What If It Was Never Anger

When my little one was very little, I bought her books on emotions and anger.  We started really really small with an amazing book called My Many Colored Days, by Dr Seuss.

Seriously if you have little ones you should check this book out.

This one was about all the colors of emotions.  I bought it as a board book, and we carried it everywhere - from across town to see a friend to across the sea to work and see friends in other countries.  We used different voices for different colors/emotions.  We had to replace it, because we wore the book out....  That was okay, though - we knew it so well, we could recite it without the book.  I can still see the pages and hear those voices rising up and lilting off of the pages:

Some days are yellow
Some are blue
On different days I'm different too
You'd be surprised how many ways I change on different colored days.....

And we'd end every time with "The many colors of you, my boo, the many colors of you."

As she grew older, we didn't find other books on emotion that worked quite so well.  It's hard to break such a complex topic down into something that a child can understand.  Even adults sometimes have issues understanding emotions and emotional responses.

When we hit school age, I started looking for other books - ones to help understand anger. Found one called Ahn's Anger that essentially walks a child through evaluating anger as a separate force and sitting with it to understand and calm it.

Not as big a hit in our house. Read it a couple of times because I read it to her.

This one was never as big of a hit in our house.  None of the books on anger that we tried really took root.  And now as we're in the teen years, dealing with much larger scale emotions, I wonder if I've finally figured out why: what if it was never about anger?  It seemed so obviously anger, and surprising anger out of the blue as well.  She was such a happy child, she effervesced with it.  People would talk about how she was such a ray of sunshine.  Except of course sometimes she wasn't, because no one is all one thing.  Some days are yellow, some are blue.

Looking back, now I wonder if what I saw as anger was actually an early sign of anxiety. My brother had deep anger issues growing up - fierce flames burning.  My mother likewise had deep anger issues to the day she died, and often a lack of emotional control.  For me, everything came down to control - anger leaves the potential for being out of control and so I turned all anger to ice from a far too young age.  But we were all children of abuse.  It took years of therapy for me to emerge as mostly whole (and I still have control issues).  My daughter has never experienced anything like that.  And while I knew that intellectually, wondered even what could possibly be sparking this anger, what if I still did the stupid thing and assumed too much filter of family?  Was my little one flailing at the world because she was afraid of it not because she was mad at it?

And aside from buying her the wrong books, does it even matter?  We talked about how it's okay to feel mad, but not to take it out on other people.  Don't say mean things (take it out verbally) or ever put your hands on someone else (take it out physically).  That it's okay to need space, but you need to be safe and momma always needs to know where you are.  (In one of the books the girl ran away to a special tree when she needed space.  We live in the woods... no running away into the trees without telling someone where you are going.)  Those are all lessons I stand by.

Looking at it from the other perspective, are there lessons I could have been teaching her about anxiety that I didn't because I was seeing anger....  I'm sure there are/were.  The one that we have come back to over and over again year on year is one of my personal sayings.  "Take a deep breath, and take the next step."  It’s okay to be afraid, everyone’s afraid sometimes.  We can’t prevent fear, but we can prevent fear from controlling us. (See, even today it all comes back to control for me.)  It's also okay that we don't know what all of the right steps are.  We only have to take the first one, then we can figure out what comes next.  And so we acknowledge the fear, and then take a deep breath and take the next step - do the thing, keep moving forward.

My personal mantra

We also worked on her "umbrella" of safety things - People, Places, Things, and Activities that she could ask for or draw on if the world felt too much.  But there are years of things seeming fine where I wasn't getting her help.  Years of non-therapy in between the bouts of therapy, where consistency would probably have been a better choice.  On the one hand, it seems like working actively on these things at 13 is so young.  And I fervently hope that we are dealing with the darkness early enough that it doesn't haunt her life.  On the other hand, looking back I see a (brief) past littered with missed opportunities.  What if I could have caught this at 6... would she already be past it?  Or would teen hormones have hit no matter what we did and all roads led here? 

 Everyone is made of many colors after all, and puberty mixes turpentine in with the paints. Ultimately, in balance, a natural addition, but first there's chaos.