So here we are, again. Since Michaela was about six months old, she has had a penchant for hitting and pushing other kids, as well as me and her dad. When she was a baby, I assumed she would grow out of it. When she was a toddler, I assumed she would grow out of it. And now here we are, her on the verge of four, practically a
—and we’re still dealing with it. I force a smile and listen carefully to Kerry, who is helping us in the most kind, generous, understanding way possible. I can tell Michaela is embarrassed from the way she tucks her chin, refusing to meet our eyes. I’m embarrassed, too.
After Kerry leaves us, having pressed the green playdough back into its jar, Michaela asks me to read her a book. I put her on my lap and begin reading one of the books lying on a table in the library nook. Did Kerry, or another teacher, leave this book out on purpose? It’s about a little girl who inadvertently hurts her friend’s feelings and musters the courage to apologize. I barely register the words. My face is hot; I feel ashamed and frustrated. I’m irritated at having been “called out,” choosing, in a short-lived moment of weakness, to interpret Kerry’s careful counseling as criticism of my parenting skills. I’m mystified by Michaela, who is an only child doted on by her parents, grandparents, and extended family. When she was a baby, I called her Sunbeam, because the feeling that came over me whenever I saw her was like the sun warming my entire body. But the truth is, she’s more of an electric spark, constantly in motion. Her movements are quick and unpredictable—jumping and jiggling, flinging her arms about. She is charismatic and imaginative and makes friends with enviable ease. Her friends from her old daycare worship her, crafting painted popsicle sticks, drawings, and collages in her honor. A natural leader, she invents convoluted games with names like “glasses” or “jump-hop” that I can barely understand, but her friends find them delightful. And yet when something doesn’t go her way, her impulse to hit is a source of endless contention and concern. After I leave the preschool to head home I no longer enjoy the blue sky or the perfect New England scenery. I’m thinking about Michaela, and why she might be this way, and if she will ever grow out of this “grabbing,” and if I could have done more to prevent it—if I’m the cause.
*
Michaela has a book about a monster who changes colors according to his mood. When he is yellow, he is happy. When he is blue, he is sad. And when he’s red, he is angry. When you are angry, according to the book, you feel as though you have been treated unfairly and you want to spread your anger everywhere. You want everyone else to feel as you do. Anger is fiery and uncontrollable, the book says. When you feel mad, you feel like you are on fire.
Everywhere I turn lately, there is a different angry woman; a different reason for women to be angry. Alongside so many others, I have observed drastic shifts in political power as well as the beginning of the #metoo movement with seesawing feelings of despair and hope. Women who raise their voices, even to defend themselves, are considered unstable; men who yell are intimidating and strong. I want things to be different for my daughter. But what to do about the girl for whom anger comes naturally—perhaps too naturally? How do I teach my daughter to restrain herself at the right moment; that self-control is more effective than lashing out blindly? How do I teach her this while also teaching her to respect her anger—that sometimes she has a right to be angry?
*
In my daughter, I see myself. When I was young, I could never control or stifle my enthusiasm over clothes, books, music, whatever, and my shrieky giddiness sometimes irritated my parents. They didn’t understand it, often misinterpreting my exuberance as mild hysteria (the word itself loaded with gender bias), or perhaps as deliberately disruptive, an attention-seeking gambit. When I was in eighth grade, my parents took my sister and me to see Sarafina!, a musical about apartheid in South Africa. The music was transportive; the entire audience enraptured by the singers’ rich, powerful voices. After the show, I asked my parents to buy me a CD. In the car on the way home, I begged them to play it. What happened next still baffles me. Was my father already tense about something at work? Was he annoyed with my mother for her backseat driving? Whatever the reason, he suddenly turned the volume dial all the way up, so that the voices I’d found so moving now sounded like sirens blaring. Could he really have been so frustrated with my request? Sitting in the backseat, I made myself go numb. Better to say nothing, and feel nothing, than risk making the situation worse.
When we got home, I put the CD away in my room. I never listened to it again. I was probably no older than thirteen, but he had succeeded in making me feel that my enthusiasm was shameful; a form of unforgivable mischief.
It’s moments like these that taught me to bottle up my difficult emotions. Last year I briefly stopped taking my prescribed antidepressant, only to find myself erupting spontaneously with wild, uncontrollable fury. I quickly went back on the drug, disturbed by this ugly glimpse of a buried side of my personality. That isn’t who I really am, I reassured myself, once my moods re-stabilized.
