I'd rather teach my children to run

Tiny True Stories #21

Welcome!

to the twenty-first edition of Tiny True Stories! Hello to you, lovely new subscribers I met at the NonfictioNow conference! Someone said that NFN is more like a family reunion than a conference, and that sounds exactly right to me. Maybe it’s too much but I don’t mind being too much: welcome to the fam, new friends! This is a monthly newsletter where I share supershort true stories you can read in 5 minutes or less. If you want to get right to that story, scroll on down past the picture!

(Substack is being very glitchy right now and I can’t delete the extra subscribe buttons throughout—so sorry! But I want to send this now so I’m leaving them :)

But first, I’m sorry for the unexpected pause in Tiny True Stories. Last month I went rock climbing, and I was feeling so great! I was feeling strong again after giving birth! I was going to do one more climb! And when I jumped down from the wall, I somehow landed wrong and tore my ACL completely. For the first week I could barely move. I couldn’t walk, couldn’t stand long enough to cook anything, couldn’t carry my giant baby up and down the stairs, couldn’t step into the bathtub for a shower. Just getting done with the basic tasks of the day took so much longer. My husband showed me videos of athletes tearing their ACL doing simple movements, and that made me feel a little better. If even a pro athlete could tear their ACL by making a small lunge, maybe I wasn’t so weak and sad.

Please do not feel too bad for me! I had surgery this week to help get my mobility all the way back, it went well, I have a good ice machine, insurance to cover (some) of it, and lots of people to support me. I write this sitting on the couch while my mom and husband do everything for the kids, the house, and for me. My mom cooks, does the dishes, helps my son walk, takes my daughter outside to play, brings me coffee. My husband cooks too, snuggles our daughter, brings me food, keeps track of my pain medicine, makes sure the ice is cold, helps me get dressed, and makes me laugh.

It's been a good reminder that any one of us can (and probably will) become disabled at any time, that MANY disabled people rely on Medicare and deserve that care, and also that much of the world is still very inaccessible. For example, when I went in for my MRI, I had to park very far away because I didn’t have my temporary disabled parking pass yet. I could walk a bit, but not very far. I’d told them I needed a wheelchair, but it didn’t occur to me that, for liability reasons, no one would come get me from my car. I just assumed someone would help me. So I crutched my way across a huge parking structure and arrived sweating to my supposedly accessible wheelchair to take me the rest of the way. On the way out, I wanted a wheelchair to get back to the entrance. When I asked, the person at the front desk actually sighed and I had to stand there, in front of a long line of people, while she called person after person, trying to find someone willing to help me.

I have a spouse that could have driven me! But he was home with our children so that I could go to this appointment, and again, no one told me that they wouldn’t really be able to help me all that much. And these are just a few minor indignities for a short period of time. I thought often about how those indignities must pile up after years of chronic illness or a lifetime of disability.

Anyway, that’s what’s happened/happening over here. Of course I’m going to write about it.

I promise I wasn’t flipping off the camera intentionally.

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Today’s Tiny True Story

The floor is lava in our house again

Our house in Northern California, far from any volcanoes, is often flooded with lava. Our backyard, too. Sometimes your shoes or socks or the rug protects you, but usually my daughter is the only one wearing the appropriate gear. And sometimes none of us are, and all we can do is run around screaming until the danger passes.

One afternoon I was attempting to work on my computer while my daughter watched TV, and she started to whimper, jostled my arm over and over, tumbled around on the couch beside me, knocking me with her long legs and sharp elbows.

I snapped, “What’s the problem?”

She turned her eyes up to me in real fear. “The floor is lava!”

When she was much younger, she got curious about volcanoes after seeing one in a book. We showed her a few diagrams and pictures, and of course, before we could think about it, Google was showing her some videos. They weren’t graphic, but they were real eruptions. I watched something change in her little face as she saw the smoke and fire and noise of it all, a tiny crack in her bedrock sense of the world’s safety. For many months after, she would ask multiple times a day if there were any volcanoes nearby. She wanted to watch the videos again, even though they scared her. I avoid things that scare me, but she found comfort in looking at them straight.

