She Feels My Pain...Sort Of

The first day I hobbled around on crutches, Sophie brought me home a card “for my foot.”

On the second day, she stepped on it.

Sophie’s sense of empathy is ephemeral. One minute she’s gently patting my orthopedic boot, cooing “awwww,” (a sound she reserves for picture of kittens and babies). The next minute she’s demanding that I get her some dried apricots “right now!” She can’t seem to hold it in her consciousness that I’m hurt. At this point, I am so used to her general obliviousness to my emotional state, it’s the kindness that surprises me.

So, as she’s looking up at me and saying, “Oh, Mommy,” in the affectionate tone that I use with her when she’s ailing, I smile and my eyes well. It doesn’t take much.

“Mommy,” Sophie observes, “you are crying, but you’re smiling. Are you touched?” Kevin and I have educated her in the physical markers of this complex feeling—another concept she is on the cusp of grasping. One day, after throwing a fit, she declared, “I need calm down time,” and ran to her room where she sobbed into her snake. Minutes later she returned, truly calmer. Through her tears, her face broke into a smile. “Look, mommy, my eyes are wet, but I’m in a good mood. I’m touched!” (Nice try.)

But in this instance, she has hit the mark. “Yes,” I tell her, “I am. You are being very sweet and kind to me, and I really appreciate it.” Sophie smiles to, and I am encouraged to see that she feels proud of her ability to touch me. Perhaps she will not grow up to be a serial killer.

There was a time when it was believed that parental warmth was a critical factor in the development of empathy, the ability to both understand and enter into another’s feelings. But studies conducted over the last several decades have determined that warmth alone is not enough. In fact, parents who are warm but shy away from setting limits may actually foster self-centeredness. Turns out, it’s all about love and boundaries. To be able to focus on and empathize with another, children need to understand that it’s not all about them.

Certainly, modeling empathy, encouraging children to recognize and acknowledge the emotions of others, and pointing out when they have had an impact on others, good or bad, helps the process along through “external” means.

Internally, children must develop a “theory of mind,” the cognitive component of empathy. Theory of mind is the ability to take the perspective of another—to understand that other people have thoughts different from one’s own. Though some children will attempt to comfort others as early as 18 months, theory of mind typically doesn’t emerge until about four years of age. So I guess I can forgive Sophia for stepping on my foot. For now.

Next year, I expect an apology.

Learning to Say I Love You

I said it in the general direction of my distended belly, certain she could hear through the stretched dermal layers that separated my words from her ears.

I whispered it into the spongy, uncalcified surface of her head, certain the words would be absorbed into the delicate folds of her gray matter.

I assured her of its truth as I rocked her from tears to sleep, when her eyes first met mine in the morning, when she smiled with recognition at my face, when she crawled towards me babbling mama, the earliest of her words.

I love you.

Long before she could understand the sentiment, I sensed she understood the emotion. She did not yet love; not in the way that I loved her. She was dependent on me. She felt comforted by me. But she did not know where she ended and I began. She didn’t understand me as separate, let alone as an object of love.

No matter. I could live with this intense unrequited passion. I did not love her to be loved. I loved her because she was. I loved her with primal ferocity and maternal tenderness. With deep gratitude and a bit of disbelief.

It’s crazy love, one of my friends tried to explain what it was like, before Sophia was born. There’s nothing like it.

But like all lovers, I eventually began to wonder when I would hear those three words directed towards me.

The words came in stages. For about six months it was said as a ritual, something she parroted when Kevin and I put her to bed or whenever we parted. She clearly felt deep affection for us, and she was expressing that affection, but it was rote. Any words could have replaced, “I love you,” and they would have held the same meaning.

I determined that, unlike the understanding of other feelings (look at my eyes, they are filled with tears, I feel sad), love could not be taught. The ability to say the words and mean it is something quite magical. Almost everyone has the capacity to love, but it is the most ineffable of emotions.

I would have to wait until she had her epiphany. It came one night, under the most quotidian of circumstances. We were sitting together at dinner, Sophia, Kevin and I eating something unmemorable, talking, listening, laughing. She suddenly looked at us with a new light in her eyes.

“I love daddy; I love mommy; and I love me. We are a whole family,” she observed.

Even now, I am awash with the simple truth of it. She learned to express love through the experience of being loved. And hearing it over and over and over again.