Dispatches from the emotional deep end
it's okay to feel angry?
My daughter winds up with a crooked smile, a glimmer in her eye—a feral sparkle. Her tiny shoulder blade pinches back as she goes in for the smack, open palm, hitting her baby brother on top of the head without losing eye contact with me.
The baby is unfazed—this wasn’t his sister’s hardest hit, not by a long shot—but I fawn over the baby anyways, ask if he’s okay, try to reinforce that hitting doesn’t earn my daughter my attention but instead shifts my focus to her target. That’s the opposite of what she wants, right? What does a two-year-old ever want?
Dr. Becky, a parenting expert with a massive Instagram following, evangelizes a parenting philosophy centered on the notion that we are all good inside. She urges parents to give kids (and themselves) the most generous interpretation. In her book, she calls it the MGI on subsequent reference.
But the MGI goes out the window when I see my curly-haired toddler wind up to smack the shit out of my bald eight-month-old. It is my job to protect her and protect him and also somehow protect myself and my energy; these jobs are usually at odds. She needs attention. He needs attention. I need attention. Instead of multiplying, I divide.
Becoming a mother thrust me back into childhood, a place I’d never relive for any amount of money. Not because it was so bad. No, my dad would be quick to point out—the sarcasm dripping down the side of the comment—“you had it soOoOooo bad, huh? We were sOOoOOo bad to you kids.”
Still, I remember childhood as a constant assault on my nervous system: emotions always escalating, then suppressed to maintain peace, then escalating again at a more frightening velocity once they reemerged.
My family was not malicious, but not especially warm. I wouldn’t call that trauma—more of an issue with temperature control. There was no space for emotions to boil over. We were skilled at icing each other out in lieu of facing conflict. I was out of place with big feelings that were hot to the touch and impossible to compartmentalize.
So today I go to therapy to sort out my still-big emotions that are often a response to my daughter’s big emotions. I pay a skilled somatic therapist more than $100/hour to create bespoke meditations and breathing exercises for me based on the content of my grievances that day. She gives me homework, and I love homework. Tasks like performing a five-minute check-in every day according to a template (take deep breaths; notice my breathing pattern; notice my energy and aura; notice what I’m feeling; acknowledge my feeling; release my feeling).
My daughter, for her part, watches the same episode of “Daniel Tiger” over and over and over. Daniel finds himself mad at his friends and his baby sister in various scenarios, always on the verge of smacking somebody. Stop stop stop, it’s okay to feel angry, my daughter sings to herself in her crib, the tune carrying over the baby monitor into my bedroom. It’s not not not okay to hurt someone.
My therapist helped me come up with an affirmation to re-center when I’m set off by my daughter’s rage: I am gentle, steady and connected. Gentle instead of pulling her by the arm to remove her from the baby; steady to remind myself to breathe instead of snap; connected because I love my daughter and I know her rage is temporary. And I know it’s not my toddler’s fault the way she holds a mirror up to me in these moments of intensity, reflecting back my own image with an uncomfortable glare.
Dr. Becky likes to toss around another acronym: DFK. Deeply feeling kid. It is a nice way of saying your child is sensitive.
When I was a kid, the word was hypersensitive. Deeply feeling—or hypersensitive—is the only way I remember being. I was too much of a baby for the Tower of Terror at Disney World; too chickenshit to go tubing behind a boat at the lake. Always filling up a padlocked diary with longing and anger and eventually poetry, thinly veiled ripoffs of Tori Amos lyrics. I was hysterical when we traded in the family car; I cried real tears, devastated to leave behind the familiar Ford we’d been tooling around in for years.
It is hard to be a deeply feeling adult while raising a deeply feeling kid. I sometimes feel doomed to drown in my own deep feelings while also being totally impotent to help my daughter navigate hers. Just a mom and her daughter, gasping for air in the deeply-feeling deep end.
I try to think of what could have helped me when I was my daughter’s age, or when I was 6 years old, or when I was 16. I never wanted an older person’s platitudes. I might have liked someone to sit next to me through the emotional treachery. To hold my hand while I witnessed for myself the way the storm passes, every time.
My daughter loves watching construction—she calls it struction—in the world. Nothing holds her attention quite like guys working. One spotting of guys working can generate weeks of conversation: There’s the guys who worked under the hood of the car at the oil change shop. The guys who poured concrete in the sidewalk in front of the daycare entrance. The guys driving the garbage truck through the alley.
This morning, she woke up to roofers outside our house. They defied logic and gravity up on the eaves with their hammers, making it rain shingles. She waved, slow and hypnotized, and one of the roofers waved back with a shy smile. The glimmer in her eye reflected the scene back to me, the men in hoodies moving deftly to a soundtrack of bilingual chatter and rhythmic banging.
I remember: It’s not just the destruction that calls to her. Not just the smacking of her baby brother or biting her dad or pulling my hair, kicking, writhing, knocking down, screaming and red faced. It’s also the rebuilding. The guys working. The struction of it all. I like that, too.