Little’s Circus Skills
It’s not all fun and games when the foundling finds her place
We could predict, prepare and prevent the flashpoints, could see trouble — see the signs of its coming — and steer a course away from its tiring, tearful maw.
I now have two daughters, we do, together. With one, we had it pretty much figured out. Big would push buttons, but we had learned by now what action was supposed to follow their pressing. We could predict, prepare and prevent the flashpoints, could see trouble — see the signs of its coming — and steer a course away from its tiring, tearful maw. She wasn’t perfect, none of us are, but we understood her failings and flailings, her moods and her grooves: what would wind her up, and how to calm her down. But we have known her since birth; she is not, and never has been, an enigma.
Big is known to us, has shown to us all that we have put in. So, she is terrible when she’s tired, is stubborn and opinionated and far too sure that she is right. She is like her mummy and daddy in that respect: cocksure and fast mouthed, frustrated by that which does not go her way and lashing out in an attempt to make it so. All of this can be calmed, can be tamed by using her words — her weapons — against her. We gave her these tools, they have been handed down, and we have the power to take them away, to diffuse them, to render them servile, as safe in the hands of a child.
We lived in an unequal democracy, with the casting votes wielded by those with the greatest physical stature, all the while being swayed by the one with the most winning, irrefutable smile. I am the weak one, the soft one. It’s me that always tries to stay calm, to use persuasion over the threat of action or the removal of privileges. It is a useless strategy at times, making me prone to manipulation, to capitulation and the giving up of position or authority. Sometimes though, it works, and peace is not simply restored, but is retained: not lost, or never relinquished. As three, we had found our patterns; our steps in unison, most of the time.
Things are more difficult now.
Little’s screams are about more than just noise. They are physical things, visceral entities that are borne witness by all of our senses.
When Little screams, I have taken to ignoring her, have taken to finishing whatever it is that I deem necessary to complete. Of finishing that, and then going to see what she needs.
She screams a lot.
She screams when a toy she desires is not relinquished by Big at her snotty, clamouring grasp. She screams, and spins in insanity circles, when she is placed on the floor — or on the bed, or in some futile attempt to get her settled in the pushchair: or anywhere at all — that she has decided she’d rather not be. She screams when food has stopped coming, or when the water she has dropped is not instantly handed back to her: the better for Little to lob it again. She screams when she wakes, and screams when you try and nudge toward sleep. She screams when she is getting dressed, and screams when she is being undressed for her bath. In her bath, she is happy, surprised and pleased by the splashing warmth of the water, until she screams again because you scold her for pulling at Big’s hair. She screams when Big is playing with her, and screams when Big would rather be alone.
Allow me to describe the screams. They have extremes of volume and pitch, of course, like broken heavy machinery: metal against metal with the power still surging through it, but driving all the wrong parts, in all the wrong directions. Sometimes they are quiet: periods of utter silence transmitted through a wide open jaw: a tunnel really; a way under, or through, a sea of fear, of confusion and the burning need for acceptance. These are the worst: the fire and brimstone, because in that festering silence, all hell is boiled, is broiled and barbecued, waiting to be unleashed. Then the noise comes, and the noise is incredible. It is inconceivable before it comes, and you do not quite believe what you have just endured when finally it is ceased.
But Little’s screams are about more than just noise. They are physical things, visceral entities that are borne witness by all of our senses. Sound and sight — like stars colliding — and touched (she bites and she scratches and she grabs for things, like glasses and hair, or hits you with anything she can reach: a toy or her milk — anything that calmed her a second ago).
Little’s screams can also be smelled and tasted. They smell like failure — acrid, polluted, and coloured with soot, and they taste like it too: metallic, chemical, like steel exposed to acid or when rubber, vulnerable and exposed for too long to the elements, begins to degrade and disintegrate, to disassemble and die. Little’s screams are an assault, a strike: they are an insurgency that demands air-strikes and boots on the ground (diplomacy having already been long abandoned).
I have mentioned her insanity circles — a staggering, increasingly desperate rotation as she seeks solace from somewhere, from anywhere; an indignant stand against the reality, the realisation, that solace will have to wait a while, that there are other entities besides her in the universe — but there is the looping arch and the death stampede, and the dumb-dumb dive as well. Little’s aerobatics, her acrobatics: Little’s circus skills. Beyond the sensory, there is the other-worldly: her screams are truly transcendent. At some point in her screaming, you cease to hear, to see and be hit and it’s when she embarks on her small screaming routines, her party tricks, that you realise she is something special. Not just a volume terrorist or a bludgeoning bandit, her screams, in revealing what she wants, what she needs, reveal who she really is.
She is challenging us. Can you do this, and be what I need you to be?
The next part of the story can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/nyu2fsj
