My husband suggested taking our one-and-a-half year old daughter to the park last weekend and my first thought was to pack her a helmet. After all, dozens of park hazards immediately came to mind: trees falling over, errant baseballs, a sudden tornado that might lift her up and then roughly deposit her in a mobile home community. Protection of the cranium simply goes without saying. That, and a box of latex gloves (Have you been to the park lately?) and several products in the anti-bacterial category. Actually, it made far more sense for us to monitor the recreational area from inside the vehicle with our daughter safely secured in her car seat.
However, my husband doesn’t generally share my fears, rational or otherwise. He led our daughter to the side of a pond and gave her a handful of breadcrumbs, encouraging her to scatter them freely to the ducks. I, on the other hand, kept a firm grip on the rest of her body, making sure she didn’t get too close to the water. Even if that meant that the breadcrumbs landed squarely on her shoes, several yards from the shore, causing great annoyance amongst the birds, fish and other inhabitants of the pond’s ecosystem.
And were we so different from the other couple near us who also had a small child? A very large and openly hostile goose was wandering about the grass, and the little boy’s father actually laughed while he chased after it. Meanwhile, his mother, fully aware that absolutely no good could come of this, swooped up the child, bundled him into her jacket, and said, “Don’t get near that filthy thing. It will peck out both of your eyes.” Apparently, she, too, had learned something from viewing Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” And yes, I’m sure we both shared the opinion that it was extremely foolish for Mitch to yield to the silly whim of his little sister and pack up the lovebirds prior to fleeing for their lives.
Perhaps I am overly fearful, and even standing in the way of my child’s learning. And how will she ever develop a joie de vivre if I am forever washing her hands and steering her away from, for example, that urine-soaked person sitting on the park bench who is mumbling very unkind things about the characters on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show?” (And what happened in his life that made his current outlook rather negative and particularly anti-Phyllis and Rhoda? Was he, at some point, full of hope and joyfully throwing his hat up into the air in downtown Minneapolis? Then his mother pounced on him, demanding that he keep it on because it was winter and that he would catch pneumonia? Good-bye, carefree and spontaneous. Hello, substance abuse. Bugger off, Mr. Grant.)
The extreme repercussions are worrisome, but I generally believe that maternal concern cannot be helped. One must chalk it up to genetic programming and the natural protective instinct a mother feels toward her offspring. But clearly not all mothers are like this. Exhibit A: the woman across the pond who let her child run around barefoot as if this park weren’t littered with used heroin needles. Exhibit B: the woman who wasn’t even present, but entrusted her kid, already knee-deep in the pond, to the very inattentive nanny smoking near the Mary-Tyler-Moore fellow.
Our daughter eventually finished dispersing her bag of breadcrumbs. And a few actually made their way into the jaws of some rather aggressive fish. I’m not sure whether or not a horror film has been made about killer carp. However, given the opportunity, I could very likely imagine one. Fortunately, neither helmet nor protective goggles were required. The weather remained cooperative and happily free of funnel clouds. As I returned my daughter to her car seat, I turned around to have a last look at the barefoot and the in-the-pond kids. Both fine apart from being seriously bacteria-ridden. The boy confined to his mother’s jacket was struggling to get free and to teach the goose a thing or two. But he could still see. More important, in our eyes, than turning the world on with his smile.