Melting Down

While on vacation over the New Year’s holiday, my seven-year old daughter experienced the mother of all meltdowns. As I learned later, it started as squabble with her older brother that left her feeling angry and misunderstood. Not wanting to be labeled a tattle, she chose to sideline herself as her brother and friends continued to play, seemingly oblivious to her self-imposed absence. Watching them laugh and joke without her only added to her frustration, and after festering in a stew of toxic emotions for twenty minutes or more, she finally just lost it.

It began as a low moaning whine and built into a crying jag jarring enough to raise the dead. Loud, relentless and borderline hysterical, she refused to be comforted. Hugs, threats, teasing, tickles and the tested and true “ignore her until she stops” technique all failed to halt the emotional tidal wave wracking her small body. Eventually we had her lie down to finish crying it out, and exhaustion quickly took over. She slept for three hours.

I’m not new to parenting and am well aware that tantrums come with the territory. But this experience caught me off guard. My daughter was not just unreasonable. She was unreachable, lost someplace inside herself we couldn’t seem to access. As I puzzled about her behavior, in a flash of insight I understood that while her uncontrollable crying was triggered by events of the day, the depth of her distress was rooted in experiences that occurred years earlier. An adopted foster child, she has already experienced more loss in her short life than I am ever likely to know. As a result, she’s been known to personalize even the slightest criticism, experiencing correction as rejection. And although maturity has tempered her tendency to overreact, she still has her moments.

Watching her sleep, all puffy eyed and flushed, I longed to take the brunt of the blows she’s been dealt. Kissing her still wet cheeks, I add my own tears to hers, heavy with the knowledge that I will never be enough of a mother to replace the one she’s lost. There is a hole in her heart my love can bandage but not mend. Then I do what I always do: I give her to God, healer of broken hearts, and ask Him to help my little girl sense the comfort of His arms around her. And I pray He helps me parent her with compassion and understanding. Especially when I don’t know how.

Today as I was putting on my makeup, I suddenly caught a glimpse of my own mother’s face staring back at me from the mirror. It’s an unsettling phenomenon that happens more and more frequently as I age. Then I realized with a start that my daughter is likely experiencing a similar phenomenon when she looks in the mirror. Her enviably high cheekbones, coffee-hued skin and luminous black eyes surely echo the face of the woman who carried her to term. I suspect this realization haunts her, since it's a face she has never actually seen outside of her dreams. When she was very young, she'd tug my arm in restaurants and stores, pointing to strangers and whispering, "Is that my real mom? Look - she's brown like me."

So I give her extra hugs. When she complains and frets, I do my best to console. And when all is said and done, I take to my room, close the door and have a meltdown of my own.

I can’t carry her pain. But I can follow her example and simply cry it out.