Fear Factor
Let me count the ways I'm afraid of my daughter.
by AM Homes
December 11, 2006
And so she arrived. We met briefly in the delivery room before she was whisked
away. She seemed quite nice: beautiful, sweet, blue-eyed, easygoing.
Having finally met her in person, was I still afraid? You bet. Was I more afraid?
With every new development came new fear. If I was not more afraid then I was
differently and increasingly worried. At first, you worry about their survival, and then whether they're normal, and then about keeping them safe, warm, dry,
well-fed and not letting them fall off the changing table, and then not choking,
not putting forks in the electric outlets, and so on. You baby proof — knowing
there is really no such thing as baby proofing. They start to walk, to run, to
talk — to understand what you are talking about — and you teach them to stay
on the sidewalk, to wait for the walk signal, to look both ways, not to
run after the ball that rolls into the street. You worry about the world they
live in — will it be a safe place, will it still exist? What will her
generation be witness to?
I blink, and she is bigger, now three-and-a-half. And am I still scared of her? Absolutely.
She scares me both because she reminds me of me, and because she is different
from me. I know how her mind works, and I have no idea what she's thinking.
She terrifies me because she thinks she can fly like Angela Ballerina. She believes
she can do anything; she wants to be a kite like Flat Stanley, she acts like
Curious George — climbing from her bed, across the window sill to get something
off my dresser — graceful, balanced, but terrifying. Another day, I
spotted her dragging a chair from the living room into the bathroom and followed
her. I found her unlocking the medicine cabinet. Why? Because she needed
to get Band-Aids.
"Come away from the window," I said. Her eyes sparkled mischievously.
The only time I've spanked my daughter was when I saw her just about to
drop something out the window — which, of course, has window guards, but still . . . "Don't
do it," I said. "Don't drop anything out that window. It's
very dangerous. You could hurt someone." Admittedly it was only a piece
of paper that she wanted to drop out the window, but still . . . She smiled. "Come
away from the window," I said. Her eyes sparkled mischievously. She giggled.
Her hand crept closer to the open window. She slipped the paper out the window
and let it go. "It's flying," she said. "See, it's
flying. It can fly." I charged across the room and slapped her bottom. She
didn't cry but looked at me, baffled, as if to say, "What did
you do that for?" "We don't throw things out the window. No, no, no.
That's a time out — a really big time out." I live in terror
of her trying it herself — her greatest dream is to achieve flight. I have
strange flashbacks to hearing about the death of Art Linkletter's daughter,
who, in 1969, threw herself out her apartment window, reportedly while on
LSD.
I put my daughter on the sofa and told her to sit. She giggled again — once more
reminding me of myself. "But it flew, it really flew."
Fascinated by matches, by fire, as was I, my daughter is always asking
us to light candles, to play birthday party. Recently, with another adult supervising,
she leaned headlong into a Play-Doh cake with ten candles burning and singed
her hair. The apartment was instantly filled with that particular burnt-hair
smell. I came running. "Are you all right? Are you sure you're all
right?" I asked again and again, while checking her hair to be sure she
was not in flames.
©2006 A.M. Homes and Nerve Media
About the Author
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A.M. Homes is the author of numerous novels and short stories, including The
Safety of Objects, The End Of Alice, Music For Torching and This Book Will Save Your Life (Viking, 2006). Her memoir The Mistress's Daughter will be published by Viking in
April 2007. |
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