I’m Going to be Sad…But Only For This Song

This post is about my daughter and how she’s been handling her sadness in her own way.    She’s sad and scared about her vision loss, we know that.   What we can’t tell is how sad and how scared.   It seems to come in short bursts that she gets over very quickly.    I think it’s the adults who are having the harder time being happy because we understand so much more.

Today after school the children’s good friend, Keira, came over.   She and my two children were running around, having fun and laughing.   They were doing things young children do and I was so happy she was over because there were no conflicts and everyone was busy doing imaginative things, laughing and getting some much-needed energy burned while I cleaned up lunch boxes and got things ready before my husband and I went out to dinner later.

I came around the corner to find three children in the living room, two of them upside down on the sofa.   They were so excited about this.   My son and Keira were jumping up onto the sofa into a headstand and kicking their legs over the back of the sofa.   They were laughing.   My daughter wanted to do the same thing.   She can easily do this.   She could probably do it faster and more effortlessly than the other two and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d even taught it to them—she loves flipping about.

She popped up and over and we had three laughing, smiling upside-down children on the sofa.   It was great.   I was laughing with them.   And then I realized what she was doing.   Upside down might not be so bad, but she was flipping forwards to get there.    Was she in danger of swinging the PFO substance into the anterior portion of her right eye?   Should I panic?    I watched in frozen horror and delight, unsure how I should react to the whole thing.  

I erred on the side of safety and told her she couldn’t do it any more.    I told a four-year-old child she couldn’t have fun doing something easy and exciting to her.   She got quiet and nodded when I told her why and then she got on her scooter and rode off into our bedroom.

I followed her a few seconds later and heard the door to our closet being shut.   She doesn’t do this.   She doesn’t hid in our closet unless it’s for hide-and-go-seek.   I opened the doors to find her sitting on her scooter, looking away, off towards my husband’s shirts, with her hands on her knees.

I came up to her and squatted down.    She said quietly, “I want to be alone.”   I tried to talk to her and she told me firmly, “I want to be alone.”   I said something else and she screamed at me, “I WANT TO BE ALONE!”

I sat beside her quietly and then said, “do you want to help me organize the new beads I got for making necklaces?”   She looked up and said, “okay” and took my hand and walked out of the closet with me.

So I distracted her from her sadness and she was definitely not sad as she helped put colored stringing beads into a container, but did she have a chance to process her sadness?   I don’t know.     It reminds me though of what she told my husband yesterday though.    They were in the car when Enya’s song, “Watermark” came on the radio.   She said to my husband, “this song looks like it’s sad.”  My husband agreed it did sound like a sad song.   She thought about it and then said, “I’m going to be sad, but only for this song.”

The Big Boy Update:  My son’s Tae Kwon Do teacher asked him last not how he felt after doing one-hundred kicks in a row.   He looked thoughtful and then replied out loud to the whole class, “I feel happy, happy, happy!”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter found a chocolate coin in a party favor bag from a birthday party this weekend.   She said, “I got a chocolate coin, just like I love!”   (She absolutely loves chocolate coins.)