Date: 2006-09-23 00:12 Subject: Esme's latest leap forward Security: Public

Sometimes I have conversations with Esme that make my head swim. Tonight, as she was supposedly going to sleep, she told me about a couple of difficult things that happened at preschool today. In the first incident, she was raising her hand to ask a question, and the girl sitting next to her said something like, "You can't raise your hand when I'm raising my hand." Esme's description of her own reaction (I'm paraphrasing, because this conversation went on for about 20 minutes, but I'm using only her words as best as I can remember them):

"My face got redder and redder. It got so red it was like fire. I was starting to cry. Then one tear came out and rolled down my cheek, then one tear, then one tear. It was about six tears. They felt like fire on my cheeks. They felt like they were going to fire [i.e., burn up] everyone in the classroom, everyone who wasn't my friend. I only started to cry, but my face was so red."

A few minutes later, we talked about another issue that's nagging at her:

Esme: "Sometimes they [other kids] just come up and take things. They take them right out of my hand. I'm holding them and they just [lifting her hands up and shaking them in exasperation] take them."

Me: "What do you say when they do that?"

Esme: "I say, [pointing] 'I want you to give that back to me right now, please.' And I think that when they give the things back, the kids should say, 'I'm sorry.'"

Me: "But they don't always?"

Esme: "No. No they don't. They never say 'I'm sorry.' Sometimes they don't give them back at all."

Now, maybe on the surface there's nothing revelatory here. But keep in mind this girl is 5-1/2 weeks shy of her fourth birthday. What I can't really effectively convey is the withering seriousness and the cold sense of outrage that was pouring out of her. She's been expressing these kinds of feelings for a while now, but her whole manner, from her body language (the hand gestures) to the way she deliberately stressed certain words, is brand new, and astonishingly reminiscent of someone much older.

We've seen this kind of sudden leap in her before. We'll get settled into a particular way of talking with her, expecting the discourse to stay at a certain level, and then seemingly overnight she'll be showing us a whole new side of herself, as if a switch in her brain had been flipped on. I always feel like these periods are fragile ones--I fear that if I don't catch up to where she is and start responding in the new right way, she'll think I don't understand her and will stop being so open and forthright. The last time she had one of these leaps (they always seem to manifest themselves at bedtime), we wound up talking about the new baby for a long time, and she was asking me questions like, "What if I feel like the invisible girl after the baby comes?" That one had me tap-dancing for a while. I can hardly imagine what our next serious conversation about the baby will be like, but it'll probably be a doozy.