The Butterfly Parent

I went sledding with the kids not long ago, one winter day in Kansas City.

We were at home, bored, and I got an urge, as I sometimes do, to have an adventure. These urges don’t come often — I’m usually content to stay indoors, to play it safe, to while away hours — but when they do come, I try to listen because I want to be like that when I grow up.

The urges to go outside come even less frequently when it is wintertime, because I am a black bear at heart and would prefer to sleep through the snow and wind and ice, physiologically ignoring it all. So despite the fact that Miles was four and Evie was two and I was only one person, we headed out toward the steep hill where neighborhood kids gathered with their saucers and sleds and garbage can lids.

We were going to make memories, I had decided, and we were going to make them now. The immediacy of the decision was at least partly due to walking into the kids’s room the night before to see gangly, oafish impostors sprawled out where my babies used to be. They were huge and their feet were huge. This panic and fear over children’s rapid growing is the plight of all parents, I think. We consider ourselves almost noble in these feelings. “They grow so fast!” we say to each other. Then we all nod at each other emphatically, mentally trying to grasp the truth of something we all already know.

When my daughter graduated from the baby class — the Butterfly class — at her preschool, I made a promise to myself that we’d have another Butterfly someday because, goshdarnit, I AM A BUTTERFLY PARENT! THAT IS WHAT I AM. I DO NOT HAVE BIG KIDS. I HAVE SMALL KIDS.

I realize, of course, the unsustainability of this sort of thinking; I do not aspire to be the next Michelle Duggar, reality mother of 17, 18, and 19 Kids and Counting fame. And yet, the only way to push back against the terrible ebb of days is to constantly replace the littlest baby. It was fear that had my heart that graduation day: fear that I was missing it somehow, that I was taking her baby years for granted, that I would somehow regret not loving the days enough, not taking enough pictures or saving enough of her finger paintings, even though the box in the garage was spilling over with scribbled art.

We are not created to live in constant stress and anxiety, even the noble kind. Our bodies pay for it: our stomachs clench, our muscles tense. Interestingly, chronic teeth-grinding is referred to in the medical community as bruxism; the word comes from the Greek bryx, and it literally means a gnashing of the teeth. Dentists note that the primary cause of the condition is anxiety, and the number of extreme cases tends to rise when conditions are stressful, such as during a recession.

Anxiety is a sort of hell.

Our hearts suffer, too. Thomas Aquinas equates fear with a “contraction” of the heart. He even uses the Greek term systole, which we will recognize from those squeezy blood pressure machines that are sometimes in the backs of drug stores. When we perceive a threat, something we can’t control, we contract inwardly in order to protect ourselves.

But the worst symptom, perhaps, has to do with what fear might mean for us relationally and spiritually. How does fear change the way we live? The way we parent? The way we love each other or give of ourselves?

Author Scott Bader-Saye writes: “By imagining some future evil, fear draws us in on ourselves so we ‘extend’ ourselves to ‘fewer things.’ This, in turn, becomes a hindrance to Christian discipleship, which calls us not to contract but to expand, not to limit ourselves to a few things but to open ourselves charitably and generously to many things, not to attack that which threatens us but to love even the enemy.”

That winter day, I didn’t recall at home how steep the hill was. Long, too. At least the weather was cooperating; after several days in the single digits, it was finally warming up to the high thirties and forties, and the sun was big. We stood there awhile, silver and black and olive green marshmallow people in our puffy coats, as I contemplated my next move. There were three of us and one sled. Evie had just woken up from a nap and was dumbfounded as to why we were there at all.

“This will be so much fun,” I told her.

Miles didn’t need any convincing. He remembered sledding from last year — remembered details that I had totally forgotten about, like how our sled used to have a blinking light on it until a rough patch had caused a spill and it had cracked.

I would hardly characterize my four-year-old as fearless, but when he was ready for a good time, he was ready.

So I had one little one who couldn’t wait to get down a hill and another who had spent fifteen minutes unwaveringly protesting the navy blue hand-me-down snow pants that I had tried to inflict upon her. (She won that argument and was clad in jeans. She wins a lot, if I am honest, and I think many authors of parenting books out there would chastise me for that, but they don’t know Evie.)

If we had been on a secluded hill somewhere with deer and only our tracks leading to and from our slope, this wouldn’t have been a problem. As it was, a fairly busy road was only a few hundred yards away, and I couldn’t risk sledding down with Miles and leaving Evie on her own at the top. We all climbed on the sled.

I make no bones about the fact that I am wimpy. I am wimpy about being too cold, about being too hot, about things hurting, about things going too fast, about things being too dangerous, about the possibility that every spider is a brown recluse spider. (It has no violin! But I forget — is the violin on its belly? I can’t see its belly! Wait, what spiders have violins?)

However, I try to hide this wimpiness from my children whenever I can. I don’t want them to inherit from me a ridiculous aversion to disturbing small rocks for fear that Voldemort’s snake might be underneath. I want them to be brave. So for that reason, I didn’t vocalize any fear about climbing onto that sled, even though the hill was now approaching Everest-like proportions in my whiny baby mind.

With Miles in front, me in back, and Evie in between, the three of us, rather heavy for a cheap Costco sled already a year old, left level ground and went hurtling for the end of the hill, which was intersected at the bottom by a concrete sidewalk. The sidewalk worried me. I didn’t know if my middle-aged behind could take such a smack of realism or concrete. I also didn’t know if my offspring, one of whom was now bellowing, would ever forgive me if I let them endure such a harsh bump. Of course, this all occurred to me at once, too late, in the midst of plummeting downhill. The three of us screamed in perfect, slightly harmonized unison and I felt Evie’s fingers tighten the grasp on my gloved hand.

So I did what any level-headed, if stupidly optimistic, person would do. I threw down my heels.

I swear to you, even in that moment, the movement felt familiar. It was the futile desire to slow down the inevitable, the pause button we want to press when time hurtles by — the idea that, if we hold on tightly enough, we might secure some fraction of safety, happiness, well-being, health. It wasn’t working. My soul and the still-forward plunge of our sled told me so.

I couldn’t gain any traction, of course. The packed sled trail and the quietly melting snow prevented that. Instead, a ripple of half-frozen slush flew at us from the indentations my boots made in the snow. It came as if forced from a garden hose, in an arc that probably glistened in the mid-day sun.

I didn’t save us from the sidewalk, either, as anyone relatively familiar with the nature of speed and velocity might have told you. We hit it hard, and the force knocked the three of us around like bowling pins. At the bottom of the hill, with both kids in tears, Miles turned to look at me. It became quite clear that he had borne the brunt of the slushy shower. He looked like a tiny garden gnome, the ice stuck to his eyebrows, cradled in the cleft of his chin and just above his lip like a snowy beard.

I laughed, I think, but it was the kind of laugh that had its origin in deep regret. I swear it was.

I brushed the snow from the crevices of his chapped, reddened face, kissed his nose, and asked with only a little trepidation, “Shall we go again?”

Katie Savage is the author of Grace in the Maybe: Instructions on Not Knowing Everything About God.