The title of this blog is true in a lot of things in my life. I’m necessarily wise, but I do have perspective on things. We gain perspective with experience and time. I can remember my children when they first started walking with some level of proficiency. They would do the little walk/run thing where they were cantered forward as they moved, the only thing keeping them upright was the next foot falling forward and catching them from tumbling over.
My children had no idea what could happen if they fell. They had no idea that falling on their face on the macadam surface of the street would result in scraped limbs or face. They didn’t care, they were walking—and walking was fun. New freedoms, new experiences.
As a parent or an adult even, I could see the potential for disaster. I could imaging the pain. I could envision the days of healing dermis. And all that made me wary, cautious and worried for my children as I saw them do this new thing called walking.
Sometimes I’d even get a jolt of adrenaline I could palpably feel when I saw a child fall or get injured in any way. I had to learn to work through it, because while it is my place to keep my children safe, it’s not my place to keep them from experiencing the world.
But there are things I can’t watch. I have spine issues, predominantly in my neck, but not exclusively. I’ve had two spinal fusions and a host of other things done to try and alleviate the myalgia, neuralgia and pain I have. I’ve had good years and bad years. There are good days and bad days and sometimes there are even good hours and bad hours. We don’t know when the injury happened to my neck but it appears it was broken at some point when I was a child and then healed wrong.
My parents would have never let me go untreated if we had known—but none of us knew. I remember as an early teen, sometime after stopping competitive gymnastics, starting to crack my neck a lot. When. I was in college it was worse and then when I was a co-op at IBM my manager sent me to a chiropractor who did an x-ray and told me my neck was straight, not curved like it should be. Since that time I’ve been working to try and alleviate or mitigate what I can with my spine.
What happened to cause it? I don’t know, we’ve speculate on many things but I have the highest suspicion it was close to the end of my gymnastics years when I did a roundoff back handspring tuck and for some reason pulled it at the last second. I fell on the right side of my face and I saw my feet over my left shoulder. But who knows at this point. It’s only recollection and supposition.
There are a few things I can’t watch though—my son doing roundoff back tucks is one of them. We were at tumbling on Sunday and I realized Zak was going to have my son practice his back tucks on 12” foam mats. But I couldn’t watch. I grabbed my laptop, told my husband I couldn’t do it and went to the car for the rest of the hour.
Could my son break his neck? Yes. But he’s trained with his instructor and hasn’t been asked to do it until he knew what he was doing. Chances are very low. I couldn’t put my fears onto my son. It wasn’t fair. He has to live his life and shouldn’t be hampered by what shaped my life.
After the lesson, Zak sent me a video of my son doing his roundoff back tuck. I must have watched it ten times; I was so proud. I wasn’t scared because I knew he was successful in the video. He’s pretty good for a seven-year-old.
The Big Boy Update: I had a brief conversation with my son’s integrative therapist (her name is Liz) with my husband on the phone today. We’re going to talk more. Figuring out what motivation to do (or not do) things with my son has been a trick. We may have to have him skip after school activities and playing with friends if he’s not able to complete work at school. I’m hoping just the thought of working after he gets home on more school work will help him work while he’s at school. And don’t get me wrong, this isn’t additional work. It’s him taking three hours at school to get something done that should have taken him twenty minutes—and distracting the other students while he isn’t working. Hopefully we’ll figure out a good plan that works for him. Once he gets some confidence back I hope his anxiety will subside.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter has had one of her front top teeth loose for some time. It did that thing my son’s front teeth did as it became more loose: it pushed over on top of the other front tooth, looking odd. My daughter wanted the tooth out, badly. She worked on it for almost an hour this morning until it fell out. She wanted to put the tooth in a bag, saying the only person she wanted to touch the tooth was the tooth fairy.
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