Along with a new facial expression (the Glower), Isaac has developed a new emotion: fear.
I guess as a baby he was startled at times– by a loud noise or a camera’s flash. But I wouldn’t say he was really “afraid” of anything. In fact, as an early toddler, his general overall fearlessness kept me awake at night. Would he throw himself down the stairs tomorrow? Attempt to breathe under water? Run out into traffic? These days I don’t worry QUITE as much about this sort of thing. He seems to have a clearer idea of cause and effect, and of what can happen if he does something impulsive. A lot of this learning stems from an incident involving a hot lightbulb that he grabbed. The memory still stings with him, and if I tell him something will hurt him “like the lightbulb” it really does give him pause. The other day in tumbling class he stopped just at the edge of a high surface and said out loud, “Be careful!” A reminder to himself, an expression of caution, an expression of self-control! Apparently “sense” has finally come in. It’s a great boon to my sanity and his safety.
But the flip side of this new awareness of his own vulnerability is anxieties running amok in his imagination. He’s afraid of things now, even those that won’t actually hurt him. To be fair, these anxieties haven’t sprung up out of nowhere. They stem from several concrete encounters (in addition to the lightbulb) with the cold reality that the world is not the 100% safe place he once thought.
First, the dog fights. Just before Christmas, we had two dog fights in the same week. After three years dog-fight-free! In the first, Ben and Isaac were out for a walk with Lena dog. Lena was playing off leash at the ball field. Another dog and its owner came along, and all was well for a while. Then an altercation broke out about a tennis ball or something like that, and it escalated into a full-fledged fight. Ben was trying to get Lena to let go of the other dog, which she was reluctant to do. (Her fighting style is clamp-n-hold.) Meanwhile, Isaac was standing by himself on the ground. Obviously this was a dangerous situation in many ways. They got the fight broken up okay, but after that, we instituted a no-off-leash policy when there was Isaac and only one grown-up. Our thinking was that someone needs to be there to deal with the dog, and someone else needs to take care of Isaac.
But the key to this rule was “off-leash.” We didn’t see any problem with walking ON a leash in a controlled situation. Lena is a reasonably well-trained dog, and can heel and sit and such things. So only a week after the first dog fight, Isaac and I were out for a nice walk together a block or two from our house. Isaac was walking along in the snow and Lena was being totally good. Then, across the street and half a block down, this woman came out of her house with two beagles on Flexileads. If you’re not familiar, these are leashes that wind up like a measuring tape inside a large plastic handle. The dogs can go out 15 or sometimes even 20 feet ahead of the owner on this thin black cord. The beagles saw Lena and immediately started barking. I stopped and picked up Isaac and got Lena in really close on her leash, right next to my leg. I waited for a moment for the beagles to walk past (still on the opposite side of the street.) However, instead the beagles ran out to the end of their flexileads barking their heads off. Instantly they hit the ends of the leashes and one of the big plastic handles slipped out of the woman’s hand. So dog number one came running right at us. The woman followed in pursuit, but in another instant she had lost control of BOTH dogs. I was holding Isaac up so high he was practically on my shoulder, and I had Lena so tight on her leash that her front feet were completely off the ground. Also I had backed up as far as possible, until I backed into a parked car and there was no where else to go.
The beagles swirled around us, yapping, and even nipping Lena. Instantly the fight was on– and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it. I could not break up three dogs with a child in my arms! Luckily there was a wooden fence right there, and a yard that I knew was dog free (I know the people there and they have little kids also). I basically threw Isaac over the fence into a snowbank, where he was safe. (Naturally he began to scream.) That took all of ten seconds, but by the time I turned around to deal with the fight, Lena had one of the beagles pinned on its back. Her harness and her sweater were both off somehow, so she was totally nude. The other beagle and the woman were both running around and yapping loudly. Lena had this beagle sort of by the ear and baggy neck skin. I knelt down and start hitting her nose and yelling at her to let go. She didn’t. I started hitting her with the leash. She held on. I started punching her in the face with my fist. Then I grabbed one of the flexileads and started pounding on her face with the big plastic handle. Finally, she let go.
