The Tantrum.

The small child rages. She kicks, she screams, she throws things. She lays on the ground, her face red, her fists clenched, her toes flexed.  Her hair is wild around her face, as she shakes her head back and forth and beats at the carpet. She will scream at anyone that comes near her. They won’t, though; they don’t know how to deal with her. I don’t know how to deal with her either, but I cannot leave her. She is mine.

Others don’t believe that it is what it is, for some reason they can’t see it: visceral, indescribable pain. They can’t face that pain, and they think it's inappropriate, so they stay away. They want to go on being appropriate. They don’t want to admit that this great injustice, DEATH, is real.

She’s only seven. She hasn’t learned what is appropriate and what isn't. She hasn’t learned the words to say,

"I’m sad because I miss daddy.”

Why would she know that? What mommy would think to teach her child how to act appropriately about the sudden death of her daddy? It doesn’t flow easily off the tongue like the ABC’s.

She thinks she is all alone. Her eyes are clouded with tears of rage and she can’t see anything else.  She is not alone. Sitting next to her, lying beside her, is Mommy: the only other person she has seen rage at this great injustice. Everyone else seems to be okay with Daddy dying.

"What is that about?" she wonders, "What is wrong with them?" I hand her another toy.

"Here, throw this one.” 

We rip pieces of paper to shreds. We hit our pillows. She kicks her toys. She stomps through the house, screaming. I follow her. I will not leave her like this; I will not leave her the way she feels Daddy did. She is not alone in this. 

She slams the door in my face and I silently wait; I know she didn’t mean it. The door opens and she is there, a tiny heap on the floor, crying uncontrollably now, not raging, just crying. I try to scoop her up in my lap but she won’t let me, so I push some toys out of the way and lie down beside her. I let her cry. There is nothing else to do, there is no fixing this, and there is no bringing Daddy back. If I stay beside her, at least she knows she is not alone. Mommy is right here.

I call these episodes "grief tantrums." In the three years since my husband died, she has had more grief tantrums than I can count. For a while they happened every day: giant tantrums that you would see in a two or three year old, complete with crying, screaming, kicking, and throwing things.

Except she’s not two. A two year old does that because they haven't learned to focus their emotions and put them into words. Once they learn those skills, they grow out of the tantrums. My daughter has grief tantrums for the same reason. She doesn’t know how to put her emotions into words. At seven, eight, and nine years old, she has no words to explain the emotions that come with her daddy dying. She doesn't know how to focus or control this massive grief. At thirty seven, I don’t know how to control my massive grief. How can I expect her to? This isn't a "didn't get her way" tantrum. This isn’t a "you won’t give me ice cream" tantrum. This is a terrifying "my daddy is gone, dead, never coming back and I can't grasp that" tantrum.

For the non-grieving, it can look like she is having an "I didn’t get my way" tantrum. It starts as something small and innocuous: she can’t find the pink crayon, she doesn’t want to go to school, she doesn’t want spaghetti for dinner. It’s not about that. It’s never about that. The pink crayon reminds her of the time she and Daddy drew a garden of pink flowers. Not wanting to go to school is because she’s afraid that if she leaves her side, Mommy will die too. Not wanting spaghetti is because Mommy doesn’t make it the way that Daddy used to.

Her therapist explained it very clearly to me the other day. He said to imagine that you’re walking down a road. If somebody bumps you, it's just a little bump. You shake it off and you keep going. But kids who have had trauma are walking on the edge of an emotional cliff. If they get bumped, even a little bit, they are now falling off a cliff.  

That describes my daughter, exactly. Every little emotional bump is huge to her, and she doesn't know how to handle it. No wonder she’s screaming and kicking. Somebody bumped into her and because she was already on the edge, she’s now holding on to a cliff by her fingernails.

The summer after my husband died we went to visit my two best friends. They both have husbands and kids. We had a good weekend playing with our friends. My daughter ran around in the back yard with the other kids while the dads chased them. She laughed and squealed and had a great time playing with the other kids and their dads. Her dad didn’t play with her. She hadn’t played with her dad for six months. He was dead, and she could never play with him again.  

Sunday morning, we were all going out to breakfast before we started our long drive home. My daughter didn’t want to have her hair brushed. We argued back and forth about it for a few minutes, and then she started raging. She had held her grief in all weekend, but she couldn’t do it anymore.

Fists clenched, screaming at the top of her lungs, she stomped into the room where we were staying and slammed the door. You could hear her yells throughout the entire house. I went into the bedroom; she had crawled under the bed and into the corner so I couldn’t reach her. She didn’t want to be comforted. She wanted to rage! She was pissed off that her daddy wasn’t there, and she had every right to be. I tried to coax her out,

"Come on, honey, let's calm down so we can go to breakfast.” She screamed louder. Nothing I could say would calm her down. Finally I poked my head out the door.

"Why don’t you guys go on to breakfast and we will catch up in a little bit."

This made her scream louder. She didn’t want her friends to leave, she wanted to go to breakfast with everyone else, she wanted to be normal like everyone else, and she wanted her daddy just like everyone else. 

It was never about brushing her hair; that was just how she got pushed off the cliff. She doesn't know how to express this:

"Mommy, I had so much fun with my friends' daddies this weekend. It made me really miss all the fun things I used to do with my daddy, and that makes me really sad, so I’m going to cry about Daddy for a little bit. Will you hold me while I do that?"

Seven year old children don't talk like that. I mean, she is very intelligent, but most adults can't verbalize those emotions. How can I expect her to?

Three years ago she was seven and a half (the half is a big deal to her). Every night, her daddy and mommy tucked her into bed after reading her a story. We said our prayers together. We sang the "Mommy and Daddy Love You Song," a song Dan made up for her. It ends with all three of us singing, “It just makes your heart so big!” I kissed her good night and said,

"I’ll see you in the morning!” Then I walked out of the room. He kissed her goodnight and said,

“I’ll see you in the morning!” leaving the door opened a crack as he left the room. She didn’t see him in the morning. She never saw him again.

Her best friend was GONE, her playmate was GONE, her hero was GONE, and her Daddy was GONE.

Right now my daughter is mad at the world. Right now she is full of anger and rage.  When she was nine years old, her therapist suggested she might need even more help dealing with her grief.  After researching and agonizing, I made the hard hard decision to put my nine year old on anti-depressants. I had to make the decision all by myself; I didn’t have my husband to discuss what was best for her with me. Nobody else gets to make decisions like that. Only parents do, and she is one parent down.

Before her daddy died, her biggest worry was whether or not we would be having ice cream for dessert. That should be a seven year old's biggest worry. But overnight, her worries went from ice cream to who was going to take care of us, what was going to happen to us, and what if mommy dies too. She shouldn’t have that on her shoulders.

She has been on anti-depressants for a year now. It was the hardest decision I ever made for her, but I believe it was the best decision I ever made for her. It didn’t take her grief away. Nothing will ever do that, and nothing will ever fix the loss of her daddy. 

What the anti-depressants did do is give her room to breathe, which in turn gave me room to breathe. That made it so that when the grief tantrums come, (and they are coming less and less often,) I can be there by her side. I can hand her another toy to throw. I can rip paper into shreds with her while she screams in pain. I can lie there on the floor, holding her foot while she cries in anguish. I can be with her in her pain and sorrow. I will not leave her. I will not be scared away by her grief like everyone else. I am her mommy.

I wrote a book about my grief, You can read it here: Carry on Castle