I Wish I Could Be a Butterfly

I'll be on the other end,
to hear you when you call
Angel, you were born to fly,
if you get too high
I'll catch you when you fall

When you're soarin' through the air
I'll be your solid ground
Take every chance you dare
I'll still be there
When you come back down.
   - Nickel Creek, "When You Come Back Down"

"I wish I could be a butterfly.
When I grow up, I can be a doctor.
I am proud of my brother.
Most children are nice."
   - Justice, age 7, February 2013

It's hard to know what's going on in their minds.

At six and seven, displaced and rerouted, what would you think about? What would any of us think about?

In therapy, which happens at our house every Wednesday after school thanks to an amazing organization called Olive Crest, which serves parts of Calfornia, Nevada and the Pacific Northwest, we play games, do crafts and activities, and watch, with the therapist who comes to our home, as the children write, draw and play out what's on their minds.

As is common with children of trauma - and all kids in the system fit that definition - J1 and J2 did not necessarily arrive in our home equipped with a standard set of emotions or the tools to express them the way children who haven't lost both parents - and the parental figures who replaced them - might do.

"Show me what it looks like when you're happy," Miss Hannah, their therapist, said to Justice one night early in our sessions. Justice smiled.

"Show me what it looks like when you're sad," she said next. Justice smiled again.

"Show me what it looks like when you're hurt," she asked. And Justice smiled again.

Same smile, different heartbreak. Sad or happy, you'll likely be the last to know.

Children of trauma do not modulate well. Typically, they're not a little sad or a little upset. When they get pissed or hurt or sad or scared, they go straight to condition red, full-on meltdown. Likewise when they're happy, they're over the moon. And sometimes, as was the case of Justice's confusion over appropriate facial expressions for opposite emotions, they actually don't know the difference.

So that's one of our goals in therapy this year: to teach the kids it's okay - and even healthy - to emote, express anger safely, tell us when they hurt inside and let us help comfort them. That's a big menu to bring to the table, big expectations from parents they've only had for nine months, and a lot of grown-up abstracts to teach reserved, guarded children who, like turtles, learned instinctively from the complicated station of their birth to pull themselves inside a protective cover instead of leaving themselves outside in the real world to be hurt or neglected again.

"If I'm still, quiet, hidden, or pretending," they wisely but unproductively seem to say, "than nothing can hurt me ever again." And we see a lot of that, friends. A challenging, heart-tugging lot of it. This has been an education into the enormous self-preservation mechanisms of the fragile young psyche, bar none.

So that's the hiding place we're trying to challenge. The table we're coaxing them out from under. Come out, come out, wherever you are, my daughter and son, and learn to love, and learn that happy looks one way, and scared looks another way and we love you equally when you're both. Just as much and just as forever. It's okay to be scared, hurt and angry. You're safe here when you are. You're loved when you're happy, cooperative, infuriated or in despair. There is no way to lose our love. It's yours for free and yours forever, no matter which emotions come exploding from your hidden hearts.

"I get angry when I get mad at my brother.
I like my teacher, but she gives us lots of worke.
Animals are not afraid because we be nice to them.
I love my friends.
When I am alone, I feel sad and mad."

You're reading things Justice wrote for her therapist, verbatim, spelling and syntax adoringly unchanged, giving us one of our first illuminating peeks inside her young, deceptively simple, but multi-layered mind. The therpist wrote the beginning of the sentence...

When I am alone...

And asked Justice to fill in the end...

I feel sad and mad.

And that's incredibly important for us, as her dads, to read after she's written it. Because's she's not yet ready to say it to us. "I feel sad." "I feel mad." Those are words she can't yet find the voice for. Whether through simple youth or astoundly complex guardedness, "I feel" is not something she's able to vocalize yet.

I learned a lot about my new daughter from this simple exercise on a piece of yellow legal pad paper. I think all parents should try it with their own kids. I even learned she sees me and Adam in a positive light...or did on this particular night, anyway.

"Father's are..." the therapist prompted...
"Happy," Justice supplied.

Whew. Thank God for unexpected endorsements.

"I feel bad when I scream at them," she wrote.
"I feel happy when someone plays with me."

"School is fun because you play with your friends at resess.
If I could be someone else, I will be like my friends.
My best friend is Brinkly and Molly and Noya and Sarena and Ellie and Ofri and Chris and Christopher and Michel and Eati and Aron and Aaron and Sophia and Emmy and Avi and the other class that I know."

"I will never be mad at my friends.
If I were a teacher, I will be nice to the kids.
A mother is kind to her kids.
What bothers me is when somone teas me.
I am bad when one time I broke my shirt."

"People like me when they see me happy.
My friends think I am sad."

That was perhaps the most telling of all. "People like me when they see me happy," and "my friends think I am sad." This year, through therapy, I hope we can help Justice to relax, relearn and remodulate. To get her eventually to that hopeful place where she knows all of us love her whether she's happy or not, and the friends who think you're sad can wrap you in a blanket of compassion and help you be happy again. Best case scenario, anyway. In a perfect world. Which, sometimes for Justice, this world is still not.

"It is nice to meat you.
I wish I were a gron up.
I wish I could be a butterfly."

I wish you could be a butterfly too, sweetheart. I hope you don't grow up too fast, with your wings too fragile to soar unencumbered, but always stretching, always reaching. That's what flying's all about. Not just height. Sometimes just the beautiful, dizzying, fluttering exploration.

You're getting very good at that, beautiful girl. Just now starting to let those wings emerge, to find out who you are inside. And here's a secret. That lasts forever. It's forever flight. A journey for you, for us, for everybody we know, for a lifetime.

And Daddy and I will always be here to catch you when you come back down.