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Kid Fears

I can remember as young as three-years-old, Opal would get overwhelmed by her feelings and just scream. Nerve-racking, soul-shattering yells, high in pitch and sharp-edged enough to bring the house down. I thought it was a tantrum. I thought it was her big emotionality. I wrote my ass off about parenting methods I’d tried based on all the books. So many books. I wanted to share the wisdom of experience, but frankly, I didn’t feel any sort of extra intelligence from my experience of navigating the world of Opal’s emotions. Just heartache and exhaustion. 

She got older, but the bouts of screaming stayed with her like an invisible illness. When her feelings grew even the slightest bit beyond tepid, or plans changed abruptly (which is something I avoid as much as possible, but then, life.), or homework was challenging, or Ruth was too annoying, or what-have-you, I’d find myself reaching to steady the breakable vases as they did in Mary Poppins when the neighbor blew his cannon every hour on the hour. Batten down the hatches. 

Having a sibling certainly complicated things. I always feared the screaming was somehow damaging to the baby in the house. Our first foster daughter, Ericha, came to us because she had birth parents whose main mode of communication was to scream and hit. The last thing I wanted was for her new and safe home to be filled to the edges with the intermittent shriek-fests of her sister.

I can see myself putting the baby in her crib—Ericha, our first, who we had for a year, then Ruthy, who we adopted—and coming upstairs to calm Opal by just holding her. She’d push me away at first but then flop into my lap with a defeated sigh, weeping into my shoulder so much I’d feel like she’d need an IV drip to recover. I saw it in a movie about working in a child psychiatric unit. (I find I am always looking for glimmers of understanding and hope to apply to our situation, like panning for gold from thin air.) In the movie, the staff people would just hold these kids, as if they were squirming puppies in a blanket, firm but loving, to keep the child from hurting herself or anyone else. When I saw that, I cried. The rage and violence of these children eventually dissipated and they were left boneless and vulnerable in the lap of the staff member. 

God, so many years of it. Taking the time now to reflect, I feel a new sense of fatigued humility. It was never constant, her outbursts. There have been enough gaps in the weave not to put her in real therapy. (We’d consider it, reach out, even find someone to talk to, but then we’d have a collection of angst-free days and put that particular approach on the shelf.) 

Also, I had so much therapy as a kid (an older kid, but still) for my big emotions, my staggering ups and downs, that I always felt like I was a broken thing to be fixed. I have zero recollection of anyone trying to give me tools to work my particular disposition. I would have given anything for my parents to sit with me and say, How are things going for you? What’s it like for you in there? I love you just as you are AND we will work through this together. That’s what we’ve been trying to provide for Opal. I never ever in a million years want her to feel like she is a fucked-up thing. The concern of that has certainly guided our choices.

Here we are. Now. She just turned nine. The current method of working with the screaming was most recently to suggest that she go to her room to cool down and regroup. We moved her beloved guinea pig, Lightning, in there. We discussed it at our family meeting—she chose this as the best course of action when she loses control. But when it came down to it, when the emotions kicked in the door, all she wanted to do was talk about it. Her need to examine those emotional parasites piece by piece was all-consuming. She was unable to see how that method unfailingly exports her—almost instantly—to a very deep and dark place. She feels she is being negligent by taking her mind off of it, when in fact, her focus is like voluntarily gripping the anchor as it pulls her to the bottom.

God, I know about that approach all too well. Before children, I used to think journaling about my feelings was what needed to happen to work through my feelings. Perhaps that’s true, but only partly. Once written down, pen-to-paper, I missed the step of what’s next? How can I rise out of this? What can I do for others? And thus, I wound up cultivating a more engaged and deluxe mode of communicating about how fucked up I was. I got really really good at chasing my emotional tail. Having kids was the ultimate teaching in you just ain't got time to dwell in the muck.

It was then that I finally experienced what happens when emotions occur, acknowledged but uncoddled for lack of time. (I’m talking about the everyday emotions, here, not the heavy-hitters that DO need tending.) They PASS. Eureka. 

