Feel the Feeling (A guest post from my husband)

I’m sitting with my four-and-a-half year old daughter Rosa at a cafe. We’re supposed to be sharing a burger and chips for our lunch but she’s staring at another family. Really staring, inquisitively. The food is getting cold, so I tell her it’s rude to stare. She lets a chip fall from her hand and I can see her retreat inward, shamed and ashamed. I finish the burger. She ignores me. Finally she asks for a snack. I’m livid: no snacks or treats until she has a proper lunch (whatever the hell that is). Her eyes fill with tears, face quivering with sadness. Here we go, I think ...

***

Everything since Rosa’s birth has been as it is supposed to be. As a baby, she cried. Oh, how she cried. She has always been ‘vocal’ in letting us know she wants/needs/craves something. I got through all that crying and screaming (just) by reminding myself: “She can’t speak yet, this is the best she can do communication wise.”

As mantras go, it isn’t that catchy, and it didn’t really help when we attempted sleep training or when she only wanted her mother (my rejection issues remain unresolved).

Onwards to toddlerdom: she could speak, surely now we could have a reasonable conversation about whatever was bothering her. All grown up and rational.

Alas, growing up merely meant her adding an array of screams and howls and nuanced cries to her arsenal.

I clung to my clumsy mantra. Whenever she was angry or sad or furious, screaming or weeping... she was asking for something. However loudly or inexpertly or annoyingly or upsettingly, she was asking me for something:

Can I have a cuddle? Can you stop telling me off? Can you leave me alone? Can you take me away from this place? Can you give me me a snack? Can I watch telly? Can you turn the telly off I’ve had too much now? Can you can you can you ...

Sometimes I was patient. Sometimes I was not. When she was 3 and a bit, she tripped and cut her knee. Blood ran down her leg, through her torn tights. She’s not a fan of blood, or even any evidence of a fall. I wanted to help her, to put a plaster on her knee, but she was weeping and weeping and screaming whenever I tried to help. She was asking me for something so nuanced I still can’t quite figure out what that was. I just wanted her to stop crying and let me help. Stop crying. Let me help. Stop crying stop crying stop crying.

Rosa is almost five in June. She seems to accept me as a stand-in for her mum. We talk and chatter and tell stories and talk and laugh. She talks and mutters and talks and talks. Wonderful words to explain herself and her feelings. Still, she weeps and screams and shouts, less so, but she does, but now I find myself inured to it somehow. Nearly five years of the mantra and finally maybe it’s sinking in.

And then last week: the lunch, the burger, the staring.

I want her to eat... so I tell her it is rude to stare (I love words and communication and yet when I want her to “please eat your lunch, please please, why oh why must meals be such hard work”, the best I can do is come up with is a scold).

I lay the ‘lunch law’ down as I polish off the last of the burger.

Her little lovely face starts to screw up. I haven’t even paid but it’s going to happen. Here we go. I resign myself for the oncoming rushing public display of emotion. I’ll hug her and apologise and then we’ll go to the library, reset and then she can have a fucking Sainsbury’s sandwich or something.

Her tears threaten to spill down her cheeks, a deluge awaits. Then something flickers across her face. She is so horribly sad ... and then not. A shift occurs, she slides off her seat and asks to go for a wee, I rise, but she raises a hand, she wants to go by herself. She returns, proud she’s done it unaccompanied and the sadness is gone. The scene somehow averted. She stopped herself from losing her shit and is happy and playing and lovely.

So much of what I’ve been asking her to do (grow up, learn, tell me what you want, be a big girl), she’s just done. Has she swallowed an emotion, swapped it for another? Or perhaps her emotional range is expanding, perhaps this is progress.

It doesn’t matter, I still feel horrible about it. I’ve played a part in grinding out a purity of feeling from her. Chipping away at all those screeching screaming wailing calls for something. 

This is what we demand of our babies, toddlers, children: grow up. Stop acting like a child. And then it happens, and it’s jarring, and our desires feel so wrong-headed. I don’t know. I just wish she’d sobbed her fucking heart out like she usually does.

***

When she was a baby and I’d bemoan the various shortcomings of early parenthood (sleep, rejection, crying, loss of self, sleep, rejection rejection rejection) people would not-so-helpfully suggest ‘Oooooooh, you’ll miss it! When she grows up and leaves you and you’re old and dying and alone you’ll miss it! You’ll miss this lovely little scrumptious ball of joy, you will!!!!!’ 

And I’d think, why won’t you let me have my feeling, while acknowledging how annoying it is that those idiots are at least a little bit right. That’s the irony of all of this, of course: that I know what it’s like to want to feel the feeling, however unhelpful and draining it is. Why do you have to solve my problem? Why say anything at all? Why can’t you just let me feel?