Marshmallows mean a lot of things in our household. When I was young, my parents had a fireplace in the family room, and we had indoor roasting contests during the dark Minnesota winters. When she turned four, my daughter asked for her birthday cake to be coated in marshmallows. And because during the rest of the year, we eat things like cottage cheese on toast and carrots for lunch, I did it—pressing tiny colorful marshmallows into the chocolate frosting one handful at a time. But the most frequent occasion for marshmallows in my life centered around campfires, passing sticky roasting forks from one to another around the circle of siblings and friends. Once, when I was a teen, Mom even showed me how to melt marshmallows on a fork over an uncovered burner on the stove. The sweetness of a marshmallow always comes out best when it’s soft and gooey; a bit of a singe brings it out even more. Birthday cake excepted, it seems that marshmallows are always accompanied by heat.
There are days when anger feels like a resident in my home. It is as if it stalks from room to room and fiery air swirls in its wake, scorching us. The embers linger within each of us, smoldering. We scorch each other. Vexation flames out of a new math concept that doesn’t make sense. Furor smolders around a new toy, snatched away in the heat of an argument. The scorch of youthful energy refusing to sit still and eat with a spoon at the dinner table. An impatient tone, an indignant word, snap. Anger crackles. I spend my days trying to douse the flames. Use calm words, please and Don’t worry, we’ll figure this math problem out together and Who had the toy first?
When you split green wood and put it somewhere hot, it dries. Put it close to a fire and eventually it catches. No matter how calm I begin the day, soon enough I’m smoldering too. I’ve dampened so many fires that all the peace has evaporated. I thought, when I was young, that anger was only a matter of self-control. If you had self-control, you weren’t angry. If you had anger, you weren’t self-controlled. It was about putting out a fire.
As an introvert in a large family, my outbursts centered around family time. I just wanted a minute to myself, and I didn’t know how, didn’t have the self-control, to ask for it. There is only one time I can remember being sent to my room as a teenager. My mother, people-person to the core, arranged kite-flying for all of us outside, and I—already worn out—snapped. I yelled at her. She sent me to my room. Perhaps to her, isolation was the best consequence for my actions, but I was relieved. Time alone? Yes, please.
A few years after that, I connected the dots. Anger is connected to self-control, but they are not only two ends of a linear, sliding scale. Need is another variable in the equation. Like an exponent on a number, unmet needs slide up towards anger. Needs like an hour of solitude, unknown and unexpressed in the business of afternoon kite-flying, become explosive.
My children are five and seven when the word “proprioception” enters my vocabulary. I have watched for their needs since they were infants. I have wakened to faint cries at night. I have studied and adjusted each nap routine when a toddler gradually grew into childhood. I have oriented our homeschool routine around the introverted need for rest time that my oldest inherited and the constant snuggling my youngest requires. Proprioception is the concept of knowing where your body is in space. Proprioception is an instinctive perception most of us have without even trying. And it is a need in our household that I’d never noticed before. With a proper sense of proprioception comes balance, so normal that most of us don’t even recognize it. We don’t know anything different. Without it comes car sickness, dizziness, headaches, a host of symptoms with a bundle of needs tagging along. Needs I had never known existed right here, in my own home.
After I first learn of this, I practice standing on one leg in the morning while I get dressed. I imagine my body as a liquid gel, like the way water blobs and floats in zero gravity. I can’t quite. The floor is sloped, the rug shifts under me. My hamstring flexes and burns when I wobble forward and ties me immediately to space: I am upright, the floor tilts to the west, my leg is under me, my toes grip the shifting rug.
I imagine the dizziness overwhelming me like the kites once overwhelmed me. Too many people for an introvert. Too much to balance with no sense of space or self. Frustration flares from the endless unmet need. A glimmer of understanding forms. Still, I cannot meet the need; not wholly, not by myself. At last, though, I can see it. My anger simmers down like water taken off a stove.
My husband brought home a packing box full of packages of marshmallows. They’re the big ones for roasting. I begin to reach for them when the anger sparks. Slowly and surely, they become a sort of medicine. We can’t have marshmallows without a little fun, without a sticky smile. The thought of marshmallows makes my children giddy; their giddiness makes me smile. We grin to each other as the antidote to our anger.
Dizzy or well-balanced, weary or well-rested, an ounce of merriment becomes a fire line, dug in the mud, hemming in the sparks.
The year passes forward. School ends; we make our annual move to a mountainous summer camp, removed from our regular community for three months. Over the years I have learned that I cannot meet all the needs in my own household, and now I learn something new. I cannot foist every one of my needs on them, either. In the rush of my husband’s summer hours and the removal from our “off-season,” school-year community, I must hold some of my needs unmet. I try to keep anger from sparking up. My children are not to blame. I miss our church, my down-the-mountain friends, the backyard dinners they savor while I’m absent. I am off-balance without them. My sense of self wobbles.
The summer heats up, and so do we. Our needs have not gone away. I still pack barf bags for the long, winding drive up to camp—I have to restock them more often than I want. I lean into our beloved community at camp while I long for the community that isn’t. We are off-kilter together, reaching for each other through air that shimmers with heat waves, flashes of anger igniting like a summer storm.
Down in the fire pit, surrounded by camp chairs, there are snippets of conversation that drift up through the open window. No matter how hot with anger I’ve become, the cool evening air seems to regulate me, check me. We meet each other’s needs slantwise, offering an interruption of joy when we can’t fill the gap another way. No matter how recent the latest bout of car sickness, the sweet, gooey s’mores always seem to stay down. No matter how loneliness may crowd the days, evenings around the campfire unite us.
I find a box that fits above the fridge and fill it with graham crackers, marshmallows, Hershey’s chocolate. Campfire night is Tuesday: I’ll be ready. Here I am, again, passing sticky roasting forks back and forth around the ring of friends. Our mirth becomes a sudden break for joy, puts a lid on the glowing embers that build throughout the day. We become controlled, like a fire inside a ring. Our lingering unmet needs slide away from anger and tip towards excitement. And week by week, we tilt the blaze into a warmth of merriment.
The featured image, “Forest Bathing,” is courtesy of Amelia Freidline and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
Gianna Soderstrom is a contributing writer to Cultivating Oaks Press and the Anselm Society, and she serves as Assistant Director of the Anselm Society Arts Guild. Adventure-hearted, but also a connoisseur of cozy, book-ish evenings, she is delighted by coffee and cocoa but shockingly, not tea. She is equally fascinated and challenged by the myriad ways that small and steady faithfulness transform a strange place into a home. She is a writer, dreamer, wife to Grant, mama to E1 and E2, and more than the sum of her parts, just like you. Gianna writes here and everywhere else to mine hope out of our ordinary moments.
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