Sharon O’Connor – on her sensitive child.

Cabot, Vermont
August 8, 2000

Dear Mimi,

As I sit down to write this, Mazie is up in her room screaming through the grate down into the kitchen, “Mom, I want you out of this house!” She is not even five, but already she sometimes has the wrath of a misunderstood teenager.

Yesterday we went to the local carnival – a midway, about five rides, barrel races, a petting zoo, and cotton candy. It was fun. I took the girls on the merry-go-round and stood between their two horses while it spun around. I held each girl in the small of her back, my almost-five-year-old to my right, my two-year-old on my left. They bounced up and down like some crazy scale, unable to level out, me in the middle. And somehow it seemed both sweet and melancholy. All I could think of was the days invested in these lives. Mazie is nearing on 2,000 days – Clementine not even 800. When I looked at Mazie she literally looked to me like she could have floated right off the ride into the clouds.

I guess I’ve been trying to decode Mazie’s sensitive nature more now that she’s making the leap from pre-school to kindergarten. Her teachers have brought it to our attention that she’s academically exceptional but emotionally fragile. Duh. I mean don’t get me wrong, I love that she’s at a small school where they notice the students. But the other night Charles and I were talking about our weird suburban school experiences and how if you were a freak, which we were, you kind of got by, and in the end I think it was character-building. Mazie is and will be a freak. Her old pre-school director called her “eccentric” in her meetings with me. On the other hand Clementine, even at two, seems oddly normal, suspiciously normal. I have weird little flashes of her as a teenager playing field hockey with a healthy glow, like some J. Crew catalog person. There is no question that she’s well adjusted to being Clem.

Mazie’s teachers said that she was “overly sensitive,” and said that they thought that she should stay in pre-school next year, instead of moving on to kindergarten. That way, they said, she would get a chance to mature socially and gain confidence. I said that I thought it would actually be a real blow to her confidence to see the children she had started getting used to move on without her. She already wanted to be in kindergarten, and she’s the only one in the class who knows how to read and do math (she gets multiplication and negative numbers already). The kindergarten teacher said, “Oh, she might mind for a week or so, but then she’ll be fine.” That’s when I knew I had to try and explain Mazie to them, because they didn’t really know her at all.

Charles and I think her sensitivity has to do with the way she’s wired. She’s brought to tears by so much, but her tears are never really inappropriate. I think she just has this brain that fills in the gaps too rapidly. She can become paralyzed by even the potential of a tragedy. When we try to watch movies these days, even ones she knows turns out all right, she gets agitated and turns off the TV. If I’m sweeping and a toy or sticker ends up in the pile she is frantic to collect it before I might absent-mindedly throw it away. Recently she woke up from a dream saying, “We have to get the bath toys out! We have to get the bath toys out before they go down the drain!” I tried to get her to describe the dream more but by the time she was fully awake it had left her. But now, if I don’t get every single bath toy out before I drain the tub, she’s frantic.

If a glass or dish breaks she is in tears, reassuring me that, “It’s okay, Mom, Jill can fix it.” (Jill is our friend the art restorer, who fixes broken art for rich people.) It’s not worth telling her that something isn’t fixable, or isn’t worth fixing, because she just chokes up with a new wave of tears.

She reminds us almost daily that we’re all young and that we won’t die for a long time. Just the other day when we were gardening she asked me why plants die in the winter but then come back in the spring and people don’t. I didn’t know exactly where to begin but I started to tell her something along the lines of some people believe that the body is kind of like clothes and there’s something called a soul that’s the you inside of you, that can come back to a new life with a different body. Her reaction to this was to put her hands over her ears and say, “I don’t want to talk about this any more.” The deaths of both of her grandfathers has really affected her. One of the episodes that disturbed her teachers the most was when she became very upset about a book they read aloud in school, in which a boy’s parents pretend he’s a pizza and lay him down on a table to put on the cheese and sauce. The page that made her flip looked suspiciously like the laid-out body she saw at Charles’s father’s viewing last year, when she was three. And my father’s car accident, which happened four years before she was even born, still consumes her. Mazie fixates on the fact that he was fifty-four, and she asks us to tell her the ages of all of her nearest and dearest so that she can figure out some mathematical formula that absolves us from the inevitable.

We wrote this three-page letter to the school in hopes that they’d understand she isn’t going to all of a sudden be this happy-go-lucky, eager-for-the-next-task type of kid. In the letter, we told them about this night that we got a cord of wood delivered. There were a few people here, and we got into this line and lifted it up the steps and stacked it. Mazie had a gray wool scarf wrapped around her neck, her face all wrinkled up with the concentration necessary to maneuver up the steps with her heavy load. We named her Queen of the woodpile at the end and lifted her on top. I have pictures of the girls from that night. Mazie absolutely glows with happiness. Charles and I have analyzed that night so often. We don’t know if it was the teamwork, the physical effort, or the sensation of a job well done. But she felt so good, and in daily life, reaching that state of satisfaction is a struggle for her.

Anyway, the whole picture, if truth be told, is that her sensitivity, while it breaks my heart sometimes, is who she is. She’s incredibly sweet and insightful, and I don’t want to numb that out of her. Not that the school was suggesting that. But the implication is that who she is is not normal, and she picks up on that.

I’m probably struggling with the heavy truth that we’ve chosen this little piece of land, and a house, in a small village where both girls will go to the same school from pre-school to senior year. As well as celebrate every holiday, eventually get drunk at the shelter up at the rec. field, and have sex in some kids pick-up truck. It’s small here. People know your business. They’ll know Mazie’s.

I keep thinking about the merry-go-round: watching Mazie, with her fragility around her like a cloak, and Clem, so solid and densely content, rising back and forth with their accumulated days, leaving me as the fulcrum of a scale weighing things not measurable, the component that does indeed balance them but that cannot control what each side will do.

All my love,

Sharon