She’s a little older now, and still, the floor is lava almost once a day. When we leave the house, there’s a different danger: the cracks. “Mom!” my daughter yells, “Don’t step on the cracks!” Even when we are in a hurry, or if the cracks are caulked lines between bricks, impossible to keep my toes within, my daughter warns me, “The cracks! Mooooooom!” It’s never occurred to me to ask her what happens if we do step on them.

One day, while rock climbing in the gym, I took a gentle jump off the wall and landed wrong. My leg made a shape it’s not supposed to, tearing a ligament in my knee. The ground was soft. I was careful. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Now the edges of my rug are lava, the tiny lip of the bathroom doorway a crack that snarls danger at me.

I didn’t teach my daughter either of these games. But anytime she plays with friends, and the grass is lava, they all catch on immediately. They scream and they cling and they love it. How are both these games so universal? Though it’s possible she picked them up from one of her books or tv shows, when I ask her, my daughter can’t tell me where she learned them.

I used to think children were born fearless. My son is almost one, and he still tried to walk off the edge of a dock into the water, not knowing where the edge of danger was yet. But I’m wrong. Of course children are born with fears. The simplest, most primal: where are you? What is happening? When my daughter was a baby, she was surprised by a balloon popping and she became terrified of them for years. It didn’t matter that there was no real danger. When my daughter was having a tantrum the other day and screaming, my son’s eyes filled with tears and he cried, too. He didn’t know yet what a scream could be for, only that it hurt his ears. This is the project of our lives: slowly learning which fears to hold, and which ones to let go.

Even when I’m not writing about the bombs and the kidnappings and the guns I’m writing about the bombs and the kidnappings and the guns. We, all of us, use our violence to teach our children what to fear.

Every day I say some version of “You need to be safe” and every day I bite my tongue. My son tries to walk off a dock and I grab his arm; an unknown dog tries to lick his face and I scoop him up, out of teeth’s way. I want to but can’t scoop my daughter every moment anymore. Even if I yell stop, she often goes ahead anyway. Unless she risks death or serious injury, I try to let her learn on her own. My daughter jumps on the couch and I warn her of the hard surfaces and then I bite my tongue. My daughter runs ahead of me onto the gravel and I bite my tongue. My daughter chases after a friend who is cruelly ignoring her and I bite my tongue. Each time, she comes back to me and I bite my tongue to keep from saying I told you so. Instead I just hug her and say I know it hurts. My daughter is safe or she is wounded and I never know whether to teach bravery or self-protective fear.

When she was little, I spent many nights sobbing over my daughter’s perfect, tiny body, sure that something was wrong and I was just not seeing it. The floor was lava, the house was lava, the world was lava.

Even when I’m alone, walking down the street, I find myself automatically stepping over the cracks. I’m so proud of my children’s tiny brave moments—a taller ladder at the playground, a loud no for a friend playing too rough, a needle at the doctor’s office—of course I am. But secretly, I think my children can never have too much fear. When I teach them to be brave I’m lying. I want them to run away instead, save themselves. When my daughter tells me the floor is lava, I’ll never tell her it isn’t.

Perfect crack-stepping form

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Today’s Letters of Recommendation

1. Ben & Jerry’s topped mint ice cream (thin mint vibes with chocolate ganache on top!)

2. Everyone I talked to prior to having surgery told me to get one of these ice machines, and they were so right. It’s like an ice pack on a timer that you never have to get up and change manually. Get one if you’re going to be sitting and icing for any period of time!

3. Watching the Great British Baking Show with your kid. Usually my daughter watches her shows and we watch ours later, but since I’ve been resting so much, I wanted to find something we could both enjoy and boy was it excellent hearing her saying “YAY! SHE GOT A HANDSHAKE!”

Wishing you peace in a time when that feels almost impossible,

Jill