Small Hands Write to Express Big Emotions

It was their 25th wedding anniversary, and their favorite gift was this note, decorated with hearts and flowers and penned in giant, crooked letters, in the awkward scrawl of their youngest child:

“I hope you have a happy anniversery. I love you very, very, very much. You are a wonderful mom and dad.”

We ooohed and aahed as they passed it around among the crowd of 40-something parents who had gathered to celebrate their special day.

“I wish my daughter would write something like that to me,” one friend said, fingering the love letter wistfully.

“I get plenty of notes from my daughter,” another one grumbled. “And they all say, ‘I need money for. . . . ‘ Fill in the blank.”

I smiled and passed the card on without a word. I, too, have a boxful of notes from my daughters. And for every one that says, “I love you,” there is another that reads like this one, deposited on my dresser by an angry 11-year-old:

“Dear Mommy. I really don’t like you. In fact I’m close to hating you!!! I don’t understand why you treat me like this. It is considered child abuse to be so mean to a child. So you stay away from me and I’ll stay away from you until I am sixteen and can drive.”

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Maybe it has to do with being the children of a writer. Perhaps my daughters inherited from me this need to put their feelings on paper, this tendency to acknowledge emotion best from the safe distance the written word provides. When they are overcome by anger, feeling neglected or abused . . . whenever emotions run high in our house, someone’s apt to put pen to paper and vent.

Not a week goes by that I don’t find a scribbled note from one child or another, unhappy because I sent her to her room or wouldn’t let her wear lipstick or scolded her because she left my bed littered with sunflower seeds.

There are protests, rebukes, tirades, pleas. . . .

“I don’t understand why you have to be the meannest mother of all my friends. You are always yelling at me and never let me do anything!! Sometimes I wish I was in another family.”

And sometimes apologies. . . .

“I am sorry I yelled at you last night, but sometimes you really get on my nerves. I hope we can get along better today.”

They are taped to my mirror, tucked in my purse, left lying on my bedroom dresser. And sometimes they are simply written and never delivered, and I find them weeks later as I rearrange a bookcase or search behind a bed for a missing toy.

Sometimes I write back. . . . “I hope you know I love you very much, and I always will” has become a sort of standard reply.

But sometimes I just fold them and put them away, content that they have served their purpose by freeing my children to express thoughts that might frighten them and threaten me.

And if I miss the “You’re a wonderful mom” missives my friend received, I am at least grateful that my daughters are learning the value of self-expression, that they have discovered a safe outlet for their most volatile passions, a vessel to contain childhood emotions that ebb and flow like an ocean’s tides.

And just as their notes let me glimpse moods of anger and darkness, they also give me a peek at tenderness I might not otherwise see.

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She began writing me notes almost as soon as she learned to spell her name. And they all tended to start this way: “Dear Mommy, I am runing away. When you find this I will be gone. Pleas dont try to find me. I am looking for my real family. . . .”

She keeps a bag packed, but she never leaves. . . . She sticks around, we joke, because she would miss tormenting us all.

She is touchy, temperamental, this youngest daughter of mine; not a child given to mushy declarations of love.

So I suspected the worst last week, when I saw her hunched over the kitchen table, writing a note while her breakfast got cold.

It was her first day of camp, and the first time she’d be going alone, without her older sister. They’d been inseparable this summer but locked in combat as often as engaged in play.

It must be a warning she was penning. “Don’t touch my things while I’m gone!” I imagined her note must say.

She folded the letter carefully, drew a heart on the outside and headed for the door. And as she climbed in the car, I couldn’t resist running back inside to see what she had said.

“Dear Dani,” she’d written. “I hope you have a great day today. I will miss you wile I am at camp. I’ll see you when I get home.”

And at the bottom, in dark letters and her most careful printing. “I love you very much.”

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Sandy Banks can be reached at sandy.banks@latimes.com.