The tell-tale signs of someone crying, or trying to cry, discreetly. Raising a shoulder and turning a head just so, to wipe an errant tear away. The dig at the corner of the eye: No really, I have an itch, is the message you're trying to convey. If I could just...Oh, the itch is in the other eye now. Allergies. Or the particular set of a jaw, the lips pressed, the unwavering focus forward, the slight head tilt, as if you could roll the tear back into your eye.
Violet usually goes for an open-mouthed wail, the tears streaming blatantly down her face. When she's sad, it's almost confrontational. Look, everyone! Look at all the feelings I am feeling! Lately, I've noticed a change in that, though. Ever since a teacher taught her that it's okay to cry as long as you do it quietly, she dips her head forward until her hair curtains her face and rubs her fists into both eyes at once over and over until her face is red. And now instead of the glorious wail of HEAR MY CRY and instant relief she holds it in as best she can and walks around all day with a certain heartbreaking weariness.
And then there is Madeleine, who almost never cries. She'll do anything she can to hold it in. I've seen her rake her fingers down her cheeks. I've seen her grit her teeth and claw and push and yell. She roars and rages instead of crying. She defies and refuses. I feel like I know her one minute and the next I realize I've never learned her language, the language that makes her know deep in her heart that she is loved, really loved. I say, "Madeleine, that's rude," when she's being rude, and she hears, "Madeleine, I hate you and you are terrible." I tell her she's wrong about that, that I love her very much, and she hears, "I don't understand you and I never will."
And still she doesn't cry. She pushes and yells "STOP IT" and runs away. Until she breaks and then her face falls and everything in her does, too, and she sobs "You never help me, you never help me." She buries her face in her beloved white blanket and cries and cries and cries. And there is no comfort to be had then. She cries the tears of the abandoned, as though I'm not standing right there smoothing her hair back and telling her I love her.
I am mostly bewildered by this, by all of this, teaching these young, complicated, volatile, beautiful young girls how to dive into the depths of all that emotion and realize that everything is going to be okay. I wonder if I can teach them that. If it's something you have to learn. I remember realizing at a very young age that people liked it best if you would stay calm. And so I did my best to do that. I wanted to keep the peace then and it was something I could maintain, mostly. I was quiet, I retreated inward. I read books and I wrote and I just stayed in that tranquil zone as much as I could.
I think I take that for granted now. I think that that tranquility should just happen, that my daughters should recognize how important that is for their own sanity and for the sanity of the people around them, that it just feels better to stay calm and not let everything upset them so much. In fact, I feel confused and lost in the face of the truth: That they don't have the first clue how to access that calm and peacefulness. That they have no idea how to calibrate their emotional responses to something that is more appropriate and more tuned to calm.
This is probably my biggest weakness as a parent. Because even as I confront the idea that I am not good at teaching them calm and how to calibrate their emotional responses I am growing resentful and angry by the day. The peace and calm that I take for granted as being a thing that should just always exist is being encroached upon by the loud, anxious, screaming, furious, sad and happy rages of my daughters. And it is changing me because I have lost my way. I don't know how to access that calm anymore, really, unless I am sitting in front of the TV after they have gone to bed and falling asleep on the couch. What a sad, sad life. A half-life. A getting-through-it life.
And like one of those horrible vicious circles that everyone talks about, they see that. An Ouroboros of negativty, it comes out of me and it sticks to them and they spit it back out at me and we just keep the negativity going and going and going.
We need to figure out another way. And I guess the thing that I've been avoiding is that it starts with me. Breaking a cycle like that is hard work, but it has to start somewhere. And for me it is here, where it always is: words.
