Trying to stay connected to your kid

Another excerpt from my book health happiness love longevity peace prosperity and safety.

“Don’t tell Mom, okay.”

She usually shared confidences with her mom, not with me. Just ten and a world away from eight and nine. And even those years, not the little girl who ran to the door when I came home.

You love your child like you love nothing else, and those first years are a joy you never imagined. This little creature who depends on you for everything, who’s yours to love and protect and nurture. Who sometimes is your own face staring back at you, who feels like she’s always been there, who materialized out of you the way your forty-year-old self materialized out of the twenty-year-old you just were. You hold her because you can’t believe she’s actually there, and she holds you back, presses against you and stretches those little arms across your chest. Wraps a hand around your finger. Falls asleep in your arms, sleeps on top of you while you sneak a nap.

It’s easy until she’s walking and grabbing things, seeing where her hands fit and what everything tastes like. There’s no sense of reason you can appeal to, but you have to keep her safe, keep her alive. No, no, Honey. No, no. But she’s determined, and you know nothing good can come of a wet finger in an electrical socket. NO. You can’t appeal to reason but you can instill fear. She freezes and starts crying because she’s never heard that voice from you. Honey, you offer softly, and move toward her, but the screams are even louder. She’s alive, and unlikely to go near an outlet again, but you’re different to her now.

You trade a little trust for her safety. You love her so much you’ll make that sacrifice. You can reason with yourself. But that bartering hurts.
Your wife sweeps her up. It’s okay, it’s okay. Shh, shh. Shields your daughter from you, and gives you the look to let you know you’ve violated all the protocols of good parenting.

She’s okay. She’s not writhing on the floor with 110 volts coursing through her. And everyone hates you for it.

A few hours later she seems to have forgotten about it. She has a fist full of your hair and probes relentlessly to get a finger behind your eye. You wrap your hand around hers, kiss her hand, kiss her face, try to distract her from maiming you. There’s no danger to her now, so you can succeed with feints and redirection.

That first little fissure widens over time. You become an impediment to the things she wants most, the barrier to her fulfilling the impulse to run into the street or disappear in a department store. There’s an experience of the world she wants and you won’t let her have it, and she starts to cultivate a suspicion of that love she took for granted.

You try to explain that coming into contact with a moving car is kind of like the time she did a face plant on the sidewalk, except much worse and probably fatal. That if she disappears from you, if you can’t see her, you can’t protect her. Someone else might walk off with her, someone who doesn’t love her like you and Mommy do.

Over and over. Until you get the why, you just have to believe that it’s because I love you, or if you don’t believe that, believe that I’ll yell again and we’ll both hate it. Over and over until the allure of all that blacktop starts to diminish. See, we always stop and look because we don’t want to get killed by some clown in an SUV who thinks the speed limit is only for suckers. Mommy and I stop at every corner and look both ways. And look whenever there’s a car in a driveway that might back over us, or wherever there’s a cutaway in the curb.
We do this stuff to stay alive, and so should you.

She gets a little older and starts to understand cause and effect, lets go of some of that initial suspicion.

You teach her how to ride a bike, run along beside her after the training wheels come off, hold the seat to keep her upright until she’s going fast enough to stay up on her own. Keep pedaling, keep pedaling. And she’s off down the sidewalk. Don’t look at me, look where you’re going.

And now you’re the agent of her freedom and the best guy in the world.
Until she thinks she doesn’t need a helmet. You want to spare her the accumulation of head injuries you incurred as a kid, but worry about the cost of letting her know there was a time when no one wore helmets.



Back and forth over the years and that offset between trust and suspicion gets wider and wider, and she spends more time thinking you’re a weasel and less time snuggled up to you on the couch. She wants Mom to put her to bed, and Mom to brush her hair. Some days she runs past you like you’re another lamp or barstool.

Bye, Honey.

Gone.

You love her, but now have to take your reward in what you hope is independence and not indifference.

Don’t tell Mom glows inside you.