#305

Megan has a potent instinct to complain. She's a grumbler and problem-finder in the AM especially, and no slouch at mealtimes either. "Ugh, we're having that again?" She's a master at disappointment. The frowning, slumping, gesturing... the moaning, groaning; it's not my favorite Megan. But I'm patient because I had a negative streak as a kid myself, sore-losing, scoffing, the usual bratty stuff. I didn't whine as much; I was parented better, which is to say more sternly. Threats like, "Quit whining or I'll give you something to whine about!" were swift and real. I cushioned myself against disappointment by expecting it. And then, slowly but surely, I matured. I learned that disappointment happens – shit happens, as they say – and you deal with it. I learned that positive energy serves us better, and we create our own energy. I hope Meg follows a similar path, but she won't. She'll follow her path. We're all different; our lives, loves, journeys, blah blah. So at the moment, I'm not looking for books and therapies to make Megan more 'positive.' She's not unhappy; she adores her friends and Sophie; she's active in sports and expresses herself artistically; she reads, laughs, plays, and sleeps well; and she even eats, but never before complaining! For now, we'll flounder on. I'll keep barking at her and banging my head against the wall.

I heard a favorite writer and journalist, Sebastian Junger, say in a podcast interview that one of his favorites is Joan Didion. When a favorite has a favorite.... This is from Joan Didion's essay On Keeping a Notebook:

"Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. ... How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write – on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest...."