Mood

We are outside in the backyard, listening to the birds chirp, when my daughter begins throwing a spontaneous tantrum.

“Tantrum” is a relative term, I suppose. She isn’t screaming. Nor does her face resemble a tomato. What I am witnessing is more of a subdued tantrum. For three minutes now, she’s been flailing all over the trampoline, grunting and whining. Her hair is both full of static and full of leaves, making her look like a cross between Albert Einstein and a woodland creature. 

She thrashes her body to the left. To the right. She whines. Kicks her legs up in the air. Grunts. Rolls over dramatically. And then starts all over again, from the top, as if completing a choreographed dance routine. Occasionally she breaks to see if I’m still watching. 

I am. 

And because she’s not hurting anyone, violently flopping around on the trampoline by herself, I do nothing about it. I simply stare at her, and let her get it all out. I’ve asked her what’s wrong a number of times, but she refuses to answer. I’m not sure what could possibly be bothering her so much.

I keep thinking of those gifs and memes where a photo or video clip simply says MOOD. 

No doubt, this little outburst by my daughter is A Mood. It reminds me of how I feel when I’m on my period. Or how I felt yesterday, after I sat in front of my laptop all afternoon and didn’t write a dang thing.

***

I’ve been sitting in front of this computer for three hours, and have nothing to show for myself. My brain is mush. I’m tired. Overwhelmed. Irritable. Even worse, I know what’s coming next. It’s happening again. Writing is going terribly, and I feel a bad mood coming on.

A small cloud hovers over my head and starts to make its way down over me, like fog settling into the grass.

I slam the laptop shut, a little too hard, and sigh a big, loud, dramatic sigh. I become a child. I putz around the house. Eat two chocolate chip cookies over the sink. Look at the leftover lunch crumbs under the kitchen table with resentment before aggressively sucking them up with the vacuum cleaner. I step on a LEGO piece in the living room and say a bad word in my head. I scroll social media. See what’s on sale at target.com. Vacuum another room. Turn up the music streaming through my headphones in a feeble attempt to drown out the voices in my head telling me I am worthless, that I’ve used up all the talent I once had, that I’ll never write anything worth reading ever again.

Believe it or not, I’m not always like this.

When I’m in a healthy state, I can flick a bad day of writing off of me like a bug. Lately, though, a bad writing session puts me in a bad mood, and a good writing session puts me in a good mood. Whether I smile or frown, sing or wallow, see the glass half empty or half full is all determined by how the writing goes. 

My emotions and my art have become one in the same, tangled around with no beginning and no end, like a soft pretzel you buy at the mall. This happens when I start to feel stressed, under pressure, when the drive to perform takes over my body. It’s like an IV pumping self-esteem into my veins. A good writing day pumps me full of confidence, assurance, validation, worth. A bad writing day is like having the IV ripped out without warning.

I’m always surprised by how quickly I get dehydrated.

***

The solution, of course, is to remember who I am, and Whose I am. To remember I create from love, not for love. I can say it, recite it, pin the mantra to the wall above my desk. 

Believing it every day? That’s a different story. 

So I repeat it quietly to myself while I rage clean the house.

When I write terribly, I am loved. 
When I write well, I am loved. 

No more, no less. My artistic abilities, or lack thereof, have no bearing whatsoever on who I am—a daughter of the King, fearfully and wonderfully made.

***

Within a few minutes, my daughter is back to her typical, joyful self. I’m not sure if she grew tired of her own fit, or if she successfully flushed every negative emotion out of her system, but, either way—she is now fine. 

She walks over to me at the opening of the trampoline net, where I am waiting for her. Her body is covered in dirt and leaves, her hair still awry from the static. She looks insane. 

I tell her the thing I long to hear when I am in a Mood myself, when I want to scream and thrash my body around and give way to every negative feeling in my body telling me I am worthless, insignificant, a bad writer, a bad mother, a bad everything. 

I tell her, “I love you.” 

She looks at me for a second, pausing to wipe a piece of hair from her eyes, and says, “I luv yoo so much.”

I reach through the net to grab her, bracing for the static shock, and pull her into my arms. 

Together we retreat back into the house, where I get a chocolate chip cookie for each of us. We sit at the table together, eating our feelings, as crumbs fall all over the freshly vacuumed floor.