Third Birthday

by Wendy Atkinson

The park is very crowded, and my three-year-old daughter, Claire, is on the verge of a meltdown because she does not understand why she should have to wait for a turn on the swing.

I try to distract her, trying my best to avoid the storm I know is coming. When I gently tug on her coat sleeve to try to move her to a less busy and overwhelming area, she explodes. The temper tantrum has started and there is no stopping it now.

Once again I am instantly aware of the looks from the onlookers, some kind and understanding, but all too many condemning. She lies on the ground, thrashing and flailing her arms and legs, and voicing her pain and frustration with a shrill, unbroken screech.

I have seen this played out many times before, in different settings. It may be a supermarket, a playgroup, or a doctor's office that has kept us waiting just a little too long. Each time it happens, my natural awareness and sensitivities allow me to be in tune with the response of those around us.

The many feelings they are conveying seem based on one central theme: I or my daughter, or both, are doing something wrong. My thoughts are racing, and my desire to defend my child has me telling the crowd my little girl is surely overtired, excuse her. I am not able to express what I really want to say—the truth, as my daughter and I know it.

I am not doing anything wrong, nor is she. We are both equally victims of our circumstances. I had longed for her, and planned her happy entry into the world for me, her father and her patient sister. She was finally coming, after many years of trying and a devastating loss two years before.

None of us had bargained for just how difficult her entrance into the world would be. After a long and painful and disappointing birth I slipped into a hell of anguish and sorrow that would not lift until late in her second year of life.

When the nightmare started to clear, I saw that I had missed most of her babyhood. I had emerged, forever changed, to a little girl who had some excusable emotional sensitivities.

What followed for me was probably the most bittersweet time of my life, getting to know this child who had a delayed start in bonding with her mother.

My daughter is not bad, excuse her or don't. She is what was created out of the best and the worst of me. How I love my wild, emotional little daughter, who can be sweet and kind enough to melt your heart one minute, and frustrated and angry as a trapped bear the next. She represents all my hope for the future, and all my reconciliation with the past, and I thank God for her every single day.

Copyright © Wendy Atkinson 2003