My yin

Madelena is a foot stomper.  A shrieker. A willful, my-way-or-the-highway child. Then seconds later she is offering me milk and half her begged-for cookie, saying “Mama, can you sit with me?”  She is dancing around the kitchen, doing a spastic one-legged hop and a skip, yelling “Look at me, Mama, look at me!” I am trying to cook dinner and she is clapping her hands together over her head, twirling dangerously close to the open flame in her princess dress and Elmo slippers, yelling “Look at me, Mama, look what I can do!” She is creating a microphone out of Legos, singing a song of her own making. She is putting countless things from around the house into bags and boxes and backpacks, never to be found again. She is brushing her stuffed duck’s nonexistent teeth with real toothpaste, saying “It’s okay, Carmella – it’s good for you.” She is riding her tricycle on the rug, singing and tossing her purple fur hat up in the air. She is watering plants and chairs and the deck. She is running full force at me, and I know not whether a kiss and a smile are coming for me or a little fist raised in anger or frustration. She is constant energy and fury and love. And if you are to believe my mother, she is me.

Shawn Joaquin is all my peacefulness, my love of books and words and the woods. He embodies my need for quiet time for regeneration, my ability to take on others’ emotions, and my desire for everyone, regardless of how I may feel about them, to like me. To really like me. 

Then there is Madelena. 

She is that part of me that is constantly in motion, trying new things and creating something from nothing. The part of me that can’t follow but must lead, that has a painful need to be recognized for what I do – not by many, but by those that count. The part of me that at the very same age, danced near the stove yelling “look at me, Mommy, look at me” for the better part of every meal preparation, and actually for the better part of every day for the first six years of my life. Everything that I love or find challenging with her is a part of me in her.

So Mom, you were right. I am now dealing with all that you did – your “just wait until you have kids” mantra has come to fruition. I know how frustrating and challenging I was each and every day. And how I fulfilled on your own mother’s proclamation…the one she must have uttered the time she caught you smoking in the closet, or hiding in the backseat on your cousin’s first date so you could pop up and yell “HELLO!” as she had her first kiss. For the times you “borrowed” your neighbor’s horse or dressed up your dog Blackie like a princess, leading to a permanently limp ear and furless patch on his side. For the countless times that you too yelled “look at me, Mother, look at ME!”

So as I watch Madelena, in all her fierceness and love and imagination…I will strive not to quash her in any way but to direct her energy and power so that she too will have the strength to bring in yet another generation of girls who become women who become mothers — having turned their willfulness into resilience and their fierceness into strength and compassion. I will teach her that her energy and creativity can be used for good, not evil, and that everything that is in her gives her the power to be amazing in all ways. I will show her, as your mother showed you, that she is loved for all of this. And capable of anything.

Look at me, Mom. Look at me.