I learned, in those years, that healing a frightened child is not a single conversation but ten thousand small ones.
It is the way you keep your voice even when something breaks, so she learns that broken things and raised voices don’t have to travel together.
It is letting her be as loud and as messy and as much as she wants, on purpose, until her body forgets the old lesson that taking up space is dangerous.
We found her a gentle therapist, a woman with a sand tray and endless patience, and for months Poppy said almost nothing in that office and simply built small safe houses in the sand and knocked them down and built them again.
I used to worry that the knocking-down meant something terrible.
The therapist told me it meant the opposite — that a child who has learned the world can fall apart needs to practice, over and over, that she is the one who gets to rebuild it.
Some nights she still woke crying.
I stopped being the mother who rushed in to fix it and became the mother who simply stayed, in the dark, until the fear passed through her and out, the way weather passes.
You cannot argue a child out of fear.
You can only outlast it beside her, again and again, until she believes at last that you aren’t going anywhere.