Kids face fears that once petrified me
Originally published in June 2005, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.
Last week, our older girl did something unusual: She woke me in the middle of the night and said she was afraid.
I tried to say, “What are you afraid of, sweetheart?” but I’m sure it came out more like “Whum fraiduv, swettert?” That’s OK, she’s lived with me more than 4 years now and understands all my languages.
“I don’t know,” she told me, which meant she’d had a bad dream and was working on forgetting it.
What she usually needs when this kind of thing happens is for my wife, Lisa, or me to keep her company a few minutes while she goes to the bathroom and back to bed, rub her back a little and tell her everything’s all right, then check on her a couple of times while she gets to sleep. That’s how it worked last week.
She’s my daughter, though, and has my hyperactive imagination, so once in awhile she gets so worked up that returning to sleep isn’t an option for an hour or more. She’ll go to the bathroom every 15 minutes and want to be walked back to bed every time.
I’m shamelessly selfish when it comes to sleep; once I’m under, I don’t want to resurface until I have to. Even so, I’ll spend much of that hour groggily awake, and my wife (who also still handles most of our younger girl’s nighttime wakeups) will be alert the whole time.
Frustration is a natural part of such adventures, but I can hardly get too aggravated. To be honest, our girl is bolder than I was at her age.
There’s not a lot I remember real well about being 4 years old, but I do know I was often wide-eyed when I should have been asleep.
At least one night – there were probably more but I only recall the one – I made my parents miserable with my anxieties. It must have been warm because my bedroom window was open, and the blind was moving in a slight breeze. This in turn caused a soft scuffing sound as the blind rubbed the wall, and I was electric, alternating between hiding under the covers and running out to get my parents.
What was wrong? I don’t remember much except thinking those scuffing noises sounded a lot like the shoes of someone creeping around the room, possibly trying to be quiet as he completed his mission to capture a little boy for his oven.
Scary things simply scared me, and continued to do so until I learned they could also be fun.
Our big girl is facing such fears earlier than I did, and so far she’s doing better with them. Last month, when a carnival set up in the Mesa Mall parking lot, she saw the haunted house ride and wanted to go in. I managed to distract her from it one day, then she spent the whole week discussing it. Lisa and I explained that the point of carnival haunted houses is to scare you. It would have ghosts in it, skeletons, witches and lots of noises. It would be fake, we said, but still scary.
She understood and still wanted to go. Lisa and I decided to respect her wishes and the next weekend I joined our girl for a ride through the haunted house.
It was all we’d told her it would be, beginning with some kind of shrieking banshee thing with flashing red eyes and ending with a roar from the masked ride operator as we came out. After seeing that first creature, our girl held tight to my arm and buried her face in my shirt. She was shaking at the end, truly scared, but she still managed to thank the man operating the ride as we left. On the way to the next attraction, she said “Wow, that was scary,” and started laughing about it.
That night she drifted off easily and slept soundly. But I had bad dreams.