I always feel so meta that it is hard to describe anything. I love that I love that I describe my sentiment about any feeling I have as something I love. If I don't like something, then that experience of dislike is something I love. I love the experience of disliking things. I love the experience of being bored. I love having experiences. So I will say a thing like "I love hating aspects of Microsoft Excel." And I really do. I derive a lot of pleasure from how intensely I dislike it.
In this moment, I am listening to a song. It is a beautiful song. When my heart tips past the threshold of holding-everything-at-bay and is submerged in the beauty of wave after wave washing over me. I am engulfed in emotion. And the intensity of longing to somehow share this beauty breaks my heart and crushes me. I am a frail leaf dry blown over jagged rocks, and pulled apart, pushed into a creek, and pulled into a million pieces, becoming soil. I am gone. It was helpless. And I cannot share it with anyone. Will anyone ever read these words even? I think not. My life is full of these moments of loneliness and beauty. Do I like this experience? That is hard to say, but I love it. I love it perhaps a bit like Stockholm Syndrome. It has me. It has me and I cannot escape, and my principal experience of life is to love my experience of life. So this too I love.
I had worked hard to setup my daughter's very first playdate today at 1pm. My wife nor the other parents were that excited about it. Or else it felt that way. But I was. So excited. And deeply committed. Daughterboo has been so isolated from normal kid interaction, partially because little kids under 4 don't really play together, but mostly because of Covid. And so I was really eager to make this happen. To give her an opportunity. So I setup a playdate with a kid. How? It was a birthday party last week for one kid in her class, and I asked all the parents if they wanted a play date. Blank stares. I share with them a picture of the place we'd play, a pic of kids playing there, and that made it a better sell. One mom said "YES!" and she delegated to me the task of walking over to her husband to tell him that he'd be assigned to go on the play date. Did our daughters like each other before this date (or even know each other's names?). I don't think so. Yet I was committed. I set it up. The day of, I had a plan, to keep daughter relatively mellow leading up to it. So she would have good energy for it. And my plan got foiled. I'm going to cut that part of this story out. But she had a thrilling morning. One of the best ever. She was so happy and alive, which is good. Great. BUT, come 11am she was not calm. No problem. I took her home. We ate. We watched TV. She cuddled my arm on the couch and we got tranquil. An hour later she wanted to draw. A relaxing thing to do. I made up a project for us. Her mom was out-of-town and coming back at 2pm. We could make her a sign that read "Welcome Home Mom! We🤍 U" So we spent 30 minutes on that. She had at this moment in her skill-growth just learned to color inside the lines, and to cut with scissors. So I had her do both these things. I was proud of myself for keeping it fun, and collaborative, letting her choose what to color and cut, and yet moving swiftly on the other aspects of it to get it all done in those 30 minutes. It was tricky to work out the timing. Really tricky, and I was proud I did it. And kept it fun. I got it to where we wrapped up all our tasks at approximately the same moment. She was finishing up the last thing, the heart, just as I was prepping the tape on the back of all the words to tape it to our front door. At this moment it is 12:28. We are exactly on schedule. All that remained to do was put this last piece of tape on the back of the heart and walk over to the front door, and put it up. We'd be done at 12:32. It was going to be great. Her mom would feel loved when she got home in 1 hour at 1:30pm, and we'd be gone by then, having peed (12:35), eaten a burrito (12:38 to 12:47), and walked out the door (12:51) to stroll to the playdate with an easy cushion of time. This did not happen. Instead, what happened was my daughter had an idea to put a drawing of herself, her mother and myself inside the heart. She drew a circle in the heart, inside which to put the three of us. She drew the first head circle. Then she stared at it. This is the moment that this entire blog post is about. This tiny moment. This is the awful experience that I loved. All this to get to this tiny human moment. My four year old stared at the circle inside the circle. The gears of her mind turned. The head circle, inside the larger circle, was too large, so large, that she would not be ablt to fit two more head circles beside it. And her skills are not so evolved that it occurred to her to draw Mom and Dad smaller, or outside the circle. All that she got in that moment was that she could not do her plan. Her plan was foiled. This is them awful experience I love. Her plan was foiled. And in that moment she decided to make 3 hearts, with 3 circles, each with a different person inside: mom, dad and herself. And in that moment I got onboard and switched my plan to have the sign say " We🤍🤍 🤍U" because I have done comedy improv, and inside that training I get it. Just ride the wave. Whatever someone else's contribution is or becomes, you just say "Yes!, and" and accept it and run with it. So BAM now I am drawing her more hearts and we are coloring them in... and halfway through working on this second heart my daughter unravels. Her commitment to her idea is a canyon to cross, and her tenuous feeling of control is a rope bridge across. Reality is friction cutting the ropes. They fray. The bridge shatters. Explodes. She is falling. ropes fray. Shatter. The bridge collapses. She is falling. She reaches out but there is nothing to hold onto. Me? Apparently she has pulled me into the freefall with her. I need 60 seconds of decisive action to finish this 30 minute plan, and she is flailing and will destroy anything she touches. She wants and opposes every action simultaneously with maximum intensity. She wants to make more hearts. She doesn't. She wants me to put it up. She wants to put it up. She doesn't want me to. It is all screaming and anger and despair and frustration, all felt at maximum strength. I jumped and grabbed the other side of the canyon, and am holding us up with one hand, while holding her with the other. Pulling us up. Because all I want is to make her mom happy, but more so to take her to the playdate and give her the chance to have a friend and be a kid and be social, a chance she has largely been denied for two years. And I am so committed. And the next 10 minutes is a blur. I get that burrito shoveled into her face through tears and her shoes on and out the door to the place, and she is trying to shift from sad and upset to happy, she is really valiantly trying, and just before we get to the other girl, just then she finally does it. We have an amazing two hours. We were a minute late. Only 1 minute. It was almost more. It was a mad dash. It was SO intense. It took everything. And it all came down to that moment when she drew the 2nd circle and had to decide what to do. I love that moment. It was so awful. It ruined so much. It was so human. It was like the song. Have billions of parents already had this experience? And it is so hard to convey. A film might be able to convey it in 3 minutes or less. Who would want to see that film? And so many words here for me to process it and cope, and cathartically get it out. https://youtu.be/0pHotq9fGZU
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