circus ovenbird I’m about to go to sleep, my body just curling onto its side, when my door swings slowly open and I find my daughter standing there, backlit by the anemic glow of the hallway night light. It’s 11 pm and she should have been asleep hours ago. “I feel weird,” she says and I know what that means. “Weird” means her body is engaged in a magic show where anxiety is transformed into physiological symptoms right before your eyes! It’s a three ring circus of heart palpitations, sweating, and trembling and I’m going to get a seat so close I’ll be able to feel the heat from the juggler’s flaming batons. Her voice sounds weak and panicky. “Get in,” I say and she climbs onto the bed beside me. She’s wearing a blue nightgown with a unicorn on it and it magnifies her smallness. Her feet are bare, her hands are rubbing her legs which won’t stop shaking. “What strategies do you have that can help you relax?” I ask, trying to get her to recognize the tools she already has. “You,” she says. “You’re the strategy.” For now, I let myself be the strategy. I try to get her to slow her breathing. “This always happens at night!” she says, not easily diverted. “In the day everything is fine, but at night all these horrible thoughts are there. I can’t stop thinking about dying! It could happen any moment! I could just DIE. What if I have a heart attack?” I tell her that nine year olds are extremely unlikely to have heart attacks but I know that pretending everything is fine won’t work. “We will all die,” I say. “And that’s a scary thing to face. It’s part of what it means to be human.” She considers that. “Why am I like this?” she asks. “Other people aren’t like this. They don’t think about death all the time.” “That might be my fault,” I say. “We seem to share a heart and my heart is prone to being anxious, though it’s also very good at experiencing wonder and awe. Your heart is good at that too.” She settles in beside me and I can tell she’s becoming less twitchy. Eventually she feels well enough to go back to her own bed, and I watch her fumble her way down the hall, and she sleeps until morning. I sweep up the crumbs left by her intrusive thoughts and a few of them get caught up in my sheets where they bother me all night. “Why am I like this?” I ask myself. I discover it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t want to be something else. I hope my daughter will come to this conclusion too. One day she will find herself confronted with something so beautiful she can hardly stand. She will feel her heart pound and her palms sweat and her knees shake. She’ll feel her mind set ablaze and tigers will leap through the rings of her wonder and she wouldn’t trade it for anything, not ever. 250815 what's it to you? who go blather from