When We Need Someone Bigger

When my toddler is melting down, between ear-piercing banshee screams and flailing arms, I nobly remind myself, he has never seen Oprah. I have over three decades of self-help scaffolding on him. He shrieks because I have taken his shoes off and he wanted them on and he can’t properly put them on most of the time and I have ruined everything. His face turns red and I imagine the neighbors peering through cracks in the fence to see why Hell has opened in my backyard. I stand there, weighing my options, also wanting to scream. But I am the one who is supposed to be emotionally intelligent, and so I wait it out.

I remind myself that he has never read a book about his amygdala or hypothalamus. He has yet to consider his soul’s purpose (to my knowledge) or taken a walk listening to Eckhart Tolle. He has not yet had a lifetime of a mother talking him through every annoyance and heart break. He hasn’t read Rumi alone in the bathroom or spent hours doing art on a rainy day. He never sat at the edge of an island cliff while puffins flew in to roost, just feet away. He hasn’t had the luxury of finding each nugget of calm that the world around him can offer. And as I said, he hasn’t seen a single episode of Oprah. 

Oprah would invite him to sit beneath her giant oak trees, offer him a soft blanket and something warm to drink. She would summarize exactly how he was feeling, and then invite him to elaborate. His tears would stop, he would curiously dip his fingers in the drink, then spill everything and launch into excited jumping on her cushions. He wouldn’t know that this move didn’t work out so well for Tom Cruise. 

How can I expect him to control himself in each frustrating moment when he is only able to draw from three years of experience on this earth? He has only just begun to form opinions and realize how much it burns to have them upended. I’m a thirtysomething woman and I certainly don’t remember to “belly breathe” when someone nearly runs me off the road. I lean into the road rage, let the expletives flow like a fountain, and grip the wheel like Cruella DeVille. I don’t think Rumi had a poem about that.

But also, I’m a mom. I haven’t had as much sleep as I have wanted on pretty much any occasion for the past three years. I’ve earned the equivalent of a masters in deciphering whines, cries, and coos. I’m well versed in the particulars of what my toddler will allow on his dinner plate and how often it will come out the other end. Some part of it will wind up on me every day. I arrange my schedule around a tiny person who is by turns sweet as pie or diminutive dictator. Nearly every project I attempt is thwarted at some stage. My Eckhart Tolle podcast is interrupted by the puppy tackling the toddler. Rumi in the bathroom is accompanied by knocking at the door and crying. And Oprah? When was the last time I sat beneath her oak trees with writers, musicians, or monks? 

So who can blame me when, despite thirty something years of learning how to emotionally regulate, I look more like my toddler, mid-meltdown. Some wretched combination of potty training failures, allergic reactions, incoherent demands and worries for the future have taken me down on this day. It’s an ugly cry and I hope it won’t be his first memory. But dang, it feels cathartic. Perhaps it’s like a chiropractic adjustment, and everything inside of me has to pop, crack, and explode every once in a while so that my pieces can fall back into place. And then I’m back to talking him through his tantrums, empathetic and soothing. My pieces have lined up again to let something bigger than me flow through. 

 

Carbonated Bayou

 

My friends are checking in on me. They are asking me how I’m doing and I tell them, “It’s a lot of ups and downs.” This is the typical refrain that we say about going through grief. And it feels sort of true to me. But when I think about ups and downs, I think about thrilling roller coaster rides and dramatic high school relationships. But it’s easier to say this than to try to explain what I’m really feeling.

What this really feels like is being submerged in a thick, murky carbonated bayou. The putrid water is over my head of course. When I first heard the news, I was panicked and shocked, flailing around without oxygen. In the days since, I have perhaps grown some sort of gill structure that allows me to exist in this way without needing to come up much for air. Or maybe part of me died, too, and so I can move about in this underworld. I do normal things like go to the grocery store, complete paperwork, and throw away the flowers that turn brown in vases around my house. But my expression is flat. Everything is slower moving under water. I’m not excited about much of anything. I can’t conjure colors in my mind. I can’t find my direction or bearings in the impenetrable surroundings. 

But as I said, it is carbonated. There are bubbles of happiness I can access as needed. I run into a friend and we catch up about fun summer happenings. My son has success on the potty and we clap and cheer. I smile and say good morning to neighbors on my walk. I make a joke because my mind is still in the habit of making those connections, a vestigial organ. These bubbles of happiness are there, but they are limited. After I use one, my mouth falls back into a straight line. My body is still sore. 

This is not a straightforward period of mourning. There are plenty of unanswered questions and conversations that needed to happen. There is a gaping hole of unmet potential. Sweet memories are chased by broken promises. These are the alligators that live with me in this bayou. They snap at my sleep and scrape my throat with rough scales. 

There are also the occasional streams of sunlight that make their way through the bog. They are the small signs from beyond that are too perfect to be coincidence. They are pieces of conversations about him that suddenly become physical objects in front of my eyes. They are sounds and songs. They are intuitive movies that play out in my mind to try to explain how things happened. I follow the beams of light upward to the trees where they filter through the Spanish moss. His presence takes up the whole sky. For a while then I can live up in the tree branches, soaking in the sun and rain, and wait to be carried home with the birds.