In a state of wazi-wazi

It has not been a good couple days for daughter #2. Sunday nights and Monday mornings are always difficult, but this extended into Monday night and Tuesday morning. Tantrums, difficulties at school, difficulties with me and her sister, anguish . . . once again she's in a state of wazi-wazi.

I first learned about wazi-wazi from Gertud Mueller Nelson, a renown Christian educator and expert on family ritual, in her book To Dance with God:

Colin Turnbull, in his marvelous accounting of the Mbuti peoples of Zaire, passes along to us their understanding of the dangers in transition. The Mbuti see the person as being in the center of a sphere. In moving from here to there, the sphere moves too and offers protection. If movement in time or space is too sudden or vehement, we risk the danger of reaching the boundaries of the sphere too quickly, before the center has time to catch up. When this happens, a person becomes wazi-wazi, or disoriented and unpredictable. If you pierce through the safe boundaries of the sphere into the other world, you risk letting in something else which takes your place. If the Mbuti know of and guard against such violent and sudden motion—and that without the experience of automobiles or jet planes—what do we, the so-called civilized people of the world, know of our transitions in space and time? I think we are a whole society in a state of wazi-wazi, beside ourselves and possessed by impostor selves.

Many of my students suffer from wazi-wazi. One normally hyper and joyous student is taken over by a sullen and still impostor when he is faced with work that is too difficult or when he is pushed too quickly. Another suffers from a far more dramatic and long-lasting case. E., a child with autism, was speaking, reading, and writing when a new sibling joined his family. For a while he stopped all language. His sphere had been pierced in what to him was a violent and unpredictable way. But patient and loving parents and a great school are helping the real E. find his place back into his sphere.

Since I've come to understand this concept and its effect, I have tried to mitigate the jarring effect it has on my child and my students. Tonight, as she fell asleep, she held my hand and told me she loved me. My child was back and the impostor was gone, at least for awhile.