No hard feelings on her part– she seemed excited and pleased about the whole thing! What a good scrap! Thank god she didn’t try to return to the fight while I put her harness back on. Some neighbors had heard the ruckus and come out. One guy was cradling the injured beagle in his arms and starting screaming at me, “What kind of dog is that? Why don’t you have a muzzle on that dog?!” etc. Passions were running high at the moment and so I screamed back at him, “SHE lost control of her dogs! My dog was on leash and heeling! On the other side of the street!” The lady collected her dog and started walking home. I sort of know her from chatting on the street, so I called after her, “Beth, if your dog is really hurt call me!” She called back, “I think he’s okay.”
At which point I could turn my attention back to Isaac. By then he had stopped crying and was just standing there in the snow behind the fence, watching all this. Another neighbor guy was talking to him quietly. I picked him up and we all stumbled home. It took me half an hour to stop hyperventilating. The next day my hand was bruised like a prize fighter’s, to say nothing of Lena’s bitten and swollen face. And it took Isaac weeks to stop talking about the dog fight.
Then I made the mistake of taking him to the Omnimax theater. We had been there before with great success. Isaac loved The Coral Reef, and he enjoyed Lewis and Clark also. So I thought that seeing Bugs! would be fun. A couple things I didn’t take into account: 1) he’s older now and so has a better sense of scale– when we went before I’m not at all sure he understood what he was looking at; and 2) the trailers. I think if if had started with just the Bugs! movie, we might have been okay. But before it started we had to sit five harrowing minutes of airplanes flying over the edges of cliffs, elephants charging towards, scary giant people making percussive sounds (something about “STOMP!”), and lastly a HUUUUGE T-Rex, coming right at us, with huge teeth and claws, and saying ROAR!. Throughout this onslaught Isaac was sitting on my lap in a tight embrace. As the T-Rex burst forth at us, Isaac’s little heart began to pound like a terrified rabbit’s, and he began to literally tremble all over. It was the denoument of the trailer and so I encouraged Isaac to hang in there for the bugs. It started out okay… a beautiful caterpillar egg hatching and the little caterpillar emerging. Lovely photography and nice music. And Isaac LOVES caterpillars! I thought we were home free. Then I remembered that as we were walking in someone had said that “you get to see a praying mantis eat a caterpillar.” The voiceover started saying, “This is Pepe…” introducing the caterpillar to us in all his glory. I realized then that the idea was going to be to get us attached to this caterpillar and then kill him off in horrific fashion, with a 60-foot tall praying mantis! Five minutes into the feature, we left. The dippin’ dots (“ice cream of the future”) that we had after that went a long way towards soothing Isaac’s frayed little nerves, but the vision of the T-Rex stays with him still.
Meanwhile, even in the most innocuous places, he has encountered frightening situations. Mr. McGregor chasing Peter Rabbit all over hell and back. Two characters on (bright and cheerful) Bob the Builder who are nearly crippled by their phobias (Muck, a dump truck, is afraid of the dark; Lofty, a crane, is afraid of heights– of all things– in fact he’s not only afraid of looking down from a high place, he’s afraid of looking UP from a low place, which is a real problem if you’re a crane!) And there was the horrible Batman trailer that leapt out at us before “There Goes a Garbage Truck!” which we got from the library.
I mean… I don’t know. The kid can’t live in a plastic bubble. But this has been hard for him, and cumulative. It’s taking an obvious toll. I put on the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, an annual event for me to watch, which I thought it would be fun to watch together– Isaac ran into the other room in fright and literally hid behind a chair. A few days ago we went to the Rainforest building at the zoo, which we’ve been to countless times and which he loves. However this time the rain sounds, the mist and the dim lighting all combined to create a spooky atmosphere for Isaac. First he wanted to be held. Then, when he was still too scared, he asked to leave. “It’s too scary,” he said, lip quivering. We left at once– out into the sunlight. He was fine for a while, and then soon was scared by walking PAST a dark-looking closet (you could see the dark over this sort of transom).
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Isaac has taken to sleeping with a stuffed kitty in his arms, or a giraffe, or a backhoe, or all of the above at once!
What to do? How to navigate a perilous world? How to preserve his wonderful sense of adventure, while keeping him physically and emotionally unharmed?