Fire Eater

 

She stands by the window, internally pacing. Not gazing, not daydreaming, but watching for something, waiting for it to happen. The yard’s bright, that San Diego blinding yellow and from the side, I see my daughter’s eyes flick over the trampoline and scan the crowded, weedy dirt bank she loves to climb. She’s not at rest – hardly ever is – and she’s looking for the thing. Neither one of us knows what.

 

I’ve glimpsed this intensity since she was a baby, bound tight to discomfort, needing to be swaddled, suddenly ravenous. I bounced on balls to soothe her, played music, tickled her gently, but those efforts seemed to madden her and exhaustion won before satisfaction.

 

Calming her only grew more difficult, and so we are where we are now.

 

I recognize this person from the primordial in me. I’ve always required different, something new, the thing other than. I bore easily and grow agitated with smooth and easy. I’d like to move all over and all at once. I’m not at peace. I’m the brain and the mitochondria, yet have no idea what to do when she’s outside me.

 

But here she is: my question-asker, truth-seeker, button-pusher. Line-eraser, argument-haver, whirlwind-maker. She pours herself out the window for the things she doesn’t have and wants; toward where she needs to go, perhaps still rejecting the swaddle, and I pound my brain for the right thing because I should know this.

 

I watch her from my bed and consider my options: draw up next to her and swing my arm around her shoulders, ask what she’s seeing, let her be.

 

“Was I really like this as a child?” I asked my dad one day. My mom and I had problems; I bolted and bucked, never was happy; ranted and railed.

 

A beat and then: “No, not as intense.”

 

I consider that all the genetics of searching and restlessness coalesced into a fireball in my daughter’s soul; that it will never be contained and so my husband and I must watch from a distance and give ourselves over to the spark and circumstance.

 

A few months ago, after a hard night of throwing herself against the wall of us (“you treat me like a kid, not a person!”), I thought of a spark shooting jagged into the sky and falling harmless to the ground, as I drove to a psychic for other reasons entirely. Not the type of person I look to for answers, she nevertheless told me unbidden and random: “She’s like a flame. Safely encircle it from a distance, but don’t let it burn out.”

 

I know that fire girl, but I don’t know how to do what she needs.

 

This is the truth: I want to throw water on that blaze most days, stamp it into the ground, make it into ash. I’m ill-suited to it: I understand it too deeply and match her tension, rant for rail. I don’t understand it enough.

 

It’s from this place on the bed, I continue to absorb her reflected face into mine; try to take the fury and the frenzy and eat it. Just a few bites so it doesn’t consume her instead.

 

I suppose we’re lucky my soul matches hers to the millimeterest edge, but I don’t know how to apply that luck, so she stays at the window and I watch.