I’ll tell you what’s difficult: not having a reaction when your kid (or other’s kids) fall down. On the one hand they say that falling down is part of life and, on the other, is the wild reaction when my or their kid takes a digger.
If it’s part of life, then why are we so crazy about reacting?
I know myself – the feeling of that tangy shock when a kid – any kid – especially your own kid, falls on their knees in the street, raking that tender, perfect skin on the asphalt. It’s all you can do to keep your hands from flying to your head and having some primordial sound come out of your mouth. It’s nearly unbearable.
Barefoot or shod, that is the question. Barefoot eliminates the extra possibility of a trip and fall. But those delicate little toes! Jabs, slivers, metal… either way something’s going to happen.
Pre-occupation with this topic kicked in. It was obvious I was at the mercy of my own emotional pain.
I am undereducated on the subject of child-rearing, and I’m sure I would fail every father-quiz on earth if not for one book: Magical Child by Joseph Chilton Pearce. My wife brought it home from the hippy den of a midwife’s office off of Arapahoe in Boulder, CO, where our daughter was born. I took one look at the cover and thought, ‘Uhh uhh – no way, no chance.’
But, when I peeped at it ten days later and found it to be so full of truths that it scared the hell out of me, I would dip into it, again, and realize, with horror, all the mistakes that were made on me. I would shut it in anxiety, only to pick it up again.
So, when Pearce began to suggest, definitively, that the main problem with kids and their behaviors don’t come from the nicks and scars (slings and arrows to Hamlet) of the fall itself, but to the attending emotions generated and then shared by the parents, I had to re-think this whole scenario – that horrible sensation I felt when our daughter would fall, and then the (mine and her) reaction.
If it really was the emotions and not the pain that the child was going to avoid, and then on forever into a crippled, truncated adulthood, I really had to do something about it. How could rearing a child mean that I had to work on myself, and not just on them? No fair!
So, the next time we went out, I was determined not to react. She did, of course, fall, and I felt the tang of pain in me, the hands towards the hair, the mouth begin its twist; and she looked at me, as they all do. I did like you see in a movie – getting caught making a gesture I shouldn’t have, then passed it off as a pitiful two-handed pass through my hair with the vestiges of a wince.
She scrutinized me, and thought she was going to cry. So did I. We didn’t.
It was a hard boot camp like year in Colorado, then we moved to Cali.
Armed with our new relationships, my two-and-a-half-year-old and I braved the (playground) recreational equipment in our new Studio City Park. Onward up the ladders and quickly down the ladders. On the seesaw, then off the seesaw onto her hands. Bravely across the rope bridge, then collect the pieces under the rope bridge, all with a frozen smile on my face.
I never thought much about it until one day I was nearly a half mile (ok, by the looks of some of the more judgmental parents, actually 100ft) away from my daughter when she fell, and I walked up to her as she wiped her third tear and went off to play. It was then that I realized They (the other parents) thought I actually didn’t care. They gave me a good eye-stoning and fluttered away, collecting their children from the Evil Man Who Didn’t Care About His Child.
I felt bad. I really didn’t want them to hate me, but I couldn’t betray her, or her future.
She had to learn how to fall (over and over), and get really hurt, and then get up, not to see the face of anguish and the flood of suffering, but the smile that would then be the world’s. For her, forever, stolen and transferred from my face, by her. I love her. No matter what. And so shall the world.
I’ve made my choice.
This morning my daughter tripped on the edge of a raised planter and fell off, head-first, onto the concrete. I heard the heart-wrenching thud and looked up in time for her to get up. There she was, blonde hair dirty and awry, looking at the ground. She rubbed her head once, and then climbed without a tear back up on the planter.
So, to you who see a mild would-be meat-head smiling at the calamity on the playground, and judge – think twice, my friends. You never know what bigger picture is being projected.
Or, what life lesson is really being learned.