Even now, my instinct when I’m feeling shitty is to sit down and write about the shitty feeling. Pretty much across the board, that DOES. NOT. HELP. What does help? Connecting with a friend. Walking in the fresh air. Finding some art to linger over. Essentially, raising my gaze so that I can once again view beyond my own, personal, self-serving, survival-based bubble. 

This is all just to say that I have decade-upon-decade of experience with this for myself. 

So now, Opal is no longer given the choice. And as much as I’m not a fan of this is for your own good thinking, Opal’s emotions simply cannot be in charge of steering the ship of our entire household. How did that saying from my time in a twelve-step program go? You can’t fix your thinker with a broken thinker? Something like that.

Now, when the cannonball sounds and the screaming begins, I am quick and clean, tethered and steady in my predetermined course of action.

Honey, when you scream you lose the privilege of being in the same space as we are. Your feelings are welcome. Screaming is not. So it’s time to head up to your room and I will check on you in five minutes and be the one who decides when you are ready to calmly join us again. 

It used to be that she would go to her room to cool off and come back out when she was ready. NOPE. That only prolonged the painful process. She’d think she had calmed down, then come out and start the whole thing right up again and the back-and-forth to and from her room was a grueling and painful dance, leaving us all feeling defeated and assaulted.

So no, now I am in charge of saying when she can come out. And as pissed off as she was, initially, she seemed to see that she can regroup much quicker when she’s not also in charge of gaging if she has re-grouped enough yet. If that makes sense.

As I said, the wailing fits have been an occurrence in our home for at least six years. I remember blogging about them in my second parenting blog which was when Opal was two and three years old. There have been eras where a certain thing we are doing really seems to help quell her inner turmoil (and we go on a kick of feeling like badass parents), but inevitably the humbling and confusing time will come when what we are doing no longer seems to have any effect and the volume-dial on her outbursts is once again off the charts.

But, familiar as her episodes are in our family and our household, and such a major part of her childhood, they have never really had one obvious cause.

Except for the Fluid.

The Fluid is what Opal used to call the stomach Flu when she was younger, Kindergarten. That’s when she got it for the first time. Our entire house, including baby Ericha, got the stomach flu. It was nasty and took weeks before I felt confident that our house was no longer being tormented by the demon-virus. The next year, First Grade, Opal was out sick for a total of 40 days! She had the Fluid for exactly five of those days, the rest were generic viruses. Regardless, a phobia was born.

However, Opal’s Fluid-phobia always had a very different texture than her screaming. On the one hand, she had her regular outbursts which were completely unconcerned with volume and level of destruction. On the other hand was her fear of sickness: it was quiet, helpless, lots of tears, as if she wanted to hide from it all. 

Only now do I realize that they are each a side of the same coin.

It’s all fear. It’s all feeling a lack of control. It’s all having emotions that feel bigger than what her little body can process. The same story told in two very different ways.

Recently, during the last few weeks, Opal’s Flu Phobia (she no longer calls it the Fluid) has grown to a massive, suffocating beast. Most mornings, she will be going along fine and then say something like, “Here comes the fear again.” It’s heart-wrenching. Like the twinge in the back of my neck that tells me I’m about to have a headache; it’s so hard not to brace yourself against it, gritted teeth, white knuckles. Or to simply give up before it even starts, which is often the case with Opal. She sees the beast approaching and she lies down at its feet. Tears, paralysis, panic. 

Jesse and I agreed that something more has to be done. Something bigger than us from someone who is trained to guide us all along this rocky, unpredictable path. I suppose I always thought that since Opal was working with the same things I have worked with —and still occasionally work with—that I could help her through. But no. My experience does not translate. And I say with all the heart I can muster. 

Nov. 13, 2018

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A very snowy ride home from Winter Park today, as documented by my almost-nine-year-old, Opal, from the backseat. 

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My grandma and grandpa: Harriett and Charles Herman. My mom’s parents. They have both been gone for decades but they were married a half a century before they died. 

