Laughing in Her Sleep

(Started at least three months ago)

Zinnie is starting pre-school next week, two mornings--Mondays and Wednesdays at La Puerta de Los Ninos. Jenn is partially in mourning, and, I suppose, so am I. I've been feeling my limitations as a father--really as a person, lately, and with each failure, I mentally add another month of therapy for the kid once know as Baby Z.

Our daughter's latest obsession is this song from this surprisingly hopping video clip (cut-and-paste into search box): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RxTSoiqXg0    If it doesn't open, Google "Joyous Noise" and look for the clip, "Man in the Mirror." Zinnia insists on correcting me when I sing "mirror."

"No, that's not how it goes. It's 'mirrah.' "

Lately I've been struggling with Graduated Paternal Failure. Z. soaks me unexpectedly with a squirt bottle--cold water, computer in general vicinity--and I make a deal of it; I put some chopped olives in a bowl for her, and instead of eating the proffered condiment, she starts grabbing them by the fistful off the cutting board and stuffing them in her mouth. I make a deal of it; Zinnie hilariously yells a line from one of our favorite Mo Willems kids books--"Get those maps!" in a crowded restaurant--and I make a deal of it. The morbid reality check is that, if I'm lucky, I mean really lucky--and the planet continues to spin on it's axis and, if not exactly thrive, then at least survive the current global environmental crisis and wave-upon-wave of Republican naughtiness--then, best case scenario, I'll be alive another 35-40 years. That I am aware of, none of my relatives (to date) have lived long enough to breathe a single nonagenarian breath, although I have an aunt that is about to turn the corner on her ninth decade.* (And yes, I had to look up the word for it so I could go Latin on your respective asses.) My point is that, in the grand scheme of things, my absolute sweetheart of a daughter cramming her cheek pouches with salty, medium-sized black olives is not worth even a scintilla of distress. Decidedly not. Will I upset myself over similar mundane goings-on in the future? You betcha.

Jenn has been a good teacher for me around this ... this parenting stuff, but in my middle age, and with the passing away of both my parents, I seemed to have developed a bit of an edge to my personality, one that I struggle to mute. In the counseling room, my straightforward, un-sugarcoated delivery seems to be (for the most part) appreciated. However, to the mind and heart of an-almost-four-year-old,** there is a certain sharpness her papa has that could perhaps benefit from a little rounding off.

The man I'm training with in couples counseling, Terrence Real, talks about "Losing Strategies." He enumerates six of them, I've added three, which makes at least nine ways we start acting like kids when feeling stressed out. A huge one for me growing-up was walling off, which means that when I got angry or hurt as a kid--and I remember being mainly angry--I would go off to my room and bury myself behind the pages of one super hero comic after another, and then, as I got older, perhaps age 9 or 10, I lost myself in actual novels, as well as late-into-the-night-with-the-volume-turned-down-low comedy albums played on a mini-turntable/radio that i kept under my bed for comic relief during those sleepless hours.***

Walling off is still one of my strategies when I get triggered, and it requires an act of will and, I hesitate to say, courage, to lower my angry inner child's "Your-Dead-to-Me-Now" wall and re-engage. I don't give Zinnie the cold shoulder exactly, I just kinda go cold inside, generally for not more than a few minutes, and often less.  I have a friend who pointed out what I already knew, but it felt good to hear it externalized: That I get to heal the wounds of my childhood through my own parenting, and in the process, I get to face every boondoggle, every shadow, every unhealed owie I have ever tried to avoid.

My mother was the stuff of my nightmares. Literally. Reoccuringly. Inescapably.  They started around age four or five and continued until age eight or nine. Maybe a little older. In these dreams, I would be alone in our dark house, running from some approaching evil. I could sense her approach, hear her footsteps, feel the venom in her voice. I would quickly push out the screen to one of the second story windows and climb into the frame, pausing, afraid of the fall. I leapt just as I felt her hands clutching at me from the dark. As I plummeted to the ground, my vision would suddenly go black, but even though I couldn't see, I could still hear the ugly screech from above, feel her frustration that I had escaped, but also knew she was still determined, still unrelenting. And rather than wake-up when I hit the ground (as, even in my dream state, I half expected to do), I would land with a thud!, still blind, rolling and thrashing around on the grass, wanting to get away, unable to get up, terrified that a set of hands were about to grab me in frantic cruelty. Small wonder I gravitated towards walling off. It felt, at the time, a matter of life or death.

Often, now, at least weekly, sometime more, I wake up to the sound of Zinnia laughing in her sleep. I think we are doing something very right.



*She didn't make it. My beloved Aunt Natalie died about 12 weeks ago. Very sad.
** As of August 4th, now four years-old. It has become a mainstay of her introducing herself to people: "My name is Zinnia Rain Bender and I just turned four and we have five chickens and two cats." 
***Wow! Asterisk Central here. This one involves both a bit of sadness and more than a bit of disgust. One of my main go-to's during that time, the man who helped me get through many a frustrated and sleepless late night, was none other than Bill Cosby--now alleged drugger and rapist of many, many women. It has been years since I held him up as my comedic hero, and, in fact, I hadn't really thought of Cosby in any meaningful way since I saw a few reruns of "The Cosby Show" sometime in the nineties. Now--Holy Christ!--what a way to round the home stretch of one's life: Outed as a total sleazeball and sexual predator, his comic legacy tarnished forever.  Triple blech!