Latest / My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story / My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 68: The First Storm

Transcript

My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 68: The First Storm · My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

0:00
my playful wife we were afraid we were afraid
0:06
he would hurt himself afraid he would hurt us
0:09
afraid underneath of the largest thing which
0:14
was that we had taken on something past our capacity
0:17
that the damage in him went deeper than our love
0:20
could reach that It came about six weeks in,
0:26
the first real storm, and it came, this is the
0:30
thing I did not understand until afterward, and
0:32
the most important thing in this whole notebook,
0:35
not because things were going badly, but because
0:37
they had started at last to go well. We had had
0:40
a run of good days. He had laughed twice. He
0:44
had begun, in small ways, to relax the total
0:47
vigilance, to leave the map folded in his pocket
0:51
for whole hours, to let himself... fractionally
0:54
be at home and it was precisely then precisely
0:58
when the hoping had begun that he set about with
1:02
a thoroughness that frightened all three of us
1:05
to burn it down nobody had truly warned us or
1:09
rather everyone had warned us in the abstract
1:12
and no warning in the abstract prepares you for
1:15
the specific The agency, the kind professionals,
1:19
the literature we had nervously read had all
1:21
said some version of it. Expect testing, expect
1:24
regression, expect the honeymoon to end. And
1:28
we had nodded and filed it under things that
1:30
happened to other people. Knowing a storm is
1:33
coming and standing inside one or different countries.
1:36
We had the map of it and not the weather. And
1:39
when the weather actually arrived. All the calm
1:42
professional foreknowledge evaporated in about
1:44
four seconds, and we were simply too frightened,
1:48
tired people in a kitchen full of broken plates,
1:51
improvising, out of our depth, with a child's
1:54
whole future, riding on whether we could do the
1:57
thing none of the pamphlets had been able to
1:59
make us actually feel in advance. I know now
2:03
that this is the pattern, that the storm is not
2:06
the failure of the attachment but the first symptom
2:09
of it, that a wounded child does not test you
2:11
when he is indifferent to you, but only once
2:13
he has started, against his every defense, to
2:17
care, because caring is the dangerous thing,
2:20
and he must find out, urgently, before he risks
2:23
any more of it, exactly where the line is past
2:26
which you will send him away. But I did not know
2:29
it that evening. That evening, it simply felt
2:32
like the floor giving way. And I want to be fair
2:35
to our fear because there is a sentimental version
2:38
of this story in which the loving adults are
2:40
never frightened, only endlessly patient. And
2:44
it is a lie that does real damage because it
2:47
makes the ordinary terrified parent feel they
2:50
are failing whenever they feel afraid. We were
2:52
afraid. We were afraid he would hurt himself.
2:56
Afraid he would hurt us. Afraid. underneath,
3:00
of the largest thing, which was that we had taken
3:04
on something past our capacity, that the damage
3:07
in him went deeper than our love could reach,
3:09
that we had made an irreversible promise to a
3:12
child we did not, in that screaming moment, have
3:16
the faintest idea how to help. The fear was not
3:19
a failure of love. The fear was love, frightened,
3:23
which is most of what love is when the stakes
3:25
are a child. It started over nothing, the way
3:32
these things do, a small no, about something
3:34
that did not matter, a screen or a suite or a
3:37
bedtime, I genuinely cannot now remember which,
3:41
because the trigger was never the point. The
3:43
no was simply the match. And Kabir, who had been
3:47
all guardedness and control for six weeks, went
3:51
up like a thing soaked in petrol. It was bad.
3:55
I will not prettify it. because the truth of
3:58
what such a child can do matters more than a
4:01
gentler version he screamed He swept his arm
4:05
across the dinner table we had laid for three
4:07
and sent the plates and the food and a glass
4:10
to the floor in a crash that seemed to go on
4:12
for a long time, and he overturned a chair, and
4:16
when Saloni moved toward him, he backed away
4:18
with his fists up, and then he said the thing
4:21
he had clearly been saving, the thing aimed with
4:24
a seven -year -old's terrible accuracy at the
4:27
exact center of what we were trying to build.
4:30
I don't want to live here. You're not my anything.
4:34
Send me back. I don't care. I'll go to another
4:37
house. None of them matter. You don't matter.
