Kid Struggles With Emotions

Did I mention Kina was crying more lately?

Yesterday, it was about the soup. The soup was hot. The soup was cold. The soup was soup. I had made the soup, and it’s a soup that she has always liked—a cauliflower and gruyère soup from our dear departed local sandwich counter, Saltie. It is a reliable way to get cauliflower into a child, and the soup has not, until now, been rejected.

But the soup was soup yesterday, and that meant something to Kina, and she cried.

She asked for a hug from Mommy, which usually signifies that this will be a long cry, because the hug from Mommy does not typically solve the crying. Rather, the hug is criticized for being too short, or too asymmetrical, or in the wrong part of the living room. She asked for it again, for more hugs, for different hugs.

In the meantime, we were making no progress on getting Kina to explain what it was about the soup—a soup, I will remind you, that Kina loves—that gave Kina the weepies. We offered to feed it to her, too cool it, to reheat it, to supplement the soup with other foods that were not soup. She demanded Laurea sit closer, that she turn the soup sideways on the table, that the hug be longer, closer, more even.

Eventually, we called it. The soup went in the fridge and we drew a bath for our bawling child. We washed some blackberries. She calmed down. We, and the soup, all cooled off.

I asked Kina to sit with me to talk. I’m not going to tell you what we talked about; our conversation is our own, but it was a new kind of conversation for us. I held up her chin. I dropped my head low enough to look into her downturned eyes, at her little frown—a different kind of sad than I have seen before. I told her that we love her, always.

She was tired, and she had not had apples at lunch, and I think she needed to be reminded that all these things can be different. It all landed funny for her, and it all seemed connected, not just the events to each other, but to things that she’d felt or heard or feared before. I recognized that something had turned on in her brain, and it felt both like a developmental milestone and the arrival of an unexpected guest.

When I say that I want to protect Kina from the things happening in the world, I think I mean the things in the world that are outside of her head, but maybe what I have always actually wanted is to protect her from the way she interprets and responds to those events, to give her the emotional fortitude to survive them. I know, and you don’t have to tell me, that resilience is something you build, and that sadness isn’t defeat.

I do not get to keep Kina from growing up and putting together the triumphs and injustices of existence, nor do I want to. I’m seeing her sadness in ways that unsettle me (for reasons of my own sadness), but I feel her strength and silliness, too. They’re all feelings, and when we talk about the feelings she has, we can both understand them better. We can recognize them as they approach. We can work with them, and we can accept them.

Even if we cannot accept, for now, the soup.

Tonight was much better, for what it’s worth. She had a couple of hiccups, a few minor disappointments, but she navigated them well. Feelings, but we felt them, and we talked about it, and we decided it’s okay.

dad