The List of Things That Will Not Change

“Those first months at Dad’s, it was like I had to build a hundred bridges, from me to every new pieces of furniture, every new lamp, every new fork, even the bathroom faucets and the lock on the door, until, slowly, all of Dad’s new things stopped feeling wrong.”

Moving into her dad’s new apartment and adjusting to a new schedule, place, and life was difficult for eight-year-old Bea. She felt like a stranger there, as though at some point soon she would be returning to her actual home. The examples Bea uses are simple, everyday objects that most people would take for granted, but which for her felt strange at first.

“When my happiness makes me feel huge, it’s almost like nothing can hurt me. But I was wearing sandals, and the glass cut my foot.”

During the period after her parents’ divorce, Bea learned a great deal about The Relationship between Mental Health, Behavior, and Emotions. Reflecting back, she describes a balloon of happiness that often welled up inside of her and caused her to lose perspective, which sometimes led to hurting herself or others.

“Mom’s face is like mine, though. Her smile was not a hundred percent.”

Despite often being lost in her own world, Bea is particularly perceptive of her mother, who she shares a unique connection with. Bea can tell that her mom is both happy and sad at the same time, just like she is, but doesn’t know how to talk to her about it. Witnessing her mother’s emotional response to the divorce made it difficult for Bea to move forward at first.

“Telling a story is harder than I thought it would be.”

Occasionally, Bea discusses and reflects on her own storytelling. She notes the challenges in recounting her own past, and how confusing it can be when new memories pop up to fill in holes in the story. Her narrative reflects this confusion, as she often jumps between time periods without warning.

“After I saw Dad almost choke to death, I had a worrying problem. I started to worry all the time. I worried that one of my parents would die while I was at school. I worried that I would die while I was at school. If I fell and scraped my knee, I worried that all my blood would fall out of my body.”

In this repetitive paragraph, Bea’s anxiety comes through both in the repetition of the word “worried” and in the knowledge that Bea had so many different things running through her mind following the choking incident. Shortly after, her parents divorced, adding to her stress and uncertainty.

“Right away I figured the wedding was off. I didn’t understand why Dad was bothering with popcorn, because how could I be in the mood for Parmesan popcorn if Dad and Jesse were getting divorced before they even got married in the first place?”

Bea has a tendency to get her hopes up before anything is certain, which also leads her to catastrophize worst case scenarios when she gets the sense that something is going wrong. After so much has changed in her life, she looks for more change around every corner, and she doesn’t expect it to be good news.

“Sonia might feel lucky, because she’ll have a sister, which she didn’t have before.”

Bea’s hopes reach their highest point when she finds out she is going to have a sister her own age. Even when Miriam tries to tell her that Sonia may feel nervous at first, Bea can only imagine Sonia feeling excited and happy. She is hurt when she finds out that Sonia is not quite ready for a sister yet, but continues putting herself on the line until Sonia is ready to reach back. Bea shows Sonia The Stability of Unconditional Love in Families.

“Sometimes I feel exactly like that. Like I’m a bunch of different Beas, all lined up to look like one.”

Bea is still only 12 years old when she looks back on her life, and she still has a lot to figure out about who she is. She doesn’t know yet how to unite all the different parts of herself into one solid person, although she is slowly figuring it out.

“A tiny balloon of happiness blew up inside me.”

Bea uses a metaphor of a balloon expanding when she starts to feel intense happiness. Finding ways to name her emotions and describe them in ways that she can relate to helps Bea navigate and understand her feelings so she can manage them. Here, Bea is happy when Sonia agrees that it’s great they’re going to be sisters.

“I thought how my life with Mom and Dad was like a room with two big windows and two different moons. And now so was hers.”

Bea creates a running metaphor through the novel about the two moons she saw out her window when she was little and how this relates to the two different worlds she occupies now that her parents are divorced. Bea turns it into something beautiful, and even uses it as a way to relate to Sonia.

“I found one of your hair bands on the rug. It’s a green one. I put it in my jewelry box for when you come back.”

Bea’s letters to Sonia are full of genuine compassion and unconditional love, as well as an unwavering hope that Sonia will come around soon. Almost immediately after Sonia left, Bea was already looking forward to seeing her again.

