The Depths of Toddler Despair

My three-and-a-half-year-old is deep in the pit of an existential crisis. I know that sounds adorable and precocious and like a good opportunity for personal growth for a Mama that purports to be mindful, and it is all those things. It is.

But, no jokes, no funny business, it's also hell. A three-and-a-half-year-old existential crisis involves some pretty horrendous temper tantrums. You can't really blame her, really: it's got to be awful to be in the grips of angsty ennui when you don't even know the words "angst" and "ennui." As nebulous and imprecise as they are, they at least provide some sort of structure for your feelings.

It's been a really tough week for us, these past seven days or so. She's been moody, operating on a hair-trigger that sends her from smiling and delightful to anger ball monster in a matter of seconds. There have been lots of thrown toys, lots of screams, lots of "NO!" regardless of what is being offered.

After her angry outbursts, she always starts to cry and then tries to burrow into me. If I ask her to stop crying, she'll look up at me with tear-stained cheeks and whimper, "But I'm really sad, Mama. I'm really sad."

It's heartbreaking.

But for seven days, I have been unable to get her to tell me what it is, exactly, that she's sad about. She's either ignored the question completely when its been asked, or mumbled some throwaway answer along the lines of  "I don't know."

Yeah, yeah, I know: she's my kid. She's MY daughter. This behavior makes perfect sense when you think about it that way, right?

Last night, after the fourth straight dinner-table meltdown, I took her upstairs to calm down. Time-outs weren't working, obviously, so I sat with her, instead - the two of us cuddled up in the rocker in her room.

And she said to me again, "I'm sad, Mama. I'm just really sad."

"What are you sad about?" I asked, again, with no hope or expectation of a response.

She lifted her chin, and the lamplight glinted on her wet, mottled cheeks. "I don't know who I am, Mama!" she wailed confessionally. "What's my fourth name?"

I was taken aback. What did she mean, fourth name? What was this about not knowing who she is?

"You're Genevieve Anne Findley. You're my snugglebug, and you are my best girl, and you are clever and strong and big and beautiful," I said to her. "Mama gave you three names. Genevieve, for St. Genevieve; Anne for Anne Shirley; and Findley, just like Mama."

She wasn't sobbing anymore, but there were still tears making tracks down her face, and her grip on my shirt was compulsively tight.

"But what about my fourth name, Mama? I should have four names," she choked out.

"Well, you think about what you want your fourth name to be. You think about all the names you know, and all the names you've heard, and when you find the perfect fourth name, you let me know, and we'll add it, ok?" This is me trying to be supportive in my absolute bafflement.

She snuggled deeper into my chest and stared at the wall. I stroked her hair. We sat and rocked, gently, back and forth, back and forth.

After what felt like an eternity, she straightened up and looked me dead in the eye.

"Bookwriter," she said. "My fourth name is Bookwriter."

"Absolutely," I replied. "Genevieve Anne Bookwriter Findley."

She squeezed out a tiny smile, and back we went to the dinner table, where she still didn't eat anything, but at least she didn't howl the whole time.

My three-and-a-half-year-old, who can't write her own name yet, wants to be a bookwriter. And is deep in the pit of an existential crisis. Perhaps some stereotypes exist for good reason. And perhaps all writers really are crazy, right from the very beginning. It would sure explain a lot about me.

Moments, Liminal

I don't often read advice columns. I am fascinated by people, and their problems, and their neuroses, and so reading advice columns seems like a natural thing for me to do, but I don't often do it. I find them inherently condescending, primarily, and that makes them difficult for me to read.

It's probably a good thing that I don't read them often; as was pointed out to me recently in disparaging tones, the last thing I need is to become further steeped in pop psychology and dime-store theories. All the good intentions and compassion in the world will be for naught if I start to believe too strongly in my own cleverness.

But sometimes, the tag line is too good, too close to home, too grabbing for me to ignore. Tag lines like "Must I Choose: My Muse or My Wife?" are more or less guaranteed to get me reading.

I'm not male, and my personality is not really set up for clear-cut dichotomies, but this is a thing that I have often struggled with. I require, for better or worse, a great deal of stimulation. I need people, different people, different perspectives, new ideas. I crave them. I crave the interaction that is exchanging thoughts with someone, and I crave variety in that enterprise.

My ex-husband had a less charitable view of this desire of mine; he told me that I required a lot of attention. That is probably true, although not, I think, entirely in the way he meant it. I am not someone that requires the full attention of another person at all times. I crave copious quantities of solitude as desperately as I crave new ideas and interactions. I need time to recharge and regroup, to integrate the sum total of those new ideas gleaned from new interactions into my cosmology and adjust as necessary. But I would be lying if I said I don't enjoy the attention of the people that I love, or admire, or respect. Who doesn't enjoy attention, honestly?

But the thrust of this man's problem is that while he very much wants to be a good husband to his wife, he finds he is consistently projecting desire onto other women and using the resultant emotional reactions as inspiration. He is creating muses for himself. And he is afraid he is hurting his wife in this process.

I very much want to be a good partner, but I require a lot of stimulation. No one person is ever going to be enough for me. And that can be hurtful. Jealousy is an ugly, wily, slippery thing, and it can rear its poisonous head and kill even the heartiest love dead.

Most of the columnist's advice I found unhelpful and unnessecarily downing. But there was one line, one line in the whole response, that sent the hamsters in my brain madly turning their wheels: "I also think it might be useful for you to read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Why do I think that? Not sure."