This is exactly what I fear for Michaela—that this uncontrollable rage is in her DNA. It is not the righteous anger of the wronged, but a geyser of bitter venom spewing from unplumbed depths.
There is a difference. Isn’t there?
*
The moment I found out I was pregnant, I went to the bookstore and bought the classic bestseller, What to Expect When You’re Expecting. The title alone brings back mild nausea; that faint acid taste at the back of my throat that I experienced throughout my pregnancy, to the point where I can hardly look at the cover. When I realized the limits of that superficial tome—I didn’t just want biological information and advice on staying healthy, I wanted emotional feedback—I rushed out to buy several more books. I wanted to understand the range of emotions I was feeling—from euphoria to despair—and why, and how I could raise my daughter to be a kind, functioning, contributing citizen of the world.
It never occurred to me to ask my own parents for help. Their advice—usually unsolicited—was infuriating. If Michaela showed resistance to something we asked of her, such as putting on her snowsuit, my parents thought it was okay to go ahead and force her to wear it, resulting in a disconsolate girl and several miserable adults. Or else they urged me to give her Time Outs, which I had read were of dubious value. Instead of relying on my parents as guides, books became crucial companions—I was searching for deep, substantive guidance. I wanted to raise my daughter differently from how I had been raised, which meant that I was starting from scratch.
I’m not alone in this quest. It turns out that a lot of people who became parents over the past few years think they can do better by their kids—as, I suspect, my parents did. There’s a new(ish) philosophy regarding discipline of children that rejects punishment, including Time Outs. This type of discipline takes the long view: children who are spanked or subject to strict consequences are less likely to trust and confide in their parents as teenagers, turning to their peers, instead, for advice on sex and drugs—exactly the sorts of things that I hope my daughter will feel comfortable approaching me about. Advocates of this philosophy strongly believe that punishing your child, while effective in the short term, ultimately backfires. Punishment often reinforces poor behavior rather than discourages it. When a parent hits or shouts, it is terrifying—but also suggests that hitting or shouting is okay so long as there is some justification for it, and if the person being hit or shouted at is small, vulnerable—unwilling or unable to fight back.
Punishment is far too often aligned with education.
I’m going to teach you a lesson is, in my opinion, among the most terrifying sentences anyone has ever uttered, parent or not. Consider for a moment: should edification be combined with violence? How often, in other circumstances, do we equate education with remonstration, or reform? Possibly more often than I’d like to believe.
Convincing a three-year-old that hitting is wrong requires more than simply punishing bad acts. It also requires being attentive to and rewarding good acts. And yet acknowledging the moments when my daughter doesn’t hit, when she acts gently toward others, takes serious effort. In doing so, I’ve begun to feel better; to realize that the “grabbing” is the exception and not the rule. When she runs to share her chocolate brioche with a friend, later I whisper how proud I am of her into her hair. When she tells me she loves me, or apologizes for having hit me, I hug her and tell her how much I love her. I acknowledge that it is very hard to say “I’m sorry.” For so long, I let the “grabbing” blot out all of the good, calm, peaceful moments. As I attempt to teach her to be a “better person,” I’m learning the same thing. I’m teaching myself—or she is teaching me.
*
A pattern has developed in my choice of books over the past year. In each—whether fiction or nonfiction; fantasy or realism—a daughter must reject her overbearing father to become independent and to realize the immensity of her potential. In Madeline Miller’s Circe, a retelling of the Greek myth, the eponymous protagonist fears being burned to ash by her father Helios, god of the sun. In Educated—an even more harrowing narrative, because it’s true—Tara Westover writes of escaping the demands of her bipolar, dictatorial, Mormon-extremist father by teaching herself enough math and other subjects to get into college and, eventually, earn a PhD from Cambridge University. In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, an African-American woman living in the present day travels back through time to confront her great-grandfather, a slaveholder in the South.
I didn’t so much devour as fall into these books, occupying the worlds created by the authors as fully as I possibly could. While the parenting manuals offered advice on how to be a fair, firm administrator of justice, the other books on my nightstand revealed that justice is meted out imperfectly, and that the system is rigged. Westover has a breakthrough when she latches onto a fundamental truth: “From the moment I first understood that my brother Richard was a boy and I was a girl, I had wanted to exchange his future for mine. My future was motherhood; his, fatherhood. They sounded similar but they were not. To be one was to be a decider. To preside. To call the family to order. To be the other was to be among those called.”
