Safe House

It had been a long afternoon, back in early July.

Time-outs.  Sass.  Tongue-sticking-out attitude.  One of those afternoons where you hear yourself getting more and more shrill as you try to stem the tide of Bad Behavior that seems — mystifyingly — to be sweeping your little family away.

Finally, we broke.  After a long dinner of stand-offs, LittleMan threw his napkin in my face and clambered out of his seat.  I grabbed his arm.

“That burger was disgusting,” he muttered, and attempted to turn away.  I held fast.

“What is going on?  What is this?”  I snapped.  I used the napkin to wipe the ketchup and mustard from his face, perhaps a bit too roughly.  “Why are you behaving this way tonight?  Are you angry?  Do you have feelings we should talk about?  You seem very angry.  Can we talk for a minute about what made you so angry today?”

“I AM angry!” he exploded.  He looked up, looked to the side, bit his lip.  He looked down., and whispered.  “I’m angry at you because of camp.”

“But you love this camp.  In fact, it’s the only camp you like.  All of your friends are there.  The first two days were great and just this morning you were talking up a storm about how excited you were about the week.  What happened?  What changed?”

“Someone yelled at me and called me stupid, and then you were late picking me up.”

“Okay, I am sorry to hear that your feelings got hurt, and we will talk about a solution to that in a minute.  But first can I ask you something?”  (I regret now that at this point in the conversation my tone was still angry and charged, but there’s no going back.)  “Can I ask you, did it make the hurt go away, being so mean to someone else — to me — all evening?  Did it make you feel better to yell and throw things at me?”

LittleMan’s voice was rising.  “I needed to yell.  I was angry and I needed to yell, and I needed to yell at someone.  And you were there.  But you were late.  So I chose you.”

I sat back dumbly and stared at him.  Stunned into silence at the clarity of his response.  And sad because, for better or worse, this is one of my jobs.

Sometimes our children have feelings that are SO BIG and they have no safe place to express them.  They are furious.  They are betrayed.  They are hurt.  They want to cry or hide or hit someone — maybe, in fact, they wanted to cry or hide or hit all day — but they don’t.  Because it’s camp and it’s supposed to fun, and we’re all supposed to get along and be friends, and to cry or hide or hit would call more attention to them, or worse, would lead to consequences.  So they wait.  And then they explode.

Don’t we all do this, to a certain extent?  Don’t we have a downer meeting at work, or botch a project, miss a deadline, get in a fender-bender, lose an earring, break a heel?  Don’t we have headaches and hurt feelings and exhaustion?  Don’t we occasionally get a terrible phone call, feel angry at Fate and God and The Man, and somehow we just soldier on through the day?

But don’t we then sometimes lose it with our spouses over something stupid, ignore a call from our moms, speak to our children a little too curtly, slam a door or two, or just mull in silence once we get home, to the bewilderment of those who share our space?

The truth is that our families, who love us no matter what, often bear the brunt of our pain.  It isn’t fair.  But when you are conditioned to be your best self all day long — polite, humble, accommodating — sometimes your baser self needs a place to go, a place to stomp her feet and scream “Today was crappy okay?  It was crappy and I was mad and I don’t really know what else to say about it!”

Where else are you going to do this, if not at home?

“Thank you for being honest,” I whispered.  “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Babygirl came barreling in, yelping about the new toothbrushes.  “You gotta see, LittleMan, come seeeeeee!” And she attempted to lift him with her arms around his waist.  My husband appeared and gently took LittleMan’s arm with a side glance at me.  “Come on, Bud.  Let’s go brush teeth.”

I sat at the table in silence and picked at LittleMan’s discarded burger, pondering where to go from here.  It wasn’t okay, the way he was acting.  Not at all.  There needed to be discipline, and there would be.  He needed to learn that piling on the disrespect a) simply wasn’t acceptable, and b) wasn’t the solution to his sadness.

But at the same time I understood.  I understood what it means to be “on” when you want to shut off. I understood that probably, when that kid called him stupid, all he wanted in the world was to get picked up, to be offered an escape…and I was late.  That to him, the two incidents — while utterly unrelated — were completely tied up in one another.  And while I wished (I wish, always) that he had a more constructive way of managing his frustration…well, I love him.  I was sad.

Children offer their parents a strange kind of emotional whiplash, swinging back and forth over the line between defiance and vulnerability, challenging us to balance on the precipitous edge of appropriate anger and necessary empathy.  In fraught moments we dance along these cliffs, taking care not to fall too far in one direction or another.

True North, though, is love.

And Home.