“I do it myself!”
I was taken aback at my little Mary’s forceful demand, so long ago, to tie her own shoes. I was not surprised, really — I had heard similar protests from others’ children — but her intensity caught me out. What had she to worry? I was the grand and great parent: the one who watches over all my wee bairns. All will go right with all my children all the time on my watch. Never shall one stub a toe or tumble from a high wall.
© Randy Heffner
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Yet from somewhere deep inside her young soul arose this emphatic and unmitigated assertion of independence. It seemed to cry that her being, her self, her personhood required separateness. Her significance as a human welled up to seize its birthright as if inherently tied to her freedom of action and choice.
I hesitated. Then I saw myself as Kim Jong-il, mandatory photo on the wall, demanding obedience and worship as protector and provider. So, with a simper and a slight grin, I withdrew my hands. She proceeded to incompletely tie her shoes and,
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with laces dragging on the sidewalk, we continued our neighborhood rounds.
After she fell, teary-eyes, bloody knees, and befogged as to what had grabbed her foot, she made no objection to my offers of comfort. Her shoes needed tying again and, though she did not repeat her demand, I respected it. "That lace," I asked, "do you want it to drag on the ground that way?"
With so many details at risk, I was prone to being a helicopter parent. I had felt the pain of her fall before she did, as I did a world of other afflictions and agonies to beset her in the years that followed. She learned to tie her shoes, of course, but with the helicopter plaintively stayed in its hangar, she learned and loved much more as well. I wasn't absent, mind you; we talked often through the years. And she would learn, when she heard. And, there were other times like when she asked for my thoughts about her and Brenner. So very set and determined were her passions. "Papa, I love you but you just don't understand." My objections not to her satisfaction, she turned away, though not without some evident grief.
Perhaps strangely, nothing has meant more than the times like that, when my sensibilities ran counter to hers, even strongly so, yet still she would say, "I love you, papa."
Actually, one thing did run deeper. After the wedding was planned, orchestrated, and paid for, it took less than a year for Brenner's darkest side to show. And show violently. At her bedside, amidst beeps and whirs, this time mine were the teary eyes, and hers the weak smile. She again said, or rather whispered, "I love you, papa," and then, just before the line went flat she added, "I know why you did it that way."
by Randy Heffner
Randy lives at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and culture — reading, watching, walking, and sometimes creating in search of our better selves. Film and photography have a lot to do with it, but anyway, art. The tie is an anomaly.
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Like the image snd the story. How cryptic is too cryptic?
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –
— Emily Dickinson