Each of these literary fathers represents the archetypal father figure that women are taught to fear and respect: the paternal government; the all-seeing god. The patriarchy is a cycle: once the son reaches a certain age, he overthrows his father, creating a new regime. Eventually he, too, will be overthrown by his own son. If you are a mother or a daughter, it doesn’t matter who’s ruling—father or son. It’s still the patriarchy, always and forever.
*
I am haunted by two memories from when I was not much older than Michaela. Times when I let my anger get the best of me. In one, I was five or six. It was at the Y, where I took swimming lessons with my best friend, Jen. I can still smell the chlorine, can still see the pale water of the pool, which occupied a large room with cement walls and glass windows fogged by the chilly air outside. Jen and I were pushing each other out of the way to try to climb the ladder to a platform from which we could slide into the pool. I see the incident, now, through our mothers’ eyes, from where they sat on the ridged aluminum bleachers: a brief, confusing scuffle, the thwack of bare skin hitting tile; sobs and shouts. Jen needed stitches, but the wound was superficial. She was able to stand and walk. My mom would have been right to scold me, but if she did—if she yelled or smacked me—I don’t remember. We’ve discussed this moment since, and I’m always amazed when she tells me that Jen’s mother told her that Jen instigated my push; that she and I had been fighting over who got to the top first.
I think Jen’s mother is too generous. I think that was a story she needed to tell herself so she and Jen could remain our friends. What if it had been Michaela falling from that slide? Would I be as forgiving as Jen’s mom?
*
The other memory is dim, hazy: a small family gathering. We were in the kitchen; some people were standing, perhaps cooking or preparing food, while others sat around the oval wood table. I was probably around five. I was acting up—I remember my jaw clenching, my body stiffening in frustration. I was being ignored. My parents were caught up in conversation, or too busy to pay me any mind, and I could sense that I was entering the nuisance zone.
And then I was steered out of the kitchen.
I found myself alone in the living room, sitting next to someone on the couch—a man. At first it seemed like it would be a sympathetic exchange. Was it my father? An uncle? I don’t know. The man asked me what I was feeling.
“Mad.”
“Like you want to hit someone?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to hit me? Go for it.”
So I did. It wasn’t a relief, it just felt pointless and dull, my tiny fist useless against this person’s bulk.
“And how do you feel when I do this?”
The man squeezed my arm, hard. It hurt but I refused to cry. The tears stung my eyes but I would not cry.
And that’s the end of the memory. I’m sure something happened next—for god’s sake, did my mother eventually come to check on me? Who knows. What was the point of that sadistic lesson? Power, that was the point. Power. Who has it, and who doesn’t.
*
My daughter and I started our relationship with a standoff. Even before she was born, I was trying to assert control. I wanted to make sure she was born on her due date, December 21st, because I liked the palindrome-ness of it, and also because I didn’t want her to be born too close to Christmas. A week before her due date I went to an acupuncturist, who stuck me with needles to hasten the birth. Having heard that walking encourages labor to begin, I walked for miles. When she did arrive, on schedule, I was not prepared for the small, pale wraith who practically pole-vaulted out of my uterus, primed for a fight. Her toothless mouth gaped red, emitting a furious howl. She was pissed off and screaming bloody murder. The acupuncture, the walking, and the epidural had forced an exit she wasn’t ready for.
I tried to nurse her, but she refused to latch. Time and again I would bring her mouth to my chest, expecting her to purse her lips so that she could get a decent hold on my nipple. But she would not clamp down. Instead, she would briefly touch her face to my body before pulling away, letting out another frustrated wail. It was as though she expected the milk to pour into her open mouth and down her throat in a smooth, unbreaking stream. Her tiny hands windmilled at my chest. One of the nurses in the maternity ward—after doggedly trying and failing to help me get her to latch—paused in her ministrations to look me in the eye and say: “This little girl has to do things her way.” She then commended me on my patience.
She didn’t know this was a pact I had made with my daughter before she was born: I would not subject her to the short fuse and quick fury that I grew up with. With her, I would be patient.
I’ve since broken this pact many times, but each time I renew it. I remember how fearful I was of my parents’ anger when I was growing up, especially when I was just being my spirited, weird, unique self—a self that conflicted with whatever ideal they’d imagined for how children were supposed to act and behave.
