“Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.” — Dante Alighieri, Inferno
In today’s missive, I aim to enlighten, educate and possibly repel with my top 10 moments of drop-dead fear.
That’s right. Sheer parental fear. Surely the worst kind.
In no particular order, here is the list of stomach-dropping, skip-a-heartbeat moments related to parenting.
10. The phone call from the school asking why my son was not in attendance, despite the fact that I had dropped him off and watched him walk onto the schoolyard an hour earlier. It turned out to be an innocent mix-up, but I was on the on-ramp to the highway before I learned otherwise. I think I audibly whimpered as I raced to my car, wondering the whole time where exactly I planned on driving to if my son was missing. Well-played, automated telephone school attendance system.
9. Watching my son take an ill-advised step onto a road in Greece and having to yank him back onto the sidewalk to avoid being struck down by a speeding car. Even though the speed limit was 40 km/hr, most cars were travelling at double the posted speed. He learned really quickly about differences in driving culture and how not following the rules of the road in this country can mean certain death. There’s a good reason why they say Greeks make great fighter pilots: they’re foolhardy and fearless when it comes to speed (and economics, apparently).
8. The random, disembodied, bloodcurdling scream from the basement. The boy had been playing on the elliptical machine with his cousin: one child on one pedal and the other child on the other pedal. Sort of like a makeshift teeter-totter, except with gears and sharp mechanical innards that chewed up my son’s ankle when he basically fell into it. The scream was much worse than the reality of his badly bruised ankle, which required a visit to the emergency room. I finally realized what my mom was thinking when she would race to my childhood screams, asking “Is it your head?!! Tell me it’s not your head!!”
7. The horrible sinking (sliding?) feeling when you realize a moment too late that your infant son is not physically ready to take on the water slide at Canada’s Wonderland. Of course he can sit up on his own, just not hurtling downwards on a slippery 45-degree angle. Watching him keel over sideways about halfway down the slide was a sight both hilarious and pathetic, if not disturbing. He emerged none the worse for wear, but my wife was convinced we basically sent him wilfully to his premature watery demise.
6. Corners, corners, everywhere corners. OK, maybe this is not a scary one to anyone not named Brett, but it still left a mark. The day my son was born, the physical dimensions of the world changed. I didn’t recall the world being so full of sharp edges and corners. For a good week after we were back from the hospital, I felt under siege by corners. Sharp, baby-head-bludgeoning corners.
5. Trusting my wife in my absence to impart proper rock-jumping technique to my son. HUGE mistake. There is videotape (I call it “evidence”) of her encouraging him to slowly and carefully jump down a massive rock face. I swear, the footage shows him missing the head-smashing contact by inches, mostly because he wasn’t fully committed to jumping outward and far away from the rocks. The resultant argument is ongoing a full five years after the incident.
4. The week SARS ruined Toronto. The landlords of our basement apartment had an elderly relative come to visit who subsequently came down with an illness and died shortly thereafter. We were advised to leave the premises with the understanding that this relative may have died from SARS. When my son developed a respiratory-related sickness, we feared the absolute worst. False alarm, but we were beyond rattled, even though he looked adorable in his little mask and infection control gown.
3. Even though I always know where I’m going and cannot possibly be lost (I am a man, after all), I’ve had our family quite lost in the bush of a provincial park. At night. Possibly near bears. Thankfully my family couldn’t read my mind, because I was pretty much freaking right out, yet exuding the outward calmness of a delusional male.
2. Dances with dogs that look like wolves: Me and my wife took a long walk near Scarborough Bluffs when she was heavily pregnant. Reaching the lake, we rested on some rocks until the calm dusk was shattered by the panting and low growling of what appeared to be two huge wolves. I was ready to start planning for both of us to swim for our lives when I saw the owner of the “wolves” marching down the hill. Nice dogs, mister.
1. Anything involving my father baby-sitting. His presence alone must elevate the risk of bodily injury by a factor of 10 times. My father is old-school when it comes to supervision (he would let the boy go down a manhole if it wasn’t welded shut. Actually, he would probably help him break the weld.). Great intentions; bad gauge of threshold of risk.
I suppose I can count myself lucky that I struggled to get to 10!
Fear not!
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