4:40
And he meant it to wound, and it did, and it
4:44
was meant to do something more than wound, which
4:46
I only understood later. It was meant to make
4:49
us prove him right. There is a particular cruelty
4:52
available to children that adults have mostly
4:54
lost. the cruelty of the perfectly aimed word,
4:58
because children have not yet learned the social
5:00
habit of softening, and a child who has been
5:03
hurt enough becomes a marksman of the wounding
5:06
sentence. He knew, somehow, exactly where we
5:10
were tender. He had found, in six short weeks,
5:13
the precise places the words would do the most
5:15
damage. You're not my anything. You don't matter.
5:19
and he fired them with a cold accuracy of someone
5:22
who had been on the receiving end of enough adult
5:25
rejection to know exactly how it is built. It
5:28
would have been easy to hear malice in it. But
5:30
it was not malice, or not only. It was a test
5:34
administered in the only language his life had
5:37
taught him, the language of preemptive rejection,
5:40
spoken fluently because it had been spoken to
5:43
him so many times that he had it by heart. And
5:49
here's the part one am least proud of and most
5:52
need to record because the notebook does not
5:55
lie. For a moment, a real moment, I felt the
5:58
old thing rise in me and the old thing wanted
6:01
to go cold. It is in me, I have told this notebook
6:05
before, the capacity to withdraw, to flatten,
6:09
to go absent and unreachable. the inheritance
6:12
of my own unwatched childhood, and a raging child
6:16
screaming that you do not matter is precisely
6:19
the kind of thing that summons it, because every
6:21
instinct the old wound installed says. Retreat,
6:25
go cold. Make yourself a stone he cannot hurt.
6:29
Do to him what was done to you. I felt it rise.
6:33
I felt, for one shameful second, the pull to
6:37
give him the frozen, unreachable face. to punish
6:40
the rejection with a deeper rejection, to become
6:43
in that moment my own father. And I understood
6:47
that the storm was testing not only whether we
6:50
would send him away, but whether I could stay
6:52
awake and present in the one situation most designed
6:55
to put me back to sleep, that the child's storm
6:58
had summoned my storm, and that if I went cold
7:01
now, I would fail us both. I did not go cold.
7:05
It was the hardest piece of staying awake I have
7:07
ever done, and I did it badly, shaking, but I
7:10
did not go cold. I think this was the truest
7:13
test the whole adoption ever put to me, truer
7:17
even than the empty room or the long wait, because
7:20
it asked me to do the one thing my entire childhood
7:22
had trained me to be unable to do, to stay warm
7:26
and present while being actively rejected. Going
7:29
cold under attack was not really a choice for
7:32
me. It was a reflex. grooved over decades, the
7:36
body's oldest defense. To override it in real
7:39
time, with broken glass on the floor and a child
7:43
screaming that I did not matter, was to fight
7:46
my own deepest programming on no notice at all.
7:49
I do not altogether know how I held. I think
7:52
it was only that I had spent six years and six
7:55
notebooks learning to notice the reflex before
7:58
it closed over me, and that the noticing This
8:01
once bought me the half second I needed to choose
8:04
the other thing. Saloni did the thing that saved
8:10
it, and she did it while I was still fighting
8:12
my own war, which is why I will love her until
8:15
I die. She did not shout back, and she did not
8:20
crumble, and she did not do the falsely gentle
8:23
thing of pretending the broken plates did not
8:26
matter. She did the hard third thing, the one
8:29
almost nobody manages, which is to hold the boundary
8:32
and the belonging at the very same time, in the
8:35
same breath, refusing to let go of either. She
8:38
stood a careful distance from him, not crowding,
8:41
and she said, in a voice that was level and certain
8:45
and not afraid, you cannot do that. You cannot
8:49
break our things and you cannot hit, and I am
8:52
going to stop you if you try. That is true. And
8:56
then without a pause, in exactly the same steady
8:59
voice, the other half, the half that changes
9:02
everything. And you are still ours. We are still
9:06
keeping you. You cannot make us send you back
9:09
by being terrible because we did not take you
9:12
for being good. Both of those things are true
9:15
at once. You are not allowed to do that and you
9:18
are not going anywhere. And I watched the boy's
9:21
face when she said it. the not going anywhere,
9:24
and something behind the rage flickered, because
9:28
it was the exact sentence his whole storm had
9:30
been built to disprove, and she had said it without
9:33
flinching, into the teeth of his worst. It did
9:39
not stop at once. These things do not. But something
9:44
in him had heard it, and the screaming began,
9:46
slowly, to come apart into the crying it had
9:50
been protecting all along. Because that was the
9:54
thing under the storm I saw once my own storm
9:57
had passed and I could see anything. The rage
10:00
was a fortress around a terror, and the terror
10:03
was hope. He had begun to want us, and wanting
10:06
us had frightened him beyond bearing. Because
10:09
everyone he had ever wanted had become someone
10:11
who sent him away, and so he had done the only
10:15
logical thing a brutalized seven -year -old can
10:18
do with unbearable hope, which is to attack it.