*
I was floored one recent night when my dad told me—boasted, really—that one time, when I was about three or four and had removed all of my clothes at a friend’s house, he had insisted that I leave like this, wearing only my underwear. He had even wanted to stop on the way home, he told me, and take me to a restaurant while I was still undressed. My mom drew the line. I have no memory of this, thankfully—but I can assume, from seeing Michaela’s response to my scolding, that I was certainly old enough to feel humiliated by this action. Another time, he and two other fathers threatened me and two of my friends with no dessert if we continued doing something naughty, which we did. The other fathers relented and gave their daughters dessert; mine, proudly, did not. I wonder what I felt, sitting there, witnessing those other dads’ forgiveness. What did that teach me about my own father?
I’m sure my own anger is scary to Michaela. Hell, it scares me. When Michaela throws a plastic bowl at me, catching me on the nose and sending a stream of bright pain through my nervous system, I feel my arm rise up, my hand clenching into a rock-hard fist that I do not let fly. I know firsthand: My father’s anger isn’t rational. It comes from some deep, buried place that probably causes him more pain, ultimately, than it does me.
I fear that I’m my father’s daughter. But from him I have learned something. I know that submission and obedience bring their own trouble. How can I reinforce boundaries when I was taught to be accommodating? How to overcome self-doubt when I was punished for behavior deemed “eccentric”? How can I stand up to authority, even when I know I am in the right, when I quake at the thought of retribution?
*
A few months after Michaela was born, I was at a gathering with some other new moms I had met through an online group. We sat on a gentle slope in Fort Greene Park. The leaves were just coming in on the trees, and it was the first time our winter babies would experience spring. I lamented to another mother that I had difficulty dealing with my daughter’s willfulness. “She has to have things her way, or she loses it,” I complained.
Her response struck me: “A woman who knows what she wants is not a bad thing.”
I looked at Michaela differently after that. My little four-month-old baby wasn’t stubborn but a fierce warrior, determined to stake her claim; to control what she could.
“Why should he be peaceful?” Circe asks of her infant son, who is not an easygoing baby. “I never was, nor his father either, when I knew him. The difference was that he was not afraid to be burnt.”
So far, Michaela is not afraid of being burnt. I aim to keep it that way—even if it means I get burned by her.
*
On a recent evening, Michaela was not willing—as per usual—to go to sleep. She lay on her bed, and I tried to snuggle up next to her. Her body was tense, little jaw jutted out, hands balled into fists, legs kicking the bedsheets—and me. I asked her what she was feeling in her body.
“Mad,” she said, squinching up her face.
“How can you change that feeling?” I asked, praying that this question wouldn’t further inflame her. I have tried prompting her to talk about her feelings in the past, only to be ignored or spat on.
She paused, “Tell me.”
“Try taking a deep breath. Sniff a candle, blow out a flower.” I always mix up this phrase, which is a perfect description of how to take a deep breath. It doesn’t matter; yogic breathing isn’t really my feisty daughter’s thing. I try a different tack.
“Think of something silly.” Like me, Michaela has a tendency to dwell on the negative. Our interior instruments are tuned to a minor key, best for playing the blues. I wish I could change the tenor and tempo of her music. I wish I could make it something soothing, soft, mellow. Or cheerful, upbeat. I recount an incident that happened earlier that day, when she and two of her friends stuck the points of their umbrellas together in a sort of Three Musketeers gesture. The memory of it makes her laugh. It also shifts her thoughts to a different subject.
“I want an umbrella like Sara’s,” she says, her face relaxing, her voice becoming higher and lighter; hopeful, even. “Pink, with hearts on it.”
Eventually, she falls asleep, and I’m left hoping the exchange helped us both.
*
By the end of that book about the monster, a little girl has helped him gain control of his emotions by putting them into individual bottles. There is a yellow jar for happiness, a black jar for fear, a red jar for anger. After the monster has organized his feelings, he smiles at the girl. His fur is a vivid pink.
“Now what are you feeling?” asks the girl.
“What is he feeling, Michaela?” I ask her, when we read it. She smiles and answers: “Love.”
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 9.
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Claire Barliant is a writer based in Cambridge, MA. She writes a monthly newsletter, Page of Pentacles, that uses the Tarot to demystify the craft of writing.
