The Picture (and the meltdown)
By Jeannette | March 24, 2018
D loves to draw, it – along with looking at countless similar pictures of My Little Pony or Minecraft on google – is one of her self-calming tools.
She’s always drawn and every birthday/Christmas/other occasion card she writes is accompanied by a drawing, some of which are incredibly detailed.
Drawing brings her happiness but, this one brought her anything but and was the cause of some severe emotion, which manifested itself at home after being bottled up during her school day:
It was from an art session in school, a lamb balancing an Easter egg on its nose and, although it was drawn a couple of weeks ago, it came home this week.
D was met by Hubbie as she’d been to after school club and his first indication that anything was wrong was that her body language was very shut off, her head was down and she matched straight past him, as if he wasn’t there. “Slam” went the car door and shouts of “nothing! I’m fine” when she arrived home, swiftly followed by items being thrown and more shouting. Unresponsive to bear hugs, she curled up into a ball.
The home-school diary gave no clues, but did say that she’d been very quiet and refused to tell anyone what was wrong. An indicator that something was very much amiss and that her emotion had kept on building – a bit like a rolling snowball – until she got home.
There was nothing we could do apart from waiting for her to ride it out, although she shouted that she “had told a teacher”.
In these situations D remains closed off to any gentle prompts to say what’s wrong, any humorous tactics that might normally bring a smile don’t work and it can be made far, far worse if she comes into contact with her brother, who finds it all extremely annoying and will – in his very blunt way – tell her so,
Eventually she whispered in my ear what was wrong. Unfortunately whispers turned to shouts as she re-lived the situation which had effected her so much.
And it was this: whilst she was drawing her picture two weeks ago, she noticed that the pupil sitting next to her was copying her picture, which greatly annoyed her at the time and accompanied by a lot of shouting from D, she told me that they’d copied everything – the trees, the lamb, the egg on its nose, everything.
Poor D, her excitement at bringing home a picture was completely over-shadowed by her re-lived negative emotions. Masking at the time and plenty of masking this week at school as she waited until she was at home, before letting those emotions out.
Any suggestions that maybe she could fit it flattering that someone had liked her picture enough to want to replicate it were met with (shouts of) “well, they should have their own ideas!”.
I can see her point, it’s a shame that what was a lovely picture has been over-shadowed for D by such extreme emotion.
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