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thetagsale · 5 years

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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

#Fear #Anxiety #Parenthood #AlwaysLearning #HumblePie

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