Screaming and Yelling and Crying at the Top of Your Lungs

Dear Naya,

You came into our lives three years ago screaming and yelling and crying at the top of your lungs.

It is a talent that has somehow been nurtured to deafening proportions.

Once, in wrestling with your mother, you walked into the room and screamed, a piercing cry that some would say coincidentally led to the first reported sighting of wild timber wolves in this part of the county in 140 years. But we know better. Your voice carries the conviction of predator and prey, alike, a language translatable at the mitochondrial level, transcending order, family, genus and species. You speak to the sorority of living things.

I, of course, see the world through eyes given to me by my own history, one removed by orders of magnitude from you that I seldom acknowledge. In your cry I didn’t recognize ferocity of will and the stubbornness of a tiny girl whose appreciation of what suits her whim far outstrips the 20 years of formal education I’ve endured.

Instead, I saw the only little girl I’ve ever known, your aunt. When she was your age, and I not much older, I watched her witness the violent beginnings and ends of days that transpired as an affront to grace and kindness everywhere. For all my education, I grew up discriminating against screaming and yelling and crying at the top of one’s lungs, only believing it to be the communication of fear and resignation. We were polyglots, in a sense, us, children, speaking a language unrecognizable by adults, them. I thought I would always understand that vocabulary.

You taught me otherwise.

It was, as all the great fables attest time and time again, a hard and hardly learned lesson.

You bit me in the ass.

We’re in the kitchen, your mother and I. I am merciless, kissing her neck with a two-day old beard, and she is in absolute agony and laughter, the cruelty of your father, Naya, barely confinable when fueled by fortified liqueurs. But that cruelty is interrupted by my despondent confusion, because although I have your mother’s hands pinned to the countertop, she has somehow inflicted a pain upon me greater than any I have known, and I know suffering, because I lived to see the break up of Journey, while lesser bands from New Jersey rocked on. But your mother was inculpable.

I looked behind me and saw you clamped teeth first 1/8th inch deep into my right buttock.

I finally knew that you were speaking some other language.

You learned screaming and yelling and crying at the top of your lungs from much different teachers. And all your instructors, Hope, Love, Patience and Sponge Bob, have told me that they go to bed each night exasperated from the tinnitus brought about from your sheer volume. They will get my sympathy when they bear your dental records in their collective ass. It’s coming.

But I understand you, Naya. I recognize your frustration when you come face to face with a world not large enough to contain your dreams, your passions, your talents. Not nearly. Years from now you might wonder why I never got angry when you screamed and yelled and cried at the top of your lungs, and threw the crayon and crumpled the page and kicked the dog, because inside I was cheering you on. I was remembering. That you are made of solid fire is no reason for disappointment or discipline. I live in fear of the day when you’ll turn down the volume out of consideration of others, that trips to the principal’s office will be replaced with Honor Roll stickers, that you’ll start to forget this first language of yours that speaks to the order of all living things.

My job is not to contain you, Naya. What little Earth exists ahead of your footfalls should tremble in your wake. We are each of us born with two hands. We ought to know by now how to cover our ears. We’ll applaud in those few moments when you’re in between breaths.

And we’ll remember how it is to properly communicate with three-year-old girls.

So today, for your birthday, I will attempt to speak to you in your language, Naya, and though my accent will surely bear the years of living in the South, I hope you will understand what I’m saying as I come home bearing gifts, all the while screaming and yelling and crying at the top of my lungs.

Happy birthday, you sweet, darling, loud little girl.