I see this photo and am awash with wonderings—what the hell did they talk about? did they laugh? did one of them dislike the sound of the other one chewing? how often did one sacrifice what they wanted for the good of the other? did they feel like their relationship was even? 

Of course, I only knew them in their later, more grandparent-ly, years. I never ever got a sense of who they were as real people. 

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Take the Clouds Along.

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?

Yes.

To keep us all ok while you are feeling them, too?

Yes.

Oh my, I bet that’s exhausting.  

It is. 

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.

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George Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte done in the form of a topiary garden. This is one of my favorite things on the planet, truly, up there with the Eiffel and St. Paul’s. And it just happens to be located in Columbus, Ohio, where I grew up. So, when visiting Ohio last July, us girls (well, four girls and one NB) made a special pilgrimage and, wow, what an exquisite site it was!

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Random Tags.

(Random Tags: Non-sequitur thoughts in no particular order stated in list form.)

1.  This morning I cleaned a strip of the kitchen counter that lives between the toaster and the oven that I don’t think I have ever noticed before. I wondered how this could be, because we have been through at least two toasters and a toaster oven during the eleven years we have lived here. 

2.  As a mother, I have VERY little control of the songs that will be playing on repeat in my head when I wake up. (This morning it was Daniel Tiger. Ruth: “DAN-O KIGER!” I want to be with my family! Opal says, MOM, now I’M going to have it stuck in my head all day! Sorry honey. I have no control.)

3. I saw the movie “Eight Grade” this week. (I love movies, especially on the big screen, especially with a tiny buzz.) This was a good movie, not grand-superb but good, and many things I could say, but the main thing is this notion of children-on-devices. I believe I need to start prepping myself for the time when Opal gets her hands on a smartphone, whenever that will be. I am hoping that, moment by moment, we are wising up to the smart-phone culture. (either that or be swallowed up by it. God I hope to choose the first option.)

4. I was craving the show Intervention last night, so I watched it. Years ago, I used to love that show. Before Opal was born, I would do overnight shifts at an elderly woman’s house (she was an angry one, often threw shoes at me, but she also had a ton of character). This woman loved being in a separate space from me so I was able to enjoy new episodes of Intervention in a different room with my microwaved burrito. Eventually, I got pregnant and stopped doing that job. I watched some episodes on Direct TV with Jesse before we vetoed it because it was too damn intense. 

Flash forward close to a decade where I have two young children who are asleep and a husband who is out teaching and I really want to fucking watch Intervention, so I do. If it was one of the episodes where the addict acts all indignant and spoiled and doesn’t man-up in any way, I would have gone to sleep feeling personally let down. But, thankfully, it wasn’t one of those. The addict turned it around, did an aces job with making amends and staying clean. They even had a follow-up skype with her and she looks beautiful! Go addict! 

5.  Today I had my new next-door neighbor over for a beer. She was marvelously easy to talk to and the conversation came very easily. But I noticed feeling awkward after the two occasions when I mentioned we had fostered Ruthy before we adopted her. As if, somehow I was telling her for attention—?

Later I told Jesse I thought I maybe over-shared with new neighbor and he said, “Honey, if you ever think you may have over-shared, you can rest assured that you DID. It’s what you do.” Then he kissed me and said, “And that’s why people love you so much.” Good save, asshole.

6. Tonight, I told my child that I was sick of her dramatic bullshit. Jesse came in moments later and she reported to him, “Mommy said FUCK!” Fake news.

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Grover Sleeps Over

Last night, Ruth (two-and-a-half) and I plopped down on the floor next to her toddler bed, where we now read our books. We have not been able to both fit into the rocking chair in months, and until she transitioned into her new bed a few weeks ago, we unceremoniously set up camp on the floor against the crib with some pillows. Now, we have the massive Costco teddy bear (SO well warn that its head topples from side to side, hollow fabric for a neck from where the stuffing has been compacted over the years. There is also the lounge pillow with the cute owl print that was Opal’s, now covered in dog hair since it is the place where Elvis (our 80-pound lab) prefers to lay.

