the bigger picture
A couple months ago, my family was visiting Barnegat Lighthouse. Once you wind down the paths, past the light house, through a bit of maritime forest, and if you stay on the beach rather than the boardwalk, you come across the beach boulders. Kids love to play and climb on these big, jagged rocks. Their formations create great lookouts divided by deep crevices full of tidal life and dark abysses. Walking on the rocks is a slippery and shoe-bending adventure along the bay.
Our oldest is five, and I know that every time we visit the lighthouse he has his eye on the kids who get to climb rocks. He looked at me, and I knew. Today is the day. I looked over my shoulder at my husband aways behind on the beach with our ambling 3-year-old daughter. Okay, I thought, as I let him take his first very cautious steps onto an outer rock. What I really wanted to do was pull him off, keep him safe—quiet the part of my brain that was flashing images of bloody faces and broken limbs and freezing waters! As he journey toward the next rock, my heartbeat quickened and my fearful thoughts got louder. Yet there was another part of my brain that it was time to listen to.
Janna! This is what you did as a kid all the time! it said. You climbed and fell and slipped and jumped. You were fine. You learned to be brave. Let you son be brave.
My fear was real, but the past was true. As a little girl, I adventured through the woods, climbed big rocks, and learned how to fall. I stretched big steps across dock slips to balance on wobbly boats. I road my pink and blue three-wheeler full-tilt-boogie down our neighbors driveway guaranteed to crash every race. Crashing was the point, not winning. Knee scrapes were trophies.
“Be brave,” I told myself. I slung my purse over my shoulder, took a few hops to catch up to my little boy in his yellow rain slicker standing on a big rock. “This is so cool, Mom!” he yelled. I hopped onto his rock and held his hand and we ventured on, me narrating his every step. I knew it was overkill, that my voice was making it hard for his brain to discern the good moves from the bad ones. But, hey, this over-narration was better than saying No to the rocks—again. And if I held his hand and he did fall, well then, I’m strong and nimble enough to keep him from the waves and deep cracks.
Eventually my mouth quieted and my hand let go and I let him “get the hang of it,” just as I know my dad did for me decades ago. Mother and son, rock by rock, both getting braver.
On the ride home, my brain got loud again. What have we done to our children? How will they ever learn to be brave? I challenged the thoughts out loud to my husband, who had shared my same fears of Cameron’s rock falling. “What are we doing to our kids? Are we being too safe?” With our two kids asleep in the backseat, he and I talked the whole way home about how we—a family who loves nature—need to get a little braver.
Nature—even and especially the unpredictablities and dangers of it—is such an amazing teacher. Its very existence is the language of our planet, and as I look around, I see that fewer people are speaking that language. In the last few decades, nature has become too scary. Too unpredictable. Too wild.
We talk a lot about rewilding the land. Perhaps in the same conversations we could be talking about rewilding the humans.
