Do you ever wonder why particular character quirks possessed by the people you love most bug you more than other quirks do?
Madeline does this thing where she’ll dip one toe into her sneaker and at the earliest onset of difficultly, begin kicking her leg thus ejecting the shoe from within her proximity, cry-shouting, “I can’t do it!”
I used to get so mad about it. I’d yell back, “Yes you can!” with an undertone of disgusted disappointment in my voice and then show her the extent to which she could do it by, uh, doing it for her -- forcibly and frustrated.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that she was acting like a mirror I did not wish to look in. That the disgust and frustration and disappointment was with me. When she gave up while putting on a shoe, my mind transported me to an archive of examples that displayed the times I’d indulged in the same behavior — giving up before really allowing myself to put in an honest effort.
Perhaps I did not explicitly yell that I can’t do it in a tone reminiscent of nails traveling down a chalkboard, but when achieving my desired outcome proved even a little more challenging than easy, I would essentially throw my body down like a falling tub full of bathwater, letting the baby flow out with the water, leaving me engulfed in shards of ceramic tub.
Sometimes I feel like I used to live with a metaphoric condom over my head -- protecting it from I don’t even know what. Admitting the truth of existence?
Giving up is so much easier than continuing to try. It’s like fantasizing about love instead of actually attempting to feel it — on the plus side, you can never really get hurt. On the minus, you don’t get to delight in the tiny, unilateral pleasures of discovering your parts unknown through an open heart.
Laura, meanwhile, has no problem trying. She doesn't like to fail either and will hedge her effort to avoid it. But the threshold of her frustration, at least as it relates to the physical impediments that might separate her from a desired outcome, is a little bit higher.
When I’m in her company and the undertone of disgust and disappointment are beginning to take hold, it’s usually because she will pretend she can’t do something. Lift herself up onto a stool, put on her own pants, eat with a utensil instead of her fingers — she’s a fucking master of these skills.
I noticed her starting to exhibit this behavior earlier in the summer one time when I was paying close attention to Madeline, helping her and suspending myself through an earnest fit. It’s like she (Laura) was aware of the dynamics in her purview and thus testing adjustments to her strategy to get what she wanted (my attention) but really what she needed (validation — a cornerstone, I have heard, of interdependence).
At first, this behavior would infuriate me -- the mind games! It was psychological warfare. Early-onset victim mentality that repulsed me because it was me and I had no cure. I have lately realized these labels are cynical. And the work of a woman who has labored over her own sense of worth and moral certitude and blah blah blah.
Laura is 3 years old. She is not deliberately playing a mind game or engaged in psychological warfare. There is an “unmet need” at stake and she is doing what she has deciphered as necessary to get that need met. It is very human — there is not much else to it.
And for as long as the strategy of mimicking the behavior of distress that is garnering attention around her works in her effort to get attention too, she’ll keep doing it, just as I did.
Eventually, it could turn into an embodied mentality of victimhood that will convince her she is always with the short end of the stick.
It could become so second nature that she will have grown so focused on assessing the dolor of being that she might miss: the love she found, career she built, the independence she earned, and on.
It is a seductive proposition -- to languish helplessly, as a sort of coping mechanism, in the precise suffering of existence. Isn’t this what existentialism is all about? Life is a cup of water, not a glass of wine. It is so fucking boring if you don’t write it into a story — affix meaning, reason, purpose to our days. So I wonder: when one can finally acknowledge that they’ve mastered the mindset of victimhood, that is, the story of their short stick, and have declared that as part of their reason, they’d like to absolve themselves of it — write a new story as it were, how do they do that?
Yesterday, I told Madeline and Laura we were going to visit their friend on Greenwich street. They charged toward the door where their shoes were waiting for them. I was in the kitchen when I heard Madeline go through the motion of losing her shit. I was going to go help her but Laura stepped in, sat down next to her, and showed her how to get on the shoe. Or tried to — it didn’t work but the effort was new and the exchange seemed progressive. Progressive enough to make me think this might be the whole thing (or at least a part) of it — that surrendering helplessness could be as simple as getting out of your own way, not trying so hard to rewrite the story, and instead just helping someone out. Letting the story write itself.
So, what you doing this weekend?
