Feeling the Curve

May 21, 2020

It takes a long time for kids to learn to express strong feelings in words rather than in explosions. I remember one especially frustrating day when my daughter Madison was about 4; nothing seemed to help get her back to equilibrium. As usual, I was in "numbers-are-our-friends" mode, so finally I found a piece of paper and drew a simple graph as she watched. "I see you getting madder and madder today, and to me it looks like this." It was a purple curve going up fast.

Madison looked at my picture. "No," she said. "Not like that. Like this." She seized a red crayon and scribbled angrily over my graph, then stepped back and looked at her work with satisfaction. "Yeah," she said. "Like that." And that was the end of the storm. My intent had been to make Madison know she'd been heard and that I respected her struggle, but what actually worked to help her get a grip was when that struggle became visible to herself. Her story was in that picture; when she saw it, she owned that story.

As adults, we do our best to be calm during an emergency, especially if we're around our kids: We suppress what we're feeling, temporarily, so we can push through what needs to get done. But as time goes on, I think it's equally important for us to acknowledge to ourselves the reality of how we are experiencing this particular emergency. Just as I had tried to show Madison, the facts of our feelings are facts just like any other, and it's good to know what they are.

I've watched my friends, family, and colleagues process the pandemic during the past few months, and I've had a front-row seat to many stories:

As you can see, I experience the world in numbers and graphs, and so that's often how stories look to me. You, though, may think in words or sounds or pictures or colors or Star Wars quotes. And that's fine: Everyone experiences the world differently, and so just as no two storylines will be the same, everyone will tell the story of their struggle—and no one is immune from the struggle—their own way. But do tell it, and help your kids tell theirs. Start now, because we're well into the plot of this novel, even if we don't yet know the ending.