After camping in Seward for the long weekend and then returning to seventy-degree weather in Anchorage, where I've been spending the long days (sunrise 4:38, sunset 11:18) working in my gardens, I feel more grounded, literally, with soil under my nails and in the cracks of my fingers, than I have for months.
I went from: Wait, wheres my phone? if I wasn't looking at it or some other screen every hour to: Phone, why do I need that?
Unplugged.
Not checking mail or FB or the news compulsively, as if more information held the potential to free my soul. As if the answers to all of lifes questions could be found within this never-ending web of communication.
I havent found the answers in our soil, a mixture of sand and hummus, but my need to know diminishes with each flower I plant.
Elias continues to challenge me to my core but the sun seems to mellow my reactions to his rage.
"You seem frustrated right now," I say, as Elias screams and swings his arm at me.
"I want to hit you!"
"Are you mad because the game changed? Because Olive added water to your plane? She's allowed to change the way she plays Bud."
I knew when they started to play airplane again, that it would not go well. The previous evening, Elias and Olive pretended to fly to Florida, as Nick and I sat in the sunshine drinking cold beverages and watching them actually play well together for the first time in what feels like months. Elias added security and baggage claim to the airport and they pushed their babies in their strollers around the terminal. Are we there yet? Elias would ask Olive. No not yet. Now you ask me, he'd say. Are we there yet? Yes! Ok, lets go. They repeated this sequence multiple times and even checked their babies at the gate to be loaded under the plane. (Oh, if only..)
So when he initiated the game again, I knew there was no way Olive could duplicate the process exactly and sure enough when she filled a water jug from my garden bucket, he almost scraped her face on our new concrete walkway.
Elias looks at me when I tell him its ok for Olive to change the way she plays. "But I want it to always stay the same!" he cries.
Oh, to hear him voice his needs, progress indeed.
"But Babe, make-believe play always changes."
"No! No it doesn't change!! I'm gonna dump her water out!!"
"Then you don't get to play with her. And I know you had fun playing airplane with her yesterday."
The slightest change in the environment can throw Elias's world. Turn him from the cute and curious kid to a hyena in the house.
Unpredictable. Wild.
All brain stem and fight. No frontal lobe and reason.
No the boy I love. But I love him still.
Because love for your child, like time, doesn't stop; even when you cant recognize your baby in the boy who says he wants to hurt you. And so you respond as best you can, knowing that some days you'll be all Mama Bear growling at him and throwing him down when he goes after his sister. And other days, fueled by soil and sunshine, you'll simply say, "Elias, you seem frustrated right now."
And when he still can't settle and ends up in his room for an extended break it will be your daughter, an hour later, who reminds you that, someday, they will be alright, these contentious siblings of yours.
"Sorry Mama," Olive says and you look up thinking she stepped on a flower or spilled your water.
"Sorry for what?"
"Sorry that Elias hit you."
And you thank and hug her and know that as much as she is the source of his jealousy and frustration now, she will learn not to provoke him, to play by his rules while helping him understand ours, to be his voice of empathy, his advocate, his friend.
And the plants will grow...
Happy (what day is it again?) Friday all!
Love this new pic of them! Saw an article in the nytimes about the gift of siblings and thought of our kids and yours. Think these two will find their way with new levels of closeness as they grow up. Or at least that's what I'm hoping for ours! Hope your summer confines to be relaxing and renewing!
Posted by: Kate | 06/05/2013 at 03:11 PM
It must be so difficult when everything changes and the world, rather than following your rules, speeds by with a chorus of voices that seem to know another reality that follows a course so different from the path you see clearly. Thank goodness Elias has family to advocate for him and who understand him better than most.
Posted by: Greta | 06/05/2013 at 07:20 PM