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Skateboarding the Third Rail The Risk of the Middle
- Rutgers University Press
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151 MICHAEL DUNN Kathleen and I used to love camping. Hiking through pine-cooled air, romantic trysts by rushing streams, leaves lightly raining on our nylon ceiling. Now, with four young kids, not so much. Camping, like much of parenthood, is a struggle to keep the kids alive. Here’s my “Ways the Kids Could Die” list from a recent adventure: ■ tumble into fire pit, ■ tumble down boulder-strewn, tick-infested, fifty-foot drop at edge of campsite, ■ drown in bacteria-infested lake if somehow survive fifty-foot drop, ■ trip over bungee cord stretched as barrier between campsite and fifty-foot drop, ■ wander off while I chase other kids from bungee barrier, ■ figure out butane lighter, bottle opener, Ginsu knives, ■ e coli, West Nile mosquitoes, rattlesnakes, black bears, etc. Not to mention the other humans, like the creepy drunk eyeing the bathhouse door when I brought the kids to brush their teeth. Wrapped in my daughter ’s pink towel and armed with a nail clipper, I cut as menacing a figure as I could, glowering, “Don’t think I’m afraid to use this.” As a people farmer, job one is to perpetuate the species, and my “RiskTaker ” hat is buried pretty deep in my Many Hats drawer. But even amid the dangers that make “safety first” our primal impulse comes the recognition of life’s more vital impulse, that growing people really means letting them risk climbing over the bungee barrier to rappel the first few boulders down the fiftyfoot drop, our hands outstretched like Holden in The Catcher in the Rye. While we need to protect our kids, our real job is to begin the heart-ripping process of gradually nudging them out of the nest. It doesn’t make any sense, really: you Skateboarding the Third Rail The Risk of the Middle CH034.qxd 7/15/09 8:02 AM Page 151 152 MICHAEL DUNN fall in love in a tent near a rushing stream under pine-cooled air, decide to get married and have kids, then fall in love all over again with these tiny helpless beings only to have to push them slowly away from you each day. But this seems to be the whole point—of parenting, teaching, life itself—to come eventually to the only big universal truth, that they have to figure it out by doing it themselves. Called “gradual release” in education-speak, it’s Holden Caulfield’s mini-enlightenment when he finally realizes it’s okay to let his kid sister Phoebe reach too far off her carousel horse: “The thing with kids is, if they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.” The warp and woof of parenting, it’s Mary teetering up the stairs, Sean’s big blue eyes as I wave through the pre-school window on my way to the car, Michael saying, “Let go, Daddy,” and taking off on his bike while I stand on the driveway holding his training wheels, Fiona diving under the big waves for the first time while I stand on the sand holding my breath, all creating new possibilities by continually reinforcing the neurological pathways of the “I can” moment that only comes through risk, like a baby robin discovering her few ounces of feather and bone are enough to keep her from crashing to the cement. Life is an eternal tango between these two survival impulses—one stretching bungee barriers, the other climbing over them—that constitute the Yin and Yang of the human condition. The only way to fulfill our first impulse, to survive , is to tap the second and evolve, but unfortunately the former often wins the day. Whereas the constant pull between protection and growth, fear and desire, creates the basic tension of life (even at the cellular level these impulses blend: cell walls that protect the life juice are also semi-permeable), the walls we build at the interpersonal level, of bungee cords or stone, ignorance or hatred, often thwart the growth impulse, and the imbalance can paradoxically threaten our survival. Perhaps our protecting impulse is more evolved than our risking one because our global campsite, teeming with extremist plots and terrorist bombs, is no less scary. But “something there is,” Frost reminds us, “that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down,” and since their mortar is fear, which it is the nature of the growth impulse to transcend, our walls symbolize not...