Lesson Learned

Lena got out of bed in a screaming panic the other night because she traded a video game to somebody and then decided she wanted it back. This is a child who doesn’t do anything on impulse so I knew she didn’t take this trade lightly and I knew it was going to be that much more painful for her to find out she had to stick with the trade. She is so cautious that I worry that she misses out on things because of the fear of what-if. And because I tend to think in extremes, I think that if she is like this at 9, she’ll be like this at 39 and she might miss lots of really good stuff and her life will be an empty, antiseptic, white room of nothingness in order to stave off regret.

Through her sobs she explained the situation to me and begged me to help her convince the kid to trade back. Basically, she wanted me to use my mom powers for evil. I very gently explained the ethics of playground trading and how it’s not really kosher to demand the game back. This explanation was followed by more tears and louder wailiing, which I encouraged. There was also a significant amount of flailing of various body parts, which I also encouraged from a safe distance. This child is extremely long in the limbs, so when she flailed around in this fit of regret, she looked like one of those giant promotional inflatables in the shape of a guy. The one with arms that don’t inflate, so they just go whipping wildly around. Her elbows and knees can be deadly in this state so I comforted her from across the room.

While Lena worked on getting out her sadness, all I could think about was how this is a kid who did not need to learn the lesson of the impulsive trade. Again, my mind went to the bleakness of a future with no risk. She already misses out on a lot of fun things because of her sense of caution and this wasn’t even an impulsive trade for her. She’d had the game since April and she didn’t like it. It wasn’t fun. She had been sitting on it for 2 months and when the opportunity to trade it with a friend came up, she thought it over and went for it.

After about 45 minutes of there-theres and I-know-it’s-so-hards, she calmed down and I let her sleep in my bed just like the good ol’ days and we talked about how much fun the good ol’ days were and how much fun these right-now days are and she started to talk about selling her fresh trade to the used game store in order to save for a certain Mario Brothers game, and she decided that there was a bright side to her trade after all.

Taking her lead, I decided I would also look on the bright side. Lena definitely did not need to learn to be more cautious, so I am going to cling to the hope that the part of her brain that encourages caution was already all filled up, so that this little experience wouldn’t even register with the be-careful gremlins in there. I’m going to choose to believe that what is really imprinted on her little brain is the fact that when she has regret, nobody that loves her is going to tell her to suck it up and move on. Nobody will ever tell her to lie in her freshly-made bed. I hope she learned to treat the people she loves with the same respect and I hope she learned that she deserves the same from the people in her life. Instead of imagining a risk-free, gain-free life for her, I’m going to imagine that she’ll always be surrounded by people who will support her through her successes and failures. People who will encourage her to fill her white rooom of nothingness type life with color and fun, and people who will teach her that experiencing regret isn’t the scariest thing in life. People who will risk their own soft tissue in order to let her flail her bony elbows all around while she wails. And people who will let her come to the bright side all on her own.