December 12, 2005

Tales From The Crib

Bravery from the mind of a 4-year-old

Jennifer Margulis

“I won’t be scared,” my 4-year-old daughter Athena assures me. “I want to do it, Mommy. Really I do!”

We are talking about an hour-long ropes course. Athena and I watch as several adults suit up in harnesses. One woman, who is doing the course with her teenage son, chatters about how she doesn’t think she’ll make it. In 10 years, only two other 4-year-olds have completed the course. One was the owner’s grandson. The other his nephew.

The harness swallows up my little girl and it takes the two leaders 10 minutes to find a helmet small enough to fit her head. They show her the movement: bend your knees to your chest, then stand up on the rope and stretch your hands above you as high as you can. The rope goes through a one-way feeder that cinches in place as you go.

Dangling six feet in the air from a 40-foot vertical rope, Athena listens to the instructions and then tries to follow them. But she’s so light, progress is slow. Watching her from the ground, I think — no, I hope — she will give up and ask to be let down.

I should know better.

When the vicious shark scene in “Finding Nemo” made her older sister hide her face in terror, Athena watched it placidly, crunching popcorn and barely blinking. When a roller coaster ride left other children shrieking with fear, Athena hopped off smiling.

One Saturday afternoon when Athena was only 3, we spent an hour looking around a dusty secondhand store for a desk and decided to check some other places before buying anything. “I have to go to the bathroom,” Athena announced as I was buckling her into the car.

“Can’t you hold it?” There was no place to use a restroom within miles.

“No!”

I felt awkward about going back into the store where we had just spent so much time without purchasing anything. I told Athena as much. “That’s OK, Mommy,” she said. “I’ll ask. But you have to come with me.”

She marched into the store without a trace of shyness. “I need to go poop,” she announced to the owner and his son behind the counter as they craned their heads forward to hear her. “May I use your potty, please?”

Another day we talked about whether she would give her tzedakah money to poor children or hurricane refugees. “I care about everyone, Mommy, even people I don’t know,” Athena explained, troubled at the idea of choosing. “Except mean people.” Tzedakah is a Jewish concept of giving and Athena has been steadily collecting coins, adding them to a piggy bank fashioned from a salt carton, in order to help people one day.

With a heart so big and an imagination to go with it, brave Athena sometimes picks up on other people’s fears. When she was a toddler, I tried to celebrate the first time she slept through the night by having a “midnight” picnic with hot chocolate and biscuits. Since it was winter and dark early, this was easy to do before bedtime. We grabbed a blanket and flashlights and I whisked cocoa on the stove.

A family of skunks had been visiting our compost pile and we sometimes saw their gleaming eyes in the dark and often smelled the acrid scent they left behind. “I hope the skunk isn’t out there,” I said, absent-mindedly voicing a distant fear. When we unfolded the blanket outside Athena clung to me more tightly than a baby chimpanzee. “Baby ’Ena scared dat skunk,” she whined. “I want go inside now.”

But she doesn’t falter as she is pulled onto the narrow platform high in the trees. She waits her turn patiently and then flies down an 80-foot zip line suspended in the tree canopy 50 feet off the ground. She’s so light I’m afraid she won’t have enough momentum to make it across and she’ll end up dangling so far from the next platform that an instructor will have to come rescue her.

Instead, Athena makes it across with a great squeal of happiness like she’s been doing this all her life. She readies herself for the next feat: to propel straight down a tree trunk. Next time I feel shy about putting myself out there, I ask myself what Athena would do. Just the thought gives me the strength I need to try.

Jennifer Margulis lives in Ashland with three small children, one 5’11” husband and four wild deer, which get fat off the foliage in her yard.