My wife is filled with nervous trepidation. Each step, each turn is a chance for my daughter to fall, to injure herself. Especially because she is more apt to focus on where she’s going than where’s she is at – a risky proposition 8 feet off the ground.
I feel exhilaration when I see my daughter bumping elbows with the bigger kids, navigating the sharp turns of a slide or dangling precariously from the monkey bars.
Fearlessness.
That’s what gets to me.
My daughter never has any inclination of how close she stands to the precipice of a nasty tumble. But my wife and I’ll admit to this as well – is always one step ahead, watching her dangle that wayward foot into the vast nothingness and foreseeing disaster.
Because there is no danger for my daughter until, of course, she does get hurt. Then, it’s a bandage on the knee or elbow and it’s off again, ready to take on the world.
We’ll pull her aside and remind her she has to remember where she is and think about what she’s doing. That, after all, is the top job of any parent.
And all these warnings – looking before you cross the street, not eating unwrapped candy on Halloween and not petting dogs you don’t know – will eventually settle in with my daughter and some day she’ll become … well … me.
Not just me. She’ll become, more specifically, an adult.
She’ll worry about gas prices, paying the mortgage and the energy bills. She’ll watch the news at night and worry about what kind of world we live in and she’ll cringe when her own child tears around those same playgrounds.
And then I’ll look at that young woman – carrying the burdens of this scary world and the day-to-day dangers we face – and I’ll wonder what happened.
It makes me wonder when I lost that sense of fearlessness, that sense of invisibility, if you will. It sure wasn’t when I hit my head falling off the jungle gym as a 5-year-old. I got stitches and kept going. And it wasn’t Sept. 11. I already knew the world was a heartbreaking place before that day.
But, somewhere in between, my sense of wonder with the everyday normalcy of life was tempered with the harsh reality of the dangers that always lay ahead.
I hope my daughter hangs on to that feeling of fearlessness as long as she can. And, while I always want her to be safe, I hope this harsh world never knocks it out of her.
