The Logic of a Summer Storm

Mood sweeps in like a summer storm. Purples the horizon. Sends me horizontal, back in bed, covering my eyes with one hand. I put on a playlist of new age jazz, let the mood soften and pass.

I have always been a moody person, but it wasn’t until my early twenties that I came to understand that. When Z and I were just starting to date, back in 2014, the moods used to ravage me so entirely that it put a strain on our relationship. What’s wrong? he’d ask as I lay listless on our bed in Crown Heights, overcome by something I know now, from having a toddler, as emotional dysregulation. A system completely overwhelmed, frayed into static, incapable of logic. Are you okay? he’d tentatively say as he hovered in the doorway—my even-keeled partner, steady and temperate as a spring day.

I was never able to give a satisfying answer, to him or to myself, so I wrote about it instead. It was from this place that my first EP, form/a, was born—six songs that clutched at new love and the fear that my moods would destroy us. I’m so aware of all my moods around you, I sang on “Severed Logic.” What if I remove myself from the action?

Over time, I learned how to handle the moods, how to tame and break them as if they were wild horses. I shushed and coddled them. I corralled them with long walks, hot baths, and loud music. I sequestered myself so that no one else—especially not Z—would feel the hot unfocused lash of me. And all along, I internalized a feeling of shame, that I was bad and weak for succumbing to an intensity that shook the earth around me and touched anyone who came close.

River is wailing in the driveway. Limbs flailing, his face red and puckered as a rose, while Z crouches beside him and tries to talk him down. Our boy turned 3 a couple weeks ago, and we are firmly in tantrum territory now.

And yet ever since he was a colicky baby, River has always had these big feelings, big moods. He runs hot and cold. He likes to be alone. He looks like a miniature version of his father but acts much more like me.

The tantrum rips through him, taking him someplace beyond us. He is scratching himself, lashing out, his voice guttural and unrecognizable. He is a Tasmanian Devil whirling himself into a vortex, boy disappearing into a wild blur.

I watch him from the window, helpless. I recognize the storm that shakes him, but I can’t stop it anymore than Z could stop mine. In anguish, my fingers find the keys of the piano, and I begin to improvise a song.

It’s just how it happened / so small in the frame / I watched it happen like a slow rain…

My mother tells me that when I was about six years old, she was in my bedroom putting away some toys when she looked out the window to check on me. I was sitting in the garden, in the shade of a large rhododendron, and I was crying. She was about to run outside and pick me up to comfort me, but a voice stopped her. Let her meet her pain, it said. So she just watched. She knew I wasn’t in danger, she could see I wasn’t hurt. She let me cry, understanding that the ability to meet pain would shape me, give me a strength greater than anything she could teach me.

It’s taken me a long time to reframe my moodiness. To let go of the shame and see that my mood is not an uninvited guest, as I sang on “Cerulean,” but a friend. An inextricable part of me.

It is a wellspring—clarifying, life-giving, slaking a thirst.

It is where the music comes from.

In an episode of the podcast Hidden Brain, psychologist Jordi Quoidbach makes a case for the utility of moods. We are told to strive for happiness—that it is our baseline, and therefore there’s something wrong and bad and “not normal” about being sad or upset—and yet what kind of life would it be if we were only ever to experience the one color of happiness? This kind of emotional monoculture, as in agriculture, is a detriment, stripping life of valuable nutrients.

Instead, let me be a cottage garden. Tall lupines edged with creeping thyme, spotted foxgloves, cosmos in orange and mauve. The high and the low juxtaposed. A layered jumble—colorful, textural, scented—that makes a complete world.

“My life is simple,” writes gardener Marc Hamer in his memoir Seed to Dust: Life, Nature, and a Country Garden. “There is light and shade, the light is beautiful, the shade more so.”

River has started writing his own songs now. This morning, he strummed a guitar in open tuning and riffed on new lyrics: Are you okay? he sang. Are you okay? I hope he’ll stick with it. I want him to learn that feeling deeply is not a curse, something to be ironed out of him, but a strength. I want to help him harness the vortex and make his own beautiful logic of it. I want to give him some place to put his moods—a genie bottle of swirling colors that will fill his life with blessings.

There’s a track on form/a called “Night Heat,” another song about my love for Z and the tremor that emanated from me, threatening the ground beneath us. The first verse goes:

I'll follow you forever so you're never gone.

Breaking up is out of the question.

I love you more than ever when I think it’s done.

It’s bigger than us, someday we’ll make a home.

This August, we’ll celebrate seven years of marriage. We’ve been together for twelve. My moods did not break us after all. I credit Z for his patience, for his love. And I credit myself for learning not only how to tame the feelings but how to celebrate them.

I look around at the home that we’ve made, here at the edge of the woods, where it is all light and shade. Outside, the world is dewy and refreshed. There is no light so beautiful as the light right after a storm. Sun-catchers refract the rays into rainbows on the floor of the living room, the kitchen tile.

All those swirling colors. Filling this life with blessings.