Lessons from Ada

I watch the various extremities of mood flash through Ada in rapid succession, without logic to their sequence or catalyst for their beginning or ending, lightning jumping from one cloud to the next. They clothe her in however staggeringly many costumes in an hour & then are flung off, slung catenary in the thin wire of her wake. I know there are biological forces at play here, shoring up against all of the emotional duress of watching her parents also care for her little brother. But it is a dumbfounding & virtuosic parade to witness. We go to bed tired. 

There is something in the dance, though, to be admired. These are not easy times, not for anyone. The fissures in our peace, taped over & patched up, still speak of ruptures. The joys come like spotfires over a wilderness of browning grass, brief & brilliant & bright. Sullen moods are a gravid sky seeping through the window. Paroxysms of all of these things at once, indecipherable, without tool for divination, transpire at the slightest suggestions. Her sock has too many polka dots. She cannot adequately draw a baby reindeer. It is not Christmas today, nor her birthday. & so she reels from the stubborn refusal of the world to align with her hopes & dreams. She kicks at its shortcomings & looks, bewildered, for blame, wondering if she herself has authored these unwelcome deviations from an imagined narrative of unbroken pleasure. She is a threenager. She feels with all of the depth & none of the understanding of someone five times her age. 

I fail wildly every day in my own attempts at equanimity, but notice of late that in my own modulations there is a different feeling to the hypergrip of self-imposed restraint. I am not holding at bay the natural fluctuations of my own emotions in order to preserve the calm among the kids, or to try to evidence to them what mastery of circumstance might look like. I seem to be exiling strong emotions in myself at present because I fear how fully they might fell me in their expression. If I were honest with myself, would I be kicking alongside my daughter? Would I be casting about for a culprit, longing beyond our daily purgatory here, just simply giving voice to the small fact that I want more than this? 

Kristin brought home a small needlepoint some time ago that said all emotions welcome here. We try to walk through Ada’s triumphs & sorrows, to hold her hand at the beginning of every labyrinth & to keep going until we are made victorious by our willingness to explore all of the contours, end-stops & gateways of the emotion at hand. We do that for her every day, even when the context is something wholly absurd, but I am finding it a difficult practice to do for myself. 

We are all of us unaccustomed to times like these. I forget that we are under the weight of the pandemic, that it carries an inexorable tide, that it has bullied us into this corner of the world. I forget that we have not all willed this into being, forget the vipers who led us away from our collective hopes for peace & hope through these last months. I know that I happened to be in the midst of a great reckoning of my own, that my family chose to uproot for a number of reasons that have collapsed or paled. But I forget all of those things in the quiet procession of each day, & find these fraught nerves & this heavy heart & wonder anew each time, why would I feel this way? I cried watching Sesame Street yesterday. I am a goddamn trainwreck. 

What I think I’m beginning to notice is the ability of my daughter to honor & validate her every emotion as it passes its way through her. To sit with it a while & feel its weight or buoyancy, to speak its name. She fears nothing in the circuitry of her feelings. She is like a river delta, every channel part of the whole & yet wholly distinct, a thing woven & weaving, twined & unraveling at once. Maybe I ought to follow her, down some shallow braid, to plumb its depths & map its course. Every arterial wandering, bleeding back into the same stolid heart that wears the name. Maybe so. Once we change her socks, anyway, & practice our drawing, & get her a snack, & discuss the finer points of ceratopsian taxonomy, & describe in full detail each character of the Lion Guard, & fill her water, & replace it with juice, & wipe up the juice she spilled, & & &