Safety vs Wing-spreading

February 9, 2012
A response to my previous post (Daddy with a shotgun) has set me to pondering and remembering two incidents, one from my childhood and one from my son Brian’s childhood.
 A shallow irrigation channel ran in front of our house in Utah. Sometimes the shallow ditch would run with cold, clear water from the Provo River. I don’t think it was ever more than 12 inches deep, and as a three-year-old child, I asked if I could “go swimming in the ditch.” My dad was doing something outside and he said okay. I put on my little pink bathing suit and enjoyed lolling around in the gutter, (a pleasure I have never relinquished?) The tiny current propelled me across the front of our yard, and it almost DID seem like I was swimming, walking along with my hands on the grassy bottom. On that day, I don’t remember that any of my older brothers were out with me, but many times before, I’d seen them let the current carry them through the culvert that run under our driveway. From my low vantage point, I could clearly see the headspace through the culvert and since they considered it a mark of bravery to go under the driveway, I decided to do it too. I was much smaller than they were anyway and felt not one qualm of fear.
   The problem arose when my Dad checked on me just AFTER I’d gone into the culvert under the driveway. He called me, I answered that I was under the driveway. “Are you stuck?”
“No.” I also wasn’t in any hurry. Eventually, I floated through and my Dad scooped me out of the water. He made me go in the house! He said I had done something dangerous. But it seemed to my three-year-old reasoning that “swimming” in the current on the grass and “swimming” through a culvert with ample headspace for a tot my size were pretty equal if there was any danger. (Of course now that I have the perspective of an adult, I see it differently.)
  A similar incident occured shortly after we moved from our home in the high desert of L.A. county to the tall pines of the Black Forest in Colorado. Brian was five and he said he was going to climb a tree. I told him to hang on tight. The next thing I knew, Brian was fifty feet up, perched in a pine tree. He called down that he could see Pike’s Peak.
Just then, Jeff came home from work. “Look at the little red squirrel in the top of that Pine tree,” I said. When it registered with Jeff that the squirrel was Brian wearing a red sweat shirt, his impulse was to command him down, but agreed with me on second thought to let him do it his own way. He was a wirey, very strong fellow and I knew that his instinct would warn him away from using a branch that wouldn’t hold his weight. He called out all the things he could see from up there, (Like Yertle the Turtle?) and finally, climbed down as readily as he had gone up.
I admit that when he posts videos of himself running down rock cliff faces and climbing sheer mountains (or descending into caves.. .oh my!) my heart quales. But better for him to find his limits, to know how high he can soar than to keep always physically safe. The only broken bone he’s had occured when a neighbor boy deliberately rode a skateboard into him. (We won’t mention frostbite here, since that would weaken my arguement).
It’s a line that as a parent we are constantly prayerfully, thoughtfully seeking. My dad was right to forbid me from the culvert. I did not perceive the dangers, but they were not only very real, but very likely. What if my bathing suit had snagged and I couldn’t get free? What if the sluicegate upstream was opened wider, even accidentally?
Life is complicated. Parenting is complicated. How could we do it without the guidance of the Holy Spirit? 

2 Comments

  • Reply Rob and Marseille February 13, 2012 at 2:42 am

    and the window pane incident? 😉

  • Reply Beth M. Stephenson February 13, 2012 at 4:57 am

    They're referring to incident where my son was opening a window to see how cold it felt outside. (He knew it was below zero.) The interior pane broke and the edge served as fillet knife for my poor boy's fingers. I think the total was 48 stitches. We were in the midst of a snow storm, so it took half an hour for the ambulance to get there. My stomach goes to jelly just remembering.

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