Feelings

My oldest is worried about her father.
“He never goes out!” she complains. “He needs to go out.”

“Don’t worry about your father,” I tell her, hoping that I am concealing the annoyance I feel toward him for being mopey around her. “That’s not your job. You have enough to do without worrying about your father. Let him take care of himself.”

“Yeah, but he seems so old! You don’t.”

“Thank you, AND, quit spying on your father. Life goes in cycles. He used to go out a lot. Now he doesn’t. He’s just not in the going out phase right now. It will come around again.”

“But I HAVE to spy on him! Besides, I spy on you too.”

“What?!” I swallow hard and silently reprimand myself for being annoyed with her father two seconds earlier.

“Yeah, I ask Bub if you still yell a lot. You know like you used to with me.”

The guilt I still carry with me over our past comes flying out of the neat compartment in which I had it stored. It hovers at the edges of our conversation, threatening. I hold my breath and brace myself for an answer I don’t want to hear and I ask, “And what does he say?”

“He says that he just tries to do what you ask because if you guys have an argument, you always end up going downstairs and apologizing and then you want to talk about feelings and he really doesn’t want to talk about feelings.”

I exhale and the pressure in my chest eases.

My daughter and I laugh. I laugh because I love the way my son deftly parried to avoid really answering the question. I laugh because his response succinctly sums up the difference between my two older children and my two younger children, the difference in the atmosphere in which they were raised.

When I was married to their father, feelings were the Cinderella step-sister of his sensible household where facts reigned supreme. There was no emotion that logic could not over power, no feeling that couldn’t be trumped by fact.

I became the keeper of feelings. I was not big enough to hold them all. When they finally crashed through the walls that had been so meticulously erected, the avalanche shook our world and buried my marriage.

My oldest son is not yet comfortable with the new order of things. He is learning. He is getting better at sharing feelings…occasionally…on his terms. He is finding out that harmony and anger, love and hate, are merely the bookends to a whole range of emotions.

“You know,” I tell my daughter, hesitating a bit, summoning that breath of courage before I go on, “things have changed since you and your father moved out. I have changed. And it’s not because of you.”

“I know,” she replies, “and it’s good. And I love you.”

I smile when I hear this, and, when I take a breath, it is big and deep and full of light. Every cell in my body jumps in, eager to be expanded. They all join together as I exhale, "I love you too, my sweet girl."