Cole cut some baby bangs on Tessa the other day and I immediately wanted to take pictures. Holy cuteness. However, the picture taking process doesn't always go so great...
People tell you to be careful when kids are this age, they say that kids are sponges, soaking up everything. And not just the sing songy sweetness and love we push out, they
really do mean EVERYTHING: our gestures, our nuance, our vulgarity, our grief, our tolerance, our rage. This is another one of those things that people told me (snuck in with all the rest of the unsolicited advice) that I immediately "yeah, yeahed" in my head, and it turned out to be way more intense than I wanted it to be. Sponges.
Tessa is 19 months old, and on more than a handful of occasions a stranger upon observing Tessa, has described her as being "precocious," and I secretly beam a little inside and think, "Well she
is a sponge, she is soaking us up, and just look at what we went and did-- we made a precocious little girl. The cleverness of us!" Then I start to wonder if I will beam and gloat on the inside like this when she is being pushy or impatient, or when she laughs hysterically when someone rips ass, or when she melts down because a toy is taken, or when she insists that something be done exactly her way. Will I accept the credit for the bad qualities that she takes on from all of this sponging? If our kids grow up a little and they haul off and smack someone in the teeth, or they choose to bully weaker kids, will we say: "they learned that one from me?" Most parents immediately get all defensive and surprised and say: "Where on earth did you learn that from? Not from us!" Never thinking for a second it could be from them. I worry all the time that because of the way we have to coach The Littlest Buddy to get dressed, or how detailed we have to be in instructing him through a seemingly simple process, that Tessa will become super bossy. All of the sudden she is the kid on the playground telling everyone exactly how they should be playing a game, and the mean girl moms standing on the sideline watching will do that bitchy judgey whisper thing they do and say: "she's a bossy little brat."
Right now (in these sponge years) Tessa is not only growing up with a big brother with special needs, which can be intense and stressful, but she is also growing up with a heavy bout of grief recovery. Cole is still suffering greatly from some hard clinging grief over the death of her Sito (grandma), and the toll it is taking on the general lightness of the house is substantial. My immediate reaction is to fix anything that isn't going to feed the sponges little brains with goodness, and silliness, and love. These two situations aren't something you just fix up, and they can't be ignored. So in the case of teaching Tessa about life with a special needs brother, I was so determined to keep her from seeing his symptoms and side effects of having Smith Magenis Syndrome, and only see his sweetness and fun. So my initial approach was "We can't let any of this cause stress on the house." I was determined to not let her first memories of her brother be filled with stress or be centered around confusion. I quickly got way more realistic-- and figured out that Tessa absolutely has to learn how to deal with intense stressful outbursts, and if our reaction is to rush off to another room to deal with these things in order to "protect" her from it, then that is what she will do when stress comes to her. She will run the other way. So instead, she sees it handled and managed in her presence, with as much calm as we can muster, and with a real matter of fact this is just life, and it's no big deal kind of attitude. I am just hoping beyond hope that she is soaking up patience and understanding. Tessa is growing up with a special needs brother, she will have an understanding and tolerance about life and differences than most other kids will, Tessa the sponge is a constant reminder of how to be our best.
Now on the other issue of handling this grief of Cole's, I realized yesterday in the presence of the Sponge that I am not teaching her a good lesson on how to handle someone who is feeling bad. Just because I am ready for Cole to be back to her old self, and to wake up happy despite having bad dreams about her Sito, or despite still feeling ache from the hole that was left when she died, I can't expect Cole to just be happy because I want her to, and then get pissy when she is not. I am absolutely admitting to being the spouse that is ready for things to go back to normal, and I am feeling impatient about how long it has been since we could make it through a week without the repercussions of grief. I miss my wife. I can't stand to see her feel guilty when we laugh hard. I can see how afraid she is to make intense connections, or to let herself feel anything too deeply. If she opens up to let one emotion in, she knows that it means the sadness will come pouring in as well. So she tries to keep everything bottled up. My overall reactions to this behavior, have for the most part been stoic and solid, patiently waiting for her full recovery and return. As nice as that sounds, when you figure out that someone is waiting for you, and you know on the inside that you are definitely going to be awhile, that person waiting on you always fucks you up worse. You start fumbling around and rushing for them, and feeling pressure because you know they are waiting, and all the sudden you're yelling: "Just go! Stop waiting for me."
So I am confused. Letting her know I am waiting sounds a lot like: "hurry up," and trying to make her feel better, also feels like a selfish act.
I want her to feel better, so here
I am trying to make her "hurry up" and feel better. People come out of the woodwork with advice on this stuff, but the truth is nobody can say or do the perfect thing, there is no one single thing that fixes us. Time is ticking along, and rapping its boney fingers on top of our heads, tick tocking on our brains, and with every tap it sends waves of pressure down upon us, and when we are just standing around waiting, eventually that is all we feel, that pressure mounts, it hurts even, and can feel awful. I figured out that if I keep moving and live life that I don't notice that pressure, except on birthdays, and waiting for pots of water to boil. So I try and just live life and fill in for Cole when she wants to take a break from smiling and laughing, she plays hard with the kids, she makes them laugh harder than anybody, do they know she is sad at night? Can they feel it? She is charming at work, and focused on hair, and so sometimes I feel like I get the brunt of her grief. When she is off work and the kids are asleep, she relaxes, and finally feels what she wants to feel, and sometimes on some nights, that is feeling sad, and I am standing there going WTF?!
The pictures above feel awkward to me, Tessa isn't relaxed, she doesn't want to really be there, they are out of focus, (I couldn't get the focus right at all). It didn't matter that she got a cute haircut and I wanted to capture it. What mattered was that Cole was waiting for me to be finished, and both her and Tessa just wanted to do something else. And I felt both of them waiting on me, and I rushed, and fumbled, and it all clicked. I got it. Not the picture, but what I have been doing to Cole. I do not want to be a source of pressure for her any longer.
My hope is that if Cole feels like I have stopped waiting around, maybe we will both get some relief from the pressure of: "it's been long enough."
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