The Exhausted Dad: Understanding the fuel to the flame
Some kids burn bright. My 8-year-old daughter carries the biggest flame in the family.
As the third of four children, my daughter doesn’t much care for her middle child status. Her FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) has been well documented in this column space, most of the time in adorable ways. She wants to be the oldest when it comes to responsibilities and activities, but she also wants to be fawned over like the baby of the family. As a middle child, she strives for more of both, often to her own confusion.
With these needs, however, come blunt opinions and a fiery temper. If she feels unheard in any way, she makes sure EVERYONE and the neighbors hear about it. She will not feel ignored. She will not admit to mistakes. And, no matter what happens, she will find a way to blame her siblings for both real and imagined conflicts.
Of course I’m not the only parent to contend with a spicy, sharp-witted and unpredictable second grader. It just feels like it sometimes.
Luckily those good folks over at Pixar reminded me recently that some of these struggles are all too common.
The animation studio’s latest, “Elemental,” suffered a disappointing box office take last weekend and will likely become Pixar’s least successful theatrical film. Sure enough, the theater I attended was near-empty, which made the story onscreen all the more personalized to the current dynamic with my 8-year-old.
I’ve been taking my four kids to the movies regularly, albeit one at a time (because it’s expensive!). It was my youngest daughter’s turn, and so we had a father-daughter date to the opening night of “Elemental.” I didn’t know much about the movie except that it was about personified elements (“people” made of fire, water, air, land) trying to co-exist in a big city despite their core differences.
The main character is Ember Lumen (voiced by Leah Lewis), a fire person who’s grown up in a small family shop owned by her parents who are first generation immigrants in Element City (though the rest of the city essentially delegate fire people to their own part of the city for “safety reasons”). Ember is impatient, especially with customers in the store, and while her father dreams of retiring and passing the reins to his daughter, Ember can’t control her anger when confronted with multiple pressures.
Her temper leads to an accident at the store, causing a leak and the arrival of Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a water element/safety inspector whose unbridled empathy regularly turns him into a sobbing, sensitive mess. Despite her initial irritation with Wade, Ember finds comfort in his presence, especially as he listens to her patiently through her moments of rage.
Allow me to put my film critic hat on for a paragraph so I can move on properly: “Elemental” is gorgeously animated, and, as far as movies geared to children, I much prefer something as thoughtful as this compared to the “Super Mario Bros. Movie” or a “Minions” installment. “Elemental” attempts a small-scale romance with a backdrop of meatier ideas about the immigrant experience, and it’s mostly successful in that aim. The Wade character is a little too much of a blank slate here, at least compared to Ember, and the story is certainly flabbier compared to Pixar’s strongest efforts. Still, a good movie like “Elemental” doesn’t deserve the media thrashing it received for its box office performance. It’s not this movie’s fault that “Inside Out” is a masterpiece, or that it didn’t make “Toy Story”-level money.
I say all that critic stuff to underline that, despite a few narrative missteps, I connected deeply to “Elemental,” especially as I sat there watching it with my own little Ember Lumen as she simmered in her seat munching on popcorn.
I especially loved how the movie treated Ember’s temper. As Wade suggests at one point, Ember’s rage is trying to tell her something. What is it about her father’s store that makes her so angry?
Put another way: “Your anger is trying to tell you something.”
Really, my 8-year-old’s anger is quite easy to understand, as we rarely experience it when she’s interacting with a parent one-on-one and is away from her other siblings. She wants to be heard. She wants our attention. She wants to be understood.
After almost every explosion with her siblings, my daughter will eventually calm down and explain that “she was just trying to say” or “I wanted to tell them.” While her FOMO can be funny and entertaining at times, it comes from a desire to feel understood and valued for who she is as an individual and not as just “#3 in the Team Wilson Assembly Line.”
If I think about it, almost every instance of my daughter yelling at me originates from her thinking I didn’t hear or understand her intentions. She’s only 8 years old, so of course it’s easy to let frustration lead to raised voices and stomping feet.
After the movie, I asked her what she liked about it. She said she liked Ember. She didn’t really elaborate, and she just snacked on leftover popcorn when I tried to talk about her fits of rage. I didn’t want to push the subject, and, really, why does she even need to connect those thematic dots? I’m the parent who needs the reminder that sometimes children act out or get angry because of something they can’t always articulate. Fires don’t start on their own. And with a better understanding of how they start, they can be appreciated for their own unique, delicate beauty.
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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer, full-time student and parent to four kids, ages 6-12. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.
