I Thought I’d Have More Time

I thought I’d have more time.

There have only been a few instances in my life when I’ve had that thought. Once was when my father died. He had been given three months and somehow made it to a year, and I still found myself thinking, I thought I’d have more time. Now I find myself entering—no, already having entered—into a season of parenting that I had no idea would come so soon. My entering into this phase was revealed to me, as many things are, because of a bouncy-house.

I always knew that someday my role as parent would be more about soothing hurt feelings than wiping bottoms, but I always imagined it differently… I’d sit on my daughter’s bed with her as she cried her teenage eyes out because some boy asked some other girl to homecoming. I would acknowledge her very real teen pain and share some story about myself in a similar situation and then move on to how things seem bad now but we will laugh about it later, reminding her that she is a wonderful, strong, smart, beautiful young woman and that any boy would be foolish to pass up spending homecoming with her—all the while being secretly relieved that she won’t be going out with a boy, at least not that night.

I did not think I would be sitting on a bench in the middle of an indoor play-place holding my three-year-old and trying to explain to her the concept of random violence. But we don’t often get to set our own stage, do we?

I recently took my three-year-old daughter to a birthday party for one of her classmates. There were multiple birthdays going on at the location, so some kids we knew and others we did not. Neither helicopter parent nor free-range parent, I moved around the party in what I like to think of as vigilant nonchalance. My daughter has proven herself capable of running around a playground perfectly fine without my assistance, and they check at the door to make sure kids are with their appropriate grown-up, so I tried to stay in the same general area and let her do her thing. When she and her friends climbed into the bounce-house, I followed along the perimeter and chatted with another parent while we watched the fun inside. But it wasn’t all fun in there. A small boy, maybe two years old, was clawing at and pulling the hair of a much older boy, who, to his credit, was trying to disentangle himself, although unsuccessfully, without resorting to force. The attacker was clearly upset, and I looked around to see if his parent was near so I could alert him or her that the child was in distress, but I could find no one hovering about. I tried to talk to the boy, “Are you OK? Do you want to get out?” thinking that maybe he was lashing out because he was scared and confused.

And then my daughter bounced too close to this troubled child and was caught in his grasp. Time froze. I can still see the look of pain on my daughter’s face and can still hear the wail that my child made as her head was pulled back by her hair and her face was clawed. And then time sped up, and suddenly I, too, was shouting and trying to climb into the bounce-house to rescue my girl while a man pushed past me to get to the child and, after finally prying him off, took him away to sit on a bench and finish his tantrum. I scooped up my daughter and took her to a different bench and tried to calm her.

“Why was he mean?” she asked when she had quieted some.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he was scared and didn’t know what else to do? Or maybe he was angry about something? I don’t know, honey, I don’t know… Was that scary for you?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“He was pulling your hair. Does it still hurt?”

“Yeah. And he was hitting me too.”

“Yes, he was. He shouldn’t have done that. It was not very nice.”

And that’s about all I could think to say. I didn’t want to get into hypothetical behavior issues that the boy and his family might have been trying to work through (of course, if this was the case, leaving him in a bouncy-house unsupervised might not have been a great choice, but, I confess, I do not know the whole story…). Maybe I could have tried to explain the idea of displaced aggression, but I didn’t. I stared daggers at the father from across the room, waiting for him to turn and look at my child, or me, and give if not some kind of apology, at least a look of acknowledgement, a shrug, a wave, anything at all. But he never turned around.

I was mad. Mad at the small boy, at his parents, at the stupid birthday party, at the inventor of the bounce-house, and at the injustice of it all. But, mostly I was mad that I had been unable to do anything about it. I was two feet away and all I could do was watch in helpless terror as my child was hit and clawed and shrieking in pain and surprise on the other side of a mesh wall.

It was a moment that brought up all kinds of feelings of helplessness: I cannot control the actions of others; I cannot control the parenting choices of others; I cannot make others see the world as I do. I cannot protect my daughter from the outside world, even if I’m standing right there.

And then it was over. My daughter, distracted by the opportunity to gorge on something with icing (doesn’t really matter what), dried her tears and headed back into the birthday fray. But I was left shaky. Like, really shaky. Why? My daughter was fine, no cuts or bruises to show for the attack, at least not on the outside. As far as personal injuries go, my girl has suffered worse and survived just fine. But something about the idea that I will not be—am not—able to protect her from the world struck me. Influences, that are not me or my husband or carefully chosen screen time and storybooks, can, and will, leave their mark on my child.

I thought I understood this going into it. I understood that our children are their own people with their own independent thoughts and ideas and feelings. I even think it’s kind’of beautiful how we each, as humans, are sculpted, edges smoothed or honed, and painted by the world (yes, the whole world and not just the tiny family-unit world) we move through. I feel blessed to even be a single color in the palette that paints my children into works of art, and I believe a single-hued portrait would be rather dull indeed. I am excited to see my children become a complex collage of experiences. I picture them someday in the lounge of a college dorm, exchanging thoughts and half-baked ideas about the world with their dorm-mates, eating pizza and procrastinating writing a paper on the Greco/Roman influences of Byzantine vases.

But my daughter is three years old. Only three years out of the womb and 15 years away from “leaving home,” much closer to being at one with me (I mean, seriously, we used to share a blood supply!) than out “on her own.” My role as “parent” is changing, and I find myself stumbling as I try to find my new footing—and just when I was starting to get the hang of care and feeding! Tears used to mean tired, wet, hungry, or cold. Check. Now it’s becoming more complicated. Tears mean nervous, scared, angry, frustrated, confused, hurt, sad, and often a complex combination of these. I knew it would happen sooner or later, but I was not expecting to feel this transition yet.

OK, maybe I’m being a little dramatic about the whole bounce-house incident. And I acknowledge that I do not know that poor little boy’s whole story. I do not relate the incident to indict him nor his parents, nor bounce-houses, really. But it was, for me, a moment when I was really hit upside the head with the notion that she is, at least in some ways, already out “on her own.”

I know it happens. Someday my children will grow up and leave me, and I will not be there to protect them. I can be there waiting in the wings to help kiss boo-boos and soothe the hurt away, but I will not always be there to stop the blow. I knew it would happen eventually. I just thought I’d have more time…