A crisis is a change where we don’t have any idea what the outcome will be. The past is not any longer accessible and the future is unknown. It is going to be different, but there is no road map.
Being nine is a time of crisis. The child is no longer cocooned in the life of the parents, particularly the mother, and is beginning to realise that he or she is a unique being, all alone in the world. I wrote this with a nine year old girl in mind. The story is partly gender based, but much of it is true for all nine year old children.
“Everything is changing for me now I am nine.
No one knows what will become of me, who I will become. Least of all me.
I am experimenting. Learning how to be in this new body, how to become what I see around me. The popular images of young women, the efforts of my peers to achieve what I am working towards and the behaviour of the women I know are my role models. But at the same time I long to go back, to be safely tucked into the space in the family that I used to take for granted. To be a part of my mother’s life as of right. To be part of the trees and the flowers and the land and the water.
But I can’t go back. And I don’t know how to go forward.
I am brave. I am ready to take on the world. And I am very much afraid.
I don’t know how to behave in this new manifestation of myself and quite often I get it wrong. Not just wrong in ways that upset those around me but wrong for myself.
That wasn’t what I meant to do.
That wasn’t what I intended should happen.
And I can’t undo it.
I long to be independent, free of the petty rules of my family, able to make my own experiments and try things out without someone who has already made the journey telling me that they know better.
That was their journey. It is not mine. No one in the whole world knows what my journey will be. Least of all me. And so I am lonely, I feel acutely alone. I feel peeled. I have lost my skin and I am trying to grow a new one. It hurts.
Often I do things that cause chaos around me. I don’t mean to. It is as if another voice speaks through me, the voice of my fear and my bravery and my confusion. A new voice that I don’t recognise.
One day it will be my authentic voice. The one that will claim for me the place in the world that is uniquely mine. The one that will speak up with fury at injustice. The one that will sooth a broken heart or a broken knee. The voice of the lover, the director, the friend.
But it is like having wings that I need to learn to use. I am clumsy, I fall back to the ground each time I launch myself into the air. I am confused by the feeling that I can fly and the reality of hitting the ground again and again and again.
When I was learning to walk, the ground was not so far away. I stood up and I landed on my bottom, but now my landings are not physical and they seem to make the dust rise up all around me. The landing is hard and sore. I am ashamed and confused by my own actions. And often I am deeply punished by my own mistakes. I set out to do something and it goes wrong. I think I can do something and I find, to my humiliation and frustration that I can’t. But I am no longer convinced that the adults around me know everything and I want to challenge the rules and push the boundaries.
I revel in my physical prowess. That is mine. My body moves with grace and strength. But it too is changing. I am aware of my own beauty. Somewhere, still underground are the first stirrings of my sexuality. At the moment it is sensuality. I love to adorn myself, to dance and to practice walking with a swing and developing grace. I long to be grown up, to carry the symbols of maturity.
In a different age, if I were a boy I would be allowed to wear breeches, a girl I could wear my hair up. In another, there would be village-wide celebrations to recognise my transition into a new stage of life.
But now, our culture has created a limbo. We talk of teenagers and have some recognition that they have moved beyond childhood, but there is no place for the in-between-ers. The people who are no longer little children, nor yet young adults; we are nothing, no one, unrecognised and unseen.
Society offers very few clues to this time of life but it does perpetuate a hazardous and wicked interest in the nascent sexuality that I innocently display. This affects everyone’s attitude way beyond the perversity it represents. I can feel it within my explorations of my beauty and it is confusing. Am I to be beautiful, sexual, enticing and revel in my body and my soul or should I hide myself in prudish fear of my own gorgeousness?
My fears are manifold. Partly because, although I begin to know myself as separate, I am still quite sure that the world revolves around me.
As this is all so new, I am convinced that everything that happens is my fault and it is up to me to ensure that no harm comes to those I love: those I love and on whom I am terrifyingly dependent. It is a constant and appalling fear that unless I am always vigilant, my parents will die. It will be my fault. But I have no idea which of my actions will cause this disaster. And I have no idea how I will survive if they die.
Often my fear is less clear cut. I am afraid that everything I know will disappear. Actually of course it already has, because although, to those around me, my world looks the same, inside me, it is all different, unknown, unrecognisable.
I am deeply superstitious.
If I am responsible for everything, I have to have some talismans, some patterns of behaviour that ensure that I keep the world safe. If you are grown up reading this, you will probably have buried this conviction deeply and may be unaware of how much it still haunts you.
“If only—-”
I wish I had —-” are the remnants of what for me is a burning reality. You may even doubt that this is what I know to be true with all my senses or want to belittle it.
I can’t speak of this, if I do, it makes it all the more likely to happen. In my world, what I say becomes reality. So I live with my secret fears as a sacrifice to keep my world safe. Sometimes this may look from the outside as if I am doing ridiculous things. But I have to. My life and other lives depend on it. Really, they do.
Of course, what I don’t know is that, one way or another, this is the experience for every nine year old. Adults don’t tend to talk about it, and if they do, they sound as if they are talking about something so far away it isn’t what I am feeling now. And my fellow nine year olds have no words for what is happening to them. It is like trying to describe the air. It is all around us, within us, but unseen and it will take years before I have the vocabulary to explain all this to another person.
Unless I am very tenderly cherished through this time, I may bury the experience so deeply that even when I have vocabulary, I have hidden away my nine year old self to keep her safe. Unless I then allow her to explain to me what her experience was, she may well rise up when times are hard and confuse, embarrass and torment me all over again in my adult life.
I need to feel important, indispensable, to know that my contribution to the life of my family is essential. I want to know you can’t do without me. I need to learn that the jobs I do are important. If I am the one who does my laundry I can relish the clean, folded clothes that go in my drawers (and also realise what happens if I neglect the task). If I am the one who has grown the food at the table or cooked it, I can feel necessary to the whole.
Sometimes there is a ray of hope. It comes in the form of story.
Stories can explain me to myself and show me a map of the journey I am on. Stories are often sad and scary, but then my life is sad and scary too.
As long as it is not overwhelming, hearing of brave princes or princesses (and I am of royal birth myself) helps me to know I am not alone. Hearing of lonely orphans finding their way (and I am now an orphan) comforts me. I can feel an affinity to these story people that satisfies my loneliness.
Learning about the creation of the world, and the mistakes and discoveries that those early people made as the world was new, helps me to create my world.
Being free to make mistakes is helpful too. When something goes wrong I will be devastated of course, but I need to discover the world even when it hurts.
Of course I don’t want to be protected, but I also look to the adults in my life to give me the parameters of safety. Rhythm, pattern, ritual, habit are all part of keeping me in the safety of my family as I run to the horizon. Being involved in maintaining these rhythms is now a crucial part of my life.”
Photo with thanks to Lorien Ray