10:22
to try to destroy the wanting before it could
10:24
destroy him, to provoke the rejection now on
10:27
his own terms, while it was still his to control,
10:30
rather than wait helpless for it to arrive later,
10:33
when he would be even more attached, and it would
10:37
hurt even more. The storm was not him not caring.
10:41
The storm was the precise measure of how much
10:43
he had started to care, and how unsurvivable
10:47
that caring felt, and how desperately he needed
10:50
to find out. by breaking everything, whether
10:53
this time the breaking would be allowed to break
10:56
it. It was the most hopeful thing he had ever
10:58
done. It just wore the face of the opposite.
11:01
Once I had seen that, the whole evening reorganized
11:05
itself, and the thing that had felt like a disaster
11:08
became almost unbearably moving. He had handed
11:12
us, in the form of smashed crockery and a cruel
11:16
sentence, the most vulnerable confession a child
11:19
can make, which is, I have started to need you,
11:22
and it is killing me, and I have to know whether
11:25
you will survive my needing you before I dare
11:28
to need you anymore. There is no harder thing
11:31
to say, and he could not say it in words, so
11:35
he said it in destruction, which was the only
11:38
vocabulary violent enough to carry the size of
11:40
it. To have punished that, to have met that confession
11:44
with coldness or banishment, would have been
11:47
one of the great failures of my life. We did
11:50
not punish it. We survived it, which was the
11:53
only correct answer to a child asking whether
11:56
we could be survived. The aftermath was not a
12:02
tender movie scene, and I will not invent one.
12:06
There was a long time of crying, and then a longer
12:09
time of a depleted silence, and the three of
12:12
us cleaning up broken crockery without much being
12:15
said. a small exhausted truce rather than a reconciliation.
12:20
He did not apologize. I did not want him to.
12:24
An apology extracted that night would have been
12:27
another performance, and we had had enough of
12:30
his performances. He simply, at some point, having
12:34
watched us not leave, not go cold, not pack his
12:37
bag, not do any of the thousand things his whole
12:40
life had taught him follow a storm like that,
12:43
He simply, wordlessly, when the cleaning was
12:45
done, sat down on the floor near where I was
12:48
sitting, not touching, not speaking, the way
12:51
he had drifted close to me on the metro weeks
12:54
before, and got out his folded map, and after
12:57
a while, in a voice gone hoarse and small from
13:00
the screaming, asked me whether the last train
13:03
had gone yet, and I looked at the clock and told
13:07
him the truth, that it had a little while ago,
13:10
that the trains were resting now. and would run
13:13
again at six. And he nodded, and we sat there
13:16
on the floor among the last of the swept -up
13:19
evening, not healed, not fixed, but still three,
13:22
the back door still bricked up, the worst he
13:25
had been able to throw at it absorbed and survived.
13:28
He had tested whether the house would hold. The
13:32
house had held. I have thought since that this
13:34
is what a home actually is underneath all the
13:37
softer definitions, not the warmth and the meals
13:40
and the bedtime stories, though it is those two,
13:43
but something harder and more structural. A place
13:46
built so solidly out of the staying that a frightened
13:49
child can throw the whole of his worst against
13:51
its walls, and the walls do not fall. Comfort
13:55
is the easy part of a home. Any pleasant house
13:58
offers comfort. The rare thing, the thing that
14:01
actually heals, is the structural integrity,
14:04
the proven load -bearing capacity, the fact that
14:08
you can scream that nobody matters and break
14:10
the dishes and try with everything in you to
14:13
bring the house down and wake the next morning
14:15
to find it still standing, still yours, still
14:18
unbothered in its foundations by your worst.
14:21
That is not comfort. That is something a wounded
14:25
child needs far more than comfort. It is safety.
14:31
I wrote it very late that night, the flat finally
14:35
quiet, a boy asleep at last in the bed he was
14:39
beginning, against everything, to trust. That
14:44
the storm I had dreaded turned out to be the
14:46
most hopeful catastrophe of my life, because
14:49
a child only tests the floor he has begun to
14:52
want to stand on. The indifferent do not rage.
