thirty times, or a book read over and over, and their parents are so sick of that stupid book but read it again anyway because they love their kids.
And Maitimos know. And they have parents who are unusually easily and intensely nerd-sniped. They stop asking for things like that. They find it really distressing to be given attention that comes out of a sense of obligation, even though that's just a completely normal way parents relate to their small children, and they work really intensively at being interesting whenever they are given attention and totally undemanding whenever they are not. If he went over and interrupted his parents, of course they would stop their work and sing to him and play with him (and probably be glad of the chance to see him, and definitely be glad that their child felt free to interrupt them), but they would stop their work and experience a flash of irritation at the work they lost and so he will never ever go over and interrupt them.
By the time they are 15 or so Maitimos understand how people can have complicated preferences like 'I want to be the kind of parent my child interrupts to need affection, even when I'm in the middle of something' and then they quietly cut that out and pretend they weren't doing it. But the little ones do it. And he knows that people would find this bad but not /why/.