When Kathleen was home recently she pulled out the home movies that I’d transferred to DVD. I don’t think I’d looked at them other than to check to make sure that the transfer was good. We sat down as she skipped through movies taken when she was very little. I was thin, my hair still black and she was completely fearless.
In one summer video when she couldn’t have been three, her mother filmed while she and I were in the back yard of the old house. She was insisting that we do it again. What “it” was didn’t become clear until I saw myself set down the coffee mug and lift her to the platform of the swing set. From my casualness and her urgent demands it was clear that we’d done this over and over. I saw myself pick up my mug and walk off, unconcerned, as she reached out, grabbed the monkey bars, and dangled there, three times her own length above the ground. Watching now, all of us were astounded as this little girl swung and kicked and the younger, casual me eventually put down his mug again and caught her, just at the moment she lost her grip. We viewers gasped, but our younger selves on screen just did it again.
We skipped forward several years, coming eventually to a now five year old in a green checked dress who stood beside her sister, not yet a year old and in a stroller. Kathleen sang a medley of songs starting with “Twinkle Twinkle” then “Skidamarink” and a big finish with “The Lumberjack Song” (a Monty Python classic, and for some reason, the song we sang at bedtime every night.) She doesn’t sing now, but the younger Kathleen had no qualms about singing as loud as she could.
There’s a part of her fearlessness that’s survived. She’s a professional musician and I’ve never seen a hint of stage fright in her. She can get up and play with anyone. I’m not sure I can take any credit for that, but it’s there. And there are other things I see. She’s independent, unafraid to take off on her own to visit friends in New York, make decisions that’s right for her, and plot her own path in life. Her younger sister is much the same. Cross either of them at your own risk.
As parents, adults, there’s so much we try and protect our children from. That’s well and good, but there are also adventures for them, monkey bars to hang from, cliffs to dive off of. As frightening as it sounds, sometimes you just have to pick up your coffee cup and watch them try something new and scary.
I smile every time Kathleen calls me. Her ringtone on my phone is “The Lumberjack Song.”