“I wanted us to shake those jars together forever. When Mr. Home came over and told us we weren’t even close, I was happy.”

Bea is not someone who shies away from labor, and she actually enjoys moments where she gets to use her muscle and work hard for a simple reward, like making butter or helping Jesse cart his oysters to the seashore. She loves working together with her friends and feeling like part of a family.

“If Jesse’s brother could turn his back on him, maybe Sonia could, too. Maybe Sonia wouldn’t choose our family, either.”

Through hearing about Mission and the tension between him and his siblings, as well as the way Mission seemed to just abandon them, Bea comes to know the reality that family does not always stand by and support each other. Her pure and unwavering hope in Sonia experiences its first bout of uncertainty.

“It’s like when two vowels go walking. The first one does the talking.”

Bea metaphorically compares the way that emotions sometimes hide behind other emotions to a spelling rule she learned (which ironically doesn’t always work anyway). Bea frequently makes comparisons to everyday, relatable concepts from her own life to better understand her emotions and circumstances.

“I kept imagining Angelica’s face, half like usual, half not working right. Sometimes I felt like that on the inside, like I knew how I wanted to be, but it didn’t match up with how I really was.”

Bea compares the discrepancy between her behavior and who she wants to be with the way that Angelica’s face is drooping on one side. She feels like one part of her knows exactly how to be and what she wants, and another part of her actively works against that.

“Suddenly I wasn’t sure if no one wanted to try an oyster because it was an oyster, or because Jesse was marrying my dad.”

Bea witnesses prejudice against Jesse when he comes to serve oysters at the colonial breakfast and one of her classmates acts as though Bea’s dad marrying a man is strange. At first, nobody wants to try his oysters, and Bea questions whether it’s because of who he loves.

“What a feeling feels like: When I get mad, I feel cold. I don’t feel huge, like when I’m happy. It’s more like I’m filling up with something that runs over my edges and rises up behind me like a gigantic pair of bat wings.”

Bea compares her anger to a pair of bat wings because she feels animalistic or like another person in those moments. Afterward, she experiences guilt, regret, and shame. Miriam helps Bea forgive herself and discover healthier ways to manage her emotions.

“Before dinner, I did my worrying with my spiral notebook in my lap. I started out just doodling. Then I drew some bats. I wasn’t worried about rabies anymore, but I was wondering if some kind of animal lived inside of me.”

After the bat incident and the rabies shots, Bea feels physically safe but not safe from her emotions and her anger. Miriam teaches Bea how to funnel her worrying into specific moments of the day, so that she isn’t worrying all the time, but Bea recognizes that there are always emotions bubbling below the surface which lead her to lash out.

“The man hadn’t moved. He was waiting, I think, to be invited inside.”

The mood changes from excitement and joy to tension and suspense when Jesse’s brother Mission shows up unannounced a few days before the wedding. Bea has never seen him before, but she instinctively knows who he is because she is the one who invited him.

“We still didn’t have window screens. But we were rabies proof now, and we decided to take our chances.”

Bea’s mother starts to feel more confident as time passes, and her decision to open the windows for the first time in a year demonstrates this change. Bea is happy to see her mother finally coming to terms with everything and moving on with her life.

“I couldn’t smile anymore. Not a real smile. And nobody noticed […] I had been carrying something for a long time. I needed to put it down. I knew where to put it. I had known that all along.”

Bea’s biggest secret is the fact that she pushed Angelica off the loft and worries now if that had something to do with Angelica’s current condition. While everything around her is going well, Bea feels more unhappy than ever, because confronting her past has led her to want to resolve old mistakes.

“I was holding it in, and it took everything I had. It took more than I had.”

After days of being excluded and bullied by her cousins, Bea snapped and pushed Angelica. Although she knows it was not an excuse, she does know that there were reasons which led up to her actions, and Miriam helps her realize that she is not a terrible person, especially since she feels guilty for doing it.

“It’s the people who matter.”

Bea’s story is one of unconditional love and the sort of acceptance and comfort that is only found in a true family. After Mission tried to ruin the wedding, it proceeded as normal because everyone who mattered to Jesse was there to support him.