rain falls in buckets from my eyes

Beatrice is moody. She is sensitive. But I don’t want to use either of those words with her. Whenever I start to say, “You are being oversensitive,” I bite my tongue and would swallow it if I could because that’s what my parents said to me–again and again. I felt as though something was wrong with me. They were so cool, so calm. They never had outbursts. As an only child, there was no one to compare my emotional temperature to. With only Thomas around, Bea doesn’t really have much of a gauge either. Thomas is either hot or cold, thrilled with the world or pissed off, awake or sound asleep. Thomas doesn’t do grey. But Bea and I live in gradations of grey.

For seven, she’s amazingly attuned to herself. It’s a gift I’m trying to help her appreciate and nurture. I want her to understand that knowing one’s emotions, no matter how complicated or disarming they are, is a rare talent. It’s easy to interpret this skill–emotional intelligence, I guess you’d call it now–as an indication of freakdom, but I want her to value it.

Bea makes me wonder if this is a skill we’re born with. When she was three, trying to understand the crying jags that would occasionally beset her, she said, “Mama, sometimes rain falls in buckets from my eyes.” Wow. I practically ran to my journal to write that one down. Self-knowledge and poetry.