A young girl, eight-years-old, is experiencing huge, uncomfortable emotions. And they are loud.
What do you need to take care or yourself? Her mother asks, trying to remain calm Trying to be the strongest-nervous-system-in-the-room. This only aggravates her more.
Do one good thing, her father says. This doesn’t work either. And the emotions grow.
Her parents THINK they are helping, that they are teaching her to care for herself, to have a strategy when it comes to working with these capital-b-Big- emotions. But what they are inadvertently teaching her is that if only she were better/smarter/more powerful or cunning, what-have-you, she should be able to do the right thing to make the emotions go away. And so, when her actions don’t make the emotions turn off like a switch, she feels like a failure.
Damn. That is not what her parents intended to teach her AT ALL. And so, it spirals and mom, dad, and toddler-sister (by proxy) go through the mill of her feelings and come out the other side squashed and exasperated.
So they try a different tactic. In the hopes of not taking on their daughter’s anger and becoming venomous as well, they get all dry and technique-y on her. They say, nope, no more, no ma’am. They say, you change your attitude or no playdate. They are only trying to get her to take responsibility for herself, but ugh, this is NOT how she perceives it. They are communicating that she needs to fix this and FAST. And that they are no longer here to support her until she gets her shit together.
I DON’T LIKE YOUR VOICE! she yells.
The song-and-dance of parenthood is, at times, an impossible flummox. And these are parents who are genuinely trying their damned-well best, who are well-resourced and well-fed and well-rested.
Emotions. You want your kids to feel-the-feels and to learn that there are no shortcuts to doing this. But there are also occasions when it’s best to close the levee that holds this flood of feelings at bay— click, lock— before they start. The line between option 1 and option 2 can be razor-thin, if not invisible altogether.
So there we were. All of us rotten and pulpy from a morning of big-kid grumpiness, an indecipherable yell-tangle of feelings, not unlike her two-year-old sister. (Major difference being: she’s eight and her sister’s tantrums last minutes whereas we were into the realm of multiple hours with her’s.)
I looked at her across the kitchen table, picking at her sandwich, and I could see the weariness in her eyes, how the flesh on her face seemed to sag with extra weight. And all I could think of was, sweet girl.
Honey, do you feel like it’s up to you to control your emotions?
To keep us all ok while you are feeling them, too?
Oh my, I bet that’s exhausting.
And I noticed her breathe. A big, fat, audible one.
Her father and I suggested she ‘take a breath’ at least a dozen times throughout the morning, but our prompting had no effect compared to the acknowledgment I just stumbled into.
Sweet girl. (Now I was able to say it out loud and I wanted to say it a hundred times.) This is something that is so human. When we have an emotion that we don’t like, we want to change it right away. It feels unsafe, doesn’t it? We want to fix it, solve it, distract ourselves from it.
I have her attention. The light-reducing curtain of anger is lifting.
When we suggest that you do ‘one good thing,’ we aren’t meaning that it will make everything all better right away. That’s the tough part, but I guess we never made that clear. I’m sorry about that.
She bites off the corner of her sandwich and watches me, chewing.
You do the good things—one at a time—to keep you busy until the emotions pass on their own time, the way a cloud goes by. And to keep from doing any further damage like hurting feelings or saying things you don’t mean. You can’t do a single thing to move the cloud faster, but you can rest your body or give your sister a kind gesture in the meantime.
You may feel sad or mad or uneasy for another minute or another day, and that’s ok. but regardless, the emotion won’t be as much in charge.
And FYI, honey, this is something that I, and everyone I know, still works with.
Instantly, the morning melted from her face and she was young again, fresh-picked, open like a blossom.
