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Dalai Mama Weekly Blog

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The year I'm remembering right now is 1990 — and I'm not thinking about my hot little 21-year-old body in its torn-up T-shirts and footless tights (Oh flat and pearly nipples of yesteryear!), or the peculiarly furnitureless apartment that Michael and I shared in San Francisco with our friend Andrew (Who needs a kitchen counter when you can duct-tape together two perfectly weak and wobbling appliance boxes fished from the dumpster?), or the time Andrew and Michael zipped off on their bikes to pick up burritos for dinner, and returned, burritoless, nine hours later because they'd decided at the last second to ride across the Golden Gate Bridge and up into the Marin headlands and halfway to frigging Oregon, while I sat on my cardboard box, pissed and panicking and also kind of hungry.

No. I'm remembering how Michael's brother, who was in the army and stationed in Monterey, California at the time, drove up to San Francisco to do a little peace keeping around the Gulf War protests. Naturally, he stayed with us (like all the countless houseguests to whom our couch sang out its damp and lumpy siren song). And so in the morning we chomped companionably through our bowls of granola and gulped the last of our coffee before climbing into our riot gear and gathering up our Peace Now signs and riding the Bart train together downtown. And we chanted and marched and Billy clubbed and arrested, and then, at the end of the day, we all met back up at Fisherman's Wharf to eat bread bowls of clam chowder together before riding the Bart train back home.

And I'm thinking of this now because Birdy is still at that heartbreaking phase where, if you speak sharply to her, she will burst into tears and turn furiously away from you — and then turn desperately back and fling her miserable arms around your treacherous neck because you are not only the worst enemy, you are also her only comfort, like one of those big, bad wolf dolls where you flip it inside out and it turns back into Red Riding Hood.

I wanted to write about this last night, but the truth is that I felt too hollowed out with sadness and regret about the argument we had had — assuming you can properly call the wrath of a raging dictator matched with the cowering sorrow of her citizens an argument. On occasion, ruthlessness can well up out of me like a rogue wave and fill our home with shipwreck, parts of everyone's spirit washing up like dead fish, and it is the thing about myself I am still most fervently hoping to change. On occasion, in the comments section here, you lovely readers suggest that I'm too hard on myself. And while I love your impulse to reassure, and I would want to reassure you back, and I respect the sentiment that one must forgive oneself to forgive others, I don't agree. I believe in setting clear limits for children and in expressing displeasure in unkind behavior. But I never think it's appropriate that the verb you'd use to describe a parent's behavior be unleash.

I can't even quite explain how it all started last night, or how it swirled into its own domestic tornado: an argument between Birdy and Ben about playing the piano, which turned into Birdy shrieking, and then insisting that she thought shrieking was a kind way to solve a problem with Ben, that she really really thought it was kind to scream at people, this was the real real real truth, she was telling the truth, and she would have been sorry, only she had no idea... And the metaphor "pushed my buttons" came into my mind as if it were unique to me alone, because I felt like a machine that had gotten suddenly flipped on, disturbing the peaceful nighttime with the clattering conveyor belt of my anger. It was something about her crazy insistence on the niceness of shrieking that made me forget that Birdy is not even 5 yet, that she is a tiny kid learning her way, that for every minute of difficulty I have written about here, there has been an unspooling infinity of gentle sweetness that has poured from her every cell. And if I miss the days of uncomplicated loveliness between her and the world, between her and me? Well. That is my problem alone. Complexity is human, and Birdy is only human.

As, of course, am I. Which is why my raised voice ("Really?" I shrieked. "You really really thought it was kind to shriek at Ben?") gave way to comfort, to the big mama arms wrapped around the miserable child, the rocking and the Shhh and There, there that must exist in some form in every language. And Birdy fell shudderingly asleep nearly instantly. And I lay awake for hours, wrestling with my own mind or heart, I'm not sure which. And now it's morning, and snow is falling, turning our yard into a blank canvas, and everyone's asleep still but the chickadees who are hopping around the feeder like feathered exclamation points. A new day, a new beginning.

Editor's Note:
You can also find Catherine's column on Family.com, where you can post comments and she can join the conversation, too.