Hoping for Coping

Sometimes I think back to when Sadie was a little younger. One of the hardest things for her has always been coping with the waves of feelings that would come over her when she was upset (as Joy dryly put it, "This girl goes from one straight to eleven.") There was never a ramping-up period -- if anything upset her then her mood went from Fine to Utterly Catastrophic.

As she gets older, learning how to speak has helped tremendously. She can't always go after what she wants, but she is now very good at asking for demanding it. Still, it's been hard when she gets frustrated or angry or disappointed and instantly dissolves into a miserable mess. To snap her out of it, we employ a variety of tricks -- distraction, singing a song, bargaining, reasoning. Sometimes they work like magic, other times not as well, others not at all.

More recently, she has decided not to waste time waiting for us to help her snap out of an episode and has put her mind toward ways to figure it out by herself. The ways in which she does this are utterly fascinating to me.

This morning, Scott left for work as he always does. Sadie saw him off with a cheerful "Bye bye!" She climbed up onto the couch by our front window, and when she did so I thought maybe what she wanted was to see his car drive off...like maybe it was something she did with Ana when I left in the mornings. So I opened up the window, and as Scott's big silver sedan pulled away from the curb I pointed it out I said, "There goes Daddy's car -- bye bye, Daddy!"

You've never seen a face fall so fast in your life. I guess she'd already reconciled herself to the fact that Daddy was gone, and by pointing it out a second time I'd caught her unaware -- she absolutely crumpled, and burst into tears. I felt terrible, and all I could do as she wailed for "Daddy" was to tell her I was sorry and I knew she was feeling sad, but that he'd be home from work later tonight. She cried for a minute longer, and then she kind of sucked it up, and repeated several times, "Bye bye, Daddy." Then she came over to me and -- by the way, she never does this -- gave me a hug and kiss as if to reassure herself that I was sticking around.

I've noticed this coping method a lot. When she doesn't want to let something go, she copes by telling it "bye bye." If she can't say good-bye to something, it become relegated to a terrible purgatory in which it's still hovering around, but she can't have it. She gets upset and cries and asks for it over and over -- but if we just wish the water in the bathtub bye-bye, if we can wish Daddy and Ana bye-bye, then those things have been sent to their proper places and will be okay until we see them again later.

Parting from a beloved object is a different skill from being able to see something but unable to touch it, but equally hard for her. Again, she's developed ways to cope. For awhile, the flowers that sat on the dining room table while she ate dinner were a source of crazy frustration for her -- she wanted to grab them, and didn't understand why she wasn't allowed to. "No touch" is a command she learned early on, and she mostly respects it, but it's never fun to hear.

So she learned instead that when you like an object but can't touch it, it's okay to blow it a kiss instead. The more forbidden an object, the more feverishly she sends air kisses in its direction. This coping method was put to the ultimate test a few hours ago when we went to the library for weekly story time.

Story time is a mixture of listening to books and singing songs, and Sadie always starts out shy and then gets more adventurous. After about ten minutes she'd shaken off the initial hesitation and began standing up and craning her head to check out the other kids. (We were on the floor down in front, her favorite spot). That was when she spotted a little girl sitting directly behind us, sitting on her nanny's lap. She was holding an Elmo doll.

Fuck.

"Elmo. It's Elmo. Elmo. ELMO."

"Yes, I know. That's Elmo. He belongs to that little girl."

"It's Elmo. IT'S ELMO."

She was moving fast, and I busted out the magic phrase: "You can look, but don't touch."

Oh, the rage. The indignance. Was I KIDDING her? There was a perfectly nice, lovely Elmo doll within two feet of her, and she wasn't supposed to touch it? "EH-HEH-HEH-ELMOOOOOO." She began to cry.

I picked her up quickly and removed her from the other kids. We stood in the back as song time commenced, and she calmed down right away, but I had already pretty much written off library as a lost cause now that she'd zeroed in on Elmo. I decided to give it one more shot, and once everyone was lost in a nice loud chorus of "I Like Shaking (My Hands, And You Shake Along Too Parents, If You Know What's Good For You)", I sat her back down.

Although we were facing front, she whipped her head around and I could see her eyeing Elmo with laser-like intensity. If I'd been that other little girl, I'd have been genuinely afraid.

And then...

Sadie put her hand to her mouth and said, "Mwah." Blowing Elmo a kiss.

"That's so nice, Sadie."

"Mwah. Mwah. MWAH."

She proceeded to blow Elmo kisses throughout the rest of story time, her eyes shining with love but resigned to the knowledge that this particular Elmo, for reasons beyond comprehension, was not for touching but merely for admiring from a distance. And I watched with hidden glee when, a few minutes later, three toddlers got in a near fist-fight over a toy truck that one of them had brought and did not want to share.

My kid's growing up.