Anyhow, that is where we sit to read our books now.  We have “mommy roof-roof” and “baby roof-roof,” essentially two identical stuffed dogs—one was meant to be a back-up, but unexpectedly brought out into the light of day by big sister. The “baby” is distinguishable by the scarf around her neck. (Calling her a she is obviously not based on any anatomical data. It’s like how Opal used to say about her blessed bunny, “B”— “He’s a girl.”)

There is also always “bow-wow”, her golden retriever stuffy, and the other cast of stuffed characters vary, depending on mood. She is now getting into dollies. She prefers them with no clothes, as she prefers herself to be with no clothes. She talks to them in her sweet little delicate voice, the voice of a baby grasshopper— “You OK? OH-KAY!” “Baby, you nervous? Okay? OH-KAY!” But they are not good to sleep with because who wants to wake up with a plastic big-toe in your eye.  

We sit against and amidst the fluffy arrangement, after she has on her clean jammies and clean diaper (still working on the potty training, clearly), and I say, “Pick out a book, honey!” She goes through phases where she often picks out the same one again and again. I rotate the inventory to give her a fresh perspective, but she seeks out her favorites. She currently loves all things Sesame Street. And right now, her favorite book is “Grover Sleeps Over.” 

“Grover Sleeps Over” is a riveting tale about Grover’s first night sleeping away from home at a friend's house. (It is unclear if Grover has ever slept away at, say, his grandparent’s house before, but I suppose that information isn’t necessary to the enjoyment of the tale.)

The story starts off with Grover trying to pack for his night away. He agonizes over what to bring. He has the proper essentials—jammies, toiletries—along with such non-essentials as his goldfish, his begonia, his favorite box of cereal.

At which point, he yells to his mother, “Mommy! I need a bigger suitcase!” I have always loved that line. I find it to be chalked full of metaphor. My children have never been quite as impressed with the meaning; they just like to yell the words.

It distills down to the fact that Grover is nervous to be without his usual things, the comforts of his home. He is uncertain about being—and sleeping—in new territory. He is scared he won't have the things he likes, and he isn’t sure if he’ll survive without those things. Who can’t relate to that? 

It’s true, perhaps I read more deeply into it then the author originally intended because I have read the book dozens—no, hundreds!—of times over the years. The familiarity of the words and images, of how the story unfolds, the sweet, if lackluster, conclusion of having had it all go smoothly. It’s all well-turned soil. There is something powerful in the reading and re-reading. It becomes a bit of a mantra. It takes on a life of its own.

But the key detail is, I DIDN’T PICK IT. That’s so much of life with kids: much if not most of the day is comprised of THINGS I DID NOT PICK OUT FOR MYSELF. 

So, for now, I make a home in the things that are chosen for me and look for the meaning in those pages.

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Each day requires something very unique to keep it in balance. Today needs this image. 

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A stunningly eerie day in Livermore. Everything sodden and heavy, hard to decipher.

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The Garden.

I was just thinking about a conversation from last night. The following is the waxed-upon gist of what was said:

Like a garden, we are hard-wired to always be cultivating something. 

Occasionally, if we are lucky, a sunflower will forge through the crack in the sidewalk, or a forgotten rose bush will flower as a visual reminder of forgiveness and grit. 

But typically, when the land is left uncultivated and stagnant, it will either dissolve into dust or provide a home for an assault of weeds. 

If one is not actively working the soil, planting the seeds, tending—as in our minds, our bodies, our relationships—we are extending an invitation to host the things that are toxic and unnourishing. Those things fall into the gap of default.

In summary—we attend: the good things blossom, mound, strengthen. We don’t: the weeds dig deep and climb limbs like a hungry ribbon up a flagpole, without consideration of anything but their own survival and perpetuation.

This is good news because it means we do not have to try so hard, to fight for it. We simply need to have an intention to remove that which we do not want and feed that which we do. And, glory, we can do this without sacrifice of any kind—while naked or singing or eating a dark dark bit of chocolate.