Read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Don't know why, just do it. Perhaps the columnist knows more than he is telling, or perhaps he intuitively knows something he can't verbalize, or perhaps it was just a random stab in the dark because this guy really likes the concept of liminality. I don't know. But that was the best bit of advice I have ever seen in an advice column in my life.

Read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Just do it.

A liminal moment is a threshhold, it is the state of being betwixt and between two concretely defined states. Liminal moments occur in all strata of human organization, from individuals to the world at large. The term was originally coined in 1909 by Arnold van Gennep in the classic anthropological tome Rites of Passage. I studied van Gennep; I remember being fascinated by the concept seven years ago.

Because the columnist did not see fit to elucidate his reasons for recommending reading about liminality, I can only guess what he was trying to impart. But I know, very clearly, what I got out of reminding myself about the concept of liminality.

I am spending my life searching out liminal moments. If I could, I would live entirely in the threshhold, in the state betwixt and between all definite things. It is in those moments, and that state, that creativity is most abundant. It is in those spaces where all stability and order have passed away and new orders and structures have not yet been erected that inspiration is clearest. I have spent my life, and I will continue to spend my life, seeking permanent liminality.

New people and new interactions and new ideas are merely vehicles for finding those things that force me into liminality, so that I do reorder my cosmology. All that attention is fodder for the productive use of my solitude.

Some part of me, the heedless, reckless, wild part wants to say that art is that which is a catalyst for liminal moments. Art is that which sends you careening into the space betwixt and between the ordinary structures of the world. Anything else is mere craft, no matter how well constructed.

And I want to create art. I want to live in the empty space between letters, in the pause of the comma and not in the words surrounding it.

Dumb Girl

I'm all up in my head, rethinking your feminism.

Everyone knows girls play dumb. It's a pretty fool-proof manipulation tactic: the hapless damsel requires assistance. I play dumb fairly frequently, or at least I take on a position of weakness in relation to whoever I'm interacting with.

But do I really do this because I'm female? I'm not so sure.

Certainly, it would be an easy out to point to pressure that girls come under to conform to standards of femininity that have been seriously influenced by Victorian mores of silent, subservient women. It would be easy to cop out with some pithy denunciation of society at large that told me for most of my childhood to sit down and shut up.

But it would be false.

Don't get me wrong: I was certainly told to sit down and shut up during my childhood. Repeatedly, in point of fact. In my very early youth, I was a talker, a mover, a smiler. I was a charming toddler, always asking ever-so-slightly intrusive questions of total strangers and winning them over with toothy grins and slightly-above average verbal skills. Not everyone was charmed, as you might imagine, particularly not in institutional settings. Daycare workers both loved and hated me; so did teachers.

So I was told to sit down and shut up. Repeatedly.

But I was also encouraged, with gentle prods. Every time someone answered a question of mine I was emboldened to ask another one. Every time I smiled at a stranger on the street and they smiled back, I was fortified to do it again.

Further, I doubt that the impatience I was up against had as much to do with my gender as it did with a general fatigue at dealing with a willful and noisy child. I'd have faced much the same reaction (I think) if I'd been male.

But then I ponder that sentence, and I'm not so sure. How would I know what would have happened if I'd been a boy? I don't. I certainly don't recall watching boys get treated differently than I for similar behavior, but I was a narcissistic little thing. I may not have noticed anyone else, boy or otherwise. And I certainly find that as I got older, there was a unique sort of pressure I faced as a a person with tits and a snatch.

Then again, people with cocks and balls faced pressures that I didn't have to deal with.

So how do we sort through all the various layers of pressure to determine whether gender has a significant impact on anything in our lives?

I will never go so far as to deny that being female has shaped my psyche, but I have no idea how my gender has affected my perception. Further, I'm uncomfortable apportioning any particular foible to gender, because there are so very many things that go into making someone crazy that it feels like a cop out to point to something so big, obvious, and unchangeable as the naughty bits one was born with.

I do play dumb. I do play weak. But I'm hesitant to say I do it because I'm female. It's effective because I'm female, and if it weren't effective, I would probably stop doing it, but I don't think my gender was the original impetus for trying weakness as a manipulation tactic. I think there are probably other, much more complicated and personal reasons for that particular development.

And, in all seriousness, what does a little weakness hurt? Who is hurt if I let the guy at the pizza place hold the door open for me? Who does it hurt if I let the guy walk me to my car because it's dark and I'm alone? No one. Everyone likes to feel useful, myself included. On an evolutionary level, we've segregated this usefulness in many ways, one of which is by gender: men are providers and women are caretakers. Since my natural inclinations are toward caretaking anyway, why shouldn't I play along with the role social pressure pushes me into?

And then, of course, I wonder if caretaking isn't my natural inclination at all, merely what I've taken on myself because of those pressures. Are the messages I receive really so insidious that they've steeped through my subconscious to my core without my even noticing?

I have no idea. I'd like to think not, and so I will operate as if such a thing has not occured.

But there is always a nagging feeling of doubt, a whisper I can't quite get rid of.

If I lived in a gender-neutral world, would I be the same person? I'm uncomfortable with the question because on the whole I like myself. I like who I am. But to ask this question posits that there may possibly be a better version of myelf out there, one I can't access because of the subtle conditioning I've been subjected to.

I hate this idea, and I'll deny that it has any real validity for a variety of reasons, including my extreme distaste for anything that smacks of predestination or fate.

But I'm intellectually honest enough (occasionally) to wonder in my heart of hearts: What if?

What if, indeed.