14:56
They leave, quietly, inside themselves, the way
15:00
I left. for 40 years. It is the ones who have
15:04
started to hope who burn the house down, because
15:06
the hope is unbearable and they must find out
15:09
whether it is safe. And the only way they know
15:12
to ask whether you will stay is to make staying
15:14
as hard as they possibly can and see if you do.
15:17
And the whole of the answer, the entire art of
15:19
it, is to hold the two things at once that every
15:22
instinct says cannot be held together. The no
15:25
and the yes, the boundary and the belonging,
15:28
you cannot do that and you are not going anywhere
15:31
in the same breath without letting go of either.
15:34
Punish and withdraw confirms his terror. Permit
15:38
everything abandons him to a chaos with no walls.
15:41
The only love that heals such a child is the
15:44
love that says both, that draws the line and
15:47
holds him inside it at the same time, that is
15:50
neither cold nor mush but the hard third thing.
15:54
Unconditional belonging with completely conditional
15:56
behavior. We had managed it once, barely shaking
16:01
badly. We would have to manage it a thousand
16:04
more times. But we had passed the first storm,
16:07
which is the one that decides whether there will
16:10
be a chance to fail all the rest. And we would
16:13
fail some of the rest. I had no illusion about
16:16
that. Even in the small hours of the first victory.
16:20
We would be tired on the wrong night and meet
16:23
a storm with a sharpness it did not deserve.
16:26
We would draw a boundary in the wrong place.
16:28
We would, being human and not the tireless saints
16:32
of the pamphlets, get it wrong a hundred times
16:35
across the years. But getting it wrong sometimes
16:38
is not the same as failing when the foundation
16:41
holds. A home is not a place where no one ever
16:45
errs. It is a place where the errors do not threaten
16:48
the belonging, where you can get the whole evening
16:51
wrong and the back door stays bricked up regardless.
16:54
We had not promised Kabir perfection. We had
16:58
promised him permanence. And permanence, it turns
17:01
out, is the one thing you can deliver imperfectly
17:04
and still deliver. Then the working line, the
17:11
sixth notebook open. The broken plates in the
17:14
bin. A boy asleep who had tried to make us leave
17:17
and been kept. When the child you are trying
17:21
to reach finally rages at you, do not despair,
17:24
and do not, whatever every instinct screams,
17:28
go cold. The storm is not the death of the bond.
17:32
It is the proof that the bond has begun, because
17:35
no one tests a floor they have not started to
17:38
want to stand on. The rage is hope wearing its
17:41
opposite face. The terrified question made of
17:44
breakage. If I am at my very worst, will you
17:48
still keep me? And the only answer that heals
17:50
is the hardest one to give while your own things
17:53
are smashing on the floor. Both halves at once,
17:56
the boundary and the belonging, the no to what
17:58
he does and the yes to who he is, held together
18:01
in the same breath without releasing either.
18:03
You cannot do that, and you are not going anywhere.
18:07
Say both. Mean both. Hold the line and hold the
18:11
child inside it, and do not send him away, and
18:14
do not pretend the line is not a line. Pass the
18:18
first storm. It is the test that earns you the
18:20
right to weather all the others. I kept the pen
18:25
and went and stood, as I do, in the doorway of
18:29
his room, and he was asleep, spent, one hand
18:33
fallen open on the folded map he had not, in
18:37
the end, destroyed. though he had destroyed nearly
18:40
everything else within reach. He had thrown the
18:44
whole of his worst at us to find out if it would
18:46
make us into the others, the ones who send you
18:49
back, and it had not, because Saloni had held
18:52
the line and the love in one hand and I had managed,
18:56
barely, not to become my father, and the house
18:59
had held. There would be other storms. I knew
19:02
that, standing there, this was the first of many,
19:06
and some of them would be worse. and we would
19:08
not always get it right. But we had got this
19:11
one right, or right enough, and a seven -year
19:14
-old who had spent his life being sent away for
19:17
being difficult had gone to sleep, for the first
19:19
time, in a house that had seen him at his most
19:22
unlovable and had answered, in the only language
19:26
that could ever reach him, you are not going
19:28
anywhere. To be continued in Episode 69, School.
19:45
Playful Wife. If this story is staying with you,
19:49
the next episode is already waiting. Subscribe
19:52
so you don't miss it. The complete book is on
19:55
Amazon and early episodes plus bonus chapters
19:58
are on my Patreon. Links are in the description.
20:02
Thank you for listening.