My child is Pollyanna incarnate: her glass is always half-full,
even when it's empty; she usually answers my scoldings/reminders with a
"Ooops!" followed by a "O-Kayyy" and there tends to be
skipping involved; this is the girl who has turned my impromptu relaxation
technique for night-fears (Relaxed Body, Easy Mind) into
a meditative ritual which includes angelic improvised signing, praying for the
"Europeans who are suffering" (during the cold snap some weeks back),
and, of course, her storytelling* that reminds me this Pollyanna
comes with her own lessons; this is also a girl who will begin most mornings
with a gentle request, "Can you please help me to not suck my finger
today, please?"
To say she has an amazing propensity for adaptation is an
understatement given all she's been through since I've met her. She has adopted
the cultural norms of our quirky family with enthusiasm "Ohhhh, today our
plates are verrry colorful!" Yet has retained the most endearing lessons
and habits of her past as seen this past Christmas when she single handedly
swept and rearranged my father's bachelor-pad house, even sweeping cobwebs out
of the corners, all the while affirming, "I'm cleaning because it's
CHRIST-MAS!!" as if this was the natural inclination of all eight year old
kids.
I will admit, though, her spirited embrace of the new and
the old is less....open-minded when it comes to academics. And it has
slowly dawned on me that the inexplicable pattern of radically mood shifts I've
come to notice are in fact associated with a particular kind of learning: ESL. Reading
The Mute Zombie Child is a
girl whose gravitational pull leaves her spending hours lying in a fetal
position on the living room rug, her finger thrust deeply in her mouth, and her
eyes dilated with apathy staring off into nothingness; this girl responds to
any and all external stimuli with just further eye dilation; this girl is mute
and will shudder with such ferocity when forced to speak on threat of
punishment; this girl forces me to get up, get a glass of water and literally
spoon feed her, her eye medication pills (she is supposed to
have some freaky medicine fetish so you can see how this would be worrisome);
her only exceptions to her apathy are during mealtimes, when, for the brief
period required to chew and swallow, she will once again take on the form of an
active, engaged human being.
Rain, in Uganda Utah
Despite my mother having not turned up when she was supposed to
and the rain having already stopped leaving behind bulging grey clouds (both of
which put us in that awkward limbo of suspense), we managed a relatively
normal breakfast in which there seemed to be all signs of normal life coming from
the Little One, including voluntary
speech. I then set myself up in the living room trying to get my mind clear and
ready for some creative flow.
Not soon after I caught Ms. V, out of the corner of my eye, quietly slip from
her chair, finger in mouth, and glide herself down to the floor, as her eyes
grew large and empty ("Ah, God!! It's not even 11am!” I mentally
hollered). Sometimes this is just from boredom so I said casually, "you
have English today so why don't you go over your homework and your
spelling?".....several silent minutes passed with no recognition that I
even existed let alone had spoken, finally she crawled to her bedroom,
her finger still protruding from her lips. This began what would ultimately be
an excruciating morning trying to get Vannesa to read and practice spelling all
of 8 vocab words,
with total failure. Meanwhile I desperately struggled to pierce the
fog in my own brain while sending dagger looks at the fat, grey, lazy clouds
outside which mocked the futility of my attempts (even the Sun was failing to
find a clear path, why should I think I would have better luck).
Some days, no matter how hard you long for flow,
resistance is all you get and on Monday, Ms V, the Sun, and I had no good luck
trying to overcome our individual stagnancies. My relief when she was
finally whisked away to class was tempered by the fact that I still found my brain incapable of any clear,
original thought, though it was exhausted from trying to pull any sort of
active response from Ms. V. Meanwhile, the Sun continued to fart moist
streams of heat into the atmosphere, an embarrassment to its usual, direct and
unabashed rays.
When she returned from class, V was revived enough for me to
confirm it was the class itself, hanging over her head like those fat, grey,
lazy clouds, that put her in such a foul mood in the first place. She was
not her old self, exactly, but the evening did move by with a little more ease
for both of us. The hidden sun finally surrendered its fight as evening
approached and gave me reason enough to do the same. All three of us went to
bed happily rejecting any further claims to the day.
Yesterday, the rain repeated itself but with much more vigor.
It actually seeped the ground and the air in a crisp freshness that still
lingers today and will likely surprise the sun by the need for a little more
effort on its part to make the ground hard and dry and dusty again. It was a
soothing sight to watch the rain do what we couldn't do the day before: flow. It was inspiring,
if for no other reason as it was a reminder of how natural and effortless flow
is supposed to be (Relaxed Body, Easy Mind). It helped that my
mother had finally shown up the night before and the morning was filled with
the distraction of her offerings scattered here and there, treats and trinkets
from a far off world. My mother is a tornado, all by herself, and for
once, her invasion into the home was not a disruption to peace but a clearing
away of the dust and static fog.
And once that fog was cleared, a gem of triumph re-merged
that had been forgotten in the previous day's miasmic mood:
