A sense of color

Last night Edith called out for Daddy in her sleep; when he went in he found she was struggling with a growing pain. Edith periodically will get aching pains in her feet in the middle of the night. Her pediatrician said they were not an uncommon phenomenon and could be chalked up generally as growing pains.

Last night's growing pain was uncommon for her, however, because was in her hand. And as she described it to Tom, she tipped him off that she may be prone to another relatively uncommon phenomenon: She told him that her hand was aching with a green pain. He asked her to clarify and she could only say, as if he should understand, that the pain was green. This morning she told me about it using the same description.

Is Edith synesthetic?

We're curious to find out as she grows up. I have a relatively mild version of the common color-grapheme form of synesthesia: that is, letters and some numbers appear to me in certain colors. So do days of the week and months of year--all of which also occupy particular locations in space. As we move through the week or the year, or reference letters of the alphabet or positive integers, I mentally am located at different places in these several spatial schemes, all of which are different colors. I never realized this was an unusual phenomenon until adulthood, when conversations with Tom and my dad made it clear that not everyone's mental world is organized like this. My mother's is.

Just this weekend the classical music show "From the Top" was interviewing a young musician who sees certain notes and chords as particular colors. And what seems much more potentially cacophonous, she also hears certain notes and chords when she sees certain colors. She recalled that once when she was young she and her mother were in a room with a brightly painted floor, and she asked her mother what note the floor was, not knowing it was a strange question.

If Edith exhibits this tendency, we'll be curious to see how her particular form plays out. It may be some time before she even realizes that it's something unusual to be articulated, however, such that we may have only the random green pain now and then as a clue.

***

In a show of sass that I really shouldn't be honoring by preserving it as an anecdote, Edith tried a new set of objections the other night when she wasn't getting her way. We were at a party at the home of a Chinese member of our church, in whose house you take off your shoes at the door. Our friend was passing out slippers to the guests, and she gave Edith a blue, sparkly, adult-sized pair that I thought would thrill her to her sparkly toes. But Edith had spied the pink sparkly slippers given to another guest and wanted those. She started to whine at me, asking for the pink slippers. I reminded her in the words from daycare that "you get what you get and you don't get upset"...and specifically, that we were guests in this home and did not get to dictate who got what. I said that Mrs. G was wearing the pink slippers--"see how they go with her pink sweater?"--and that was that.

Once I mentioned Mrs. G's sweater Edith switched tacks:

"But Mom," she whined, "that's too much pink for an adult!"

And then...

"Mama! Her pinks don't match!"


The denouement: I told Edith I didn't want to hear it, but she continued to whine that Mrs. G was wearing too much pink for an adult and that the pinks didn't match. Finally I told her the only acceptable way potentially to change the situation was to approach Mrs. G and politely ask whether she might be interested in exchanging slippers. Edith did this, Mrs. G was amused, and all was well.

Just be careful when asking Edith what she thinks of your next accessorizing effort.