Haunted by What If?

Lessons in Parenting

What if?

This is the perennial parenting question that haunts my thoughts day in and day out. What if they fall down the stairs? What if they touch the hot stove? What if they slip in the bath tub? The greatest what ifs aren’t about accidental falls or playground mishaps. What I fear most as a parent, is K experiencing the heartbreak that I know. What if they feel unwanted? What if they feel like they don’t belong? What if they stop feeling loved?

These are the questions that threaten to keep me up at night. I can plan for the playground. It’s the unforeseen heartbreak of life that I can’t plan for which threatens my sleep. As I watch K move through their world, I see them looking for belonging and interaction. I see them testing and exploring any number of hypothesis with joy and fearless abandon. And like many parents, I see the dangers that await.

Someone said that when you have a child, your heart is suddenly outside of your body and you spend the rest of your life trying to protect it. I find that to be true. My child is my heart moving through the world in wonder, and I want to protect that heart from any and all pain. Yet pain is also a wise teacher.

This is what I struggle to understand about life. Pain and grief have much to teach us, but we spend so much time running from them. The longer I’m a father, the more aware I become of all I haven’t grieved. Without grief, there is no movement.

I end up held captive by the weight of the past so that every place, every person, every moment contains the shadow of wounds once felt. Unfortunately, I now see those shadows being cast over my child, and I’m the one casting them.

When I stand over K, I see myself at their age and I fight like hell to protect me. Except, K isn’t me. They’re a version of me and a version of their mom and something else entirely that we’ve been gifted with.

K will walk pathways I haven’t yet travelled, and ask questions I haven’t yet considered. And when I fail to see them in all of their uniqueness, when I see myself instead of seeing my child, I’m doing both of us a disservice. K is living in the present, and to walk alongside them, means I have to be present as well. K’s world is being built all around them every moment of every day, and in that beautiful chaos, I have the chance to help them learn how to find safety, seek out healthy community, heal when they’ve been hurt and offer repair when they’ve caused pain.

What I’m getting at is I don’t need to be haunted by What If anymore. This perennial question is both warning and invitation. A warning that helps me keep K safe by putting necessary boundaries in place, and an invitation to the wild wonder of life in which our greatest delights are often hidden. I may have days when I feel haunted by my past, but those ghosts aren’t K’s, and as long as I continue to learn the lessons grief has to teach me, they might never be.