Patience Interrupted: Excerpt from Chapter Seven of Loving Zelda

Fluctuations in mood. They’re intrinsic to the human condition. When a cognitively able person gets angry or sad, the feeling usually fades once the cause has been addressed. You talk it out, reason it through, or confront it. Maybe you distract yourself with an uplifting activity. But if you’re operating under a shadow of fear, paralyzed by the mounting sense that you can no longer manage any of those approaches, the rules of the game may as well be written in hieroglyphics. Unresolved feelings stay intense, last longer, and pull the sufferer deeper into that shadow.

Zelda is stepping into the darkness more often this month. Troubling emotions pop up from nowhere like the pesky, evasive rodent in a Whac-A-Mole arcade game. Add to that the blurring of time and space, and her internal clock becomes as difficult to reset as her emotions. A plan made on Monday gets sucked into the thin air of the stratosphere overnight, so that Tuesday begins with no blueprint, no to-do list, no road map. No wonder she gets angry. How can you trust a world that is zipping along full speed and leaving you behind its wake?

7-8-05: Difficulty in dystopia. Dad had drawn a “P” on his left thumbnail several days ago—a reminder to have patience. When Z saw it yesterday, she was wildly certain that the “P” must stand for counselor Pat, whose company Pa presumably prefers. It’s junior high with crow’s feet and pill-minders.

Depleted from running interference against her desire to see Dr. A every few weeks, I have migraine aura two days in a row. That’s rare; I can usually stave off these vestigial symptoms with quiet time in a darkened room. But by the second day, I am low on resistance. I tense up over Z’s obsession with Dad’s bad joke about the advantage of marrying an only child so you don’t have to share her inheritance. Maybe I need to paint a “P” on my left thumbnail.

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You don’t want to press too hard against the will of a person whose view of the world you can’t begin to conceptualize. Urging Zelda to buy just one fresh, pretty five-dollar guest towel for the newly redecorated downstairs bathroom seems at first to be an innocent miscalculation. As it turns out, my method is stupidity in action. “Oh, c’mon,” I coax playfully. “Let’s loosen up and have a little fun.”

Maybe if we hadn’t had that minor wrestling match over ditching the disintegrating bath mat with its rubber backing crumbling into black powder all over the pristine new floor. Her independent streak now hemorrhages into obstinance, and she is not about to surrender. I rub my own nose in the obvious: she is already relinquishing so much to my management. P.

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"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first and the lessons afterward." Vernon Law

So what’s the deal? Have I been cheating on the exam? Nodding off over the essay questions? Apparently so, because enlightenment continues to elude me.