Robin’s sensitive side.

Robin’s SweetPea music player has a mix of music I enjoy and music aimed at small children on it. One of my favorite instrumentals in the world is the opening theme to the video game Chrono Cross (called ‘Scars of Time’). It’s a gentle, soft, vaguely sad mix of woodwings and strings that picks up with a swirl of energy after the opening. Of course, I included it.

It makes Robin sob his heart out. 

I first noticed this when he broke a crayon, realized it was broken and not going back together like his legos do, started sobbing and crawled over to make the SweetPea skip to the next song. Or, in this case, the previous song.

I figured he was crying because of the crayon and just taking it out on the music player. But when the previous song ended and the strains of Scars of Time began, he burst into tears and hurled himself at the music player.

This isn’t a kid who cries often. Even when he’s frightened of a toy, he usually stares at it and pokes at it and curls up in a little ball and it takes him a lot of exposure to work up to sobbing. He whines when he wants stuff, but again, sobbing is rare.

It’s happened since then, too. Just now when he was getting ready for bed, unexplained tears! Freaking out! Until Kevin realized that song was playing.

He sounds so sad when he’s sobbing, like the world is ending. Kevin thinks he just strongly associates it with the breaking crayon. I don’t know. He doesn’t cry when other crayons or chalk break, since then. He’s really ANGRY at them; he refuses to use them and throws them away from him. But he doesn’t sob. I really don’t know if he reacted before that event; there’s 50 or so songs on his player and because he hits ‘back’ as often as ‘forward’ it can take him a long time to work through the set. I wonder if he’s partially reacting to the mournful beginning of the music itself.

He’s been more sensitive than usual lately, as well. He was scared to tears by a delayed Peek-a-boo from Kevin, and at dinner tonight, at a pizza place, he got so upset he worked himself into hysterics. We’re still not sure why– I think he realized we had pizza while he had bread and got so upset that we were eating while his was cooling that he refused it by the time it was ready (but eventually calmed enough to eat it in hisb  traditional fashion), but there also seemed to be some element of the table itself scaring or upsetting him, or maybe the busyness of the decor of the restaurant. 

And he’s intermittently crying upstairs now. Sad, sad whimpers and single sobs. I keep going up to rub his back and comfort him and it seems to work but then he feels sad again.

I’m having unpleasant flashbacks to my own childhood. Even as a small kid, I would get into nasty anxiety-powered  fear-based thought cycles I couldn’t get out of, and I remember crawling into bed with my mother, or having her come in to find me weeping in my bed. Afraid of loss. Afraid of things breaking. The only thing I’ve really learned since growing up is that you just can’t think about that stuff. You can’t let it consume you, even though it would be so easy.

I’m not looking forward to going through that again from the other side. At least I should be able to apply my own experiences learning to cope to helping Robin learn to cope as well.