PARTS OF SPEECH- So little time to damage our children

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN SHELLEY PLETT
“…You spend years trying to corrupt and mislead this child, fill his head with nonsense, and still it turns out perfectly fine.”

-From the movie ‘Big Fish’

ll parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.”

This is a quote from a novel, but facts can always be found in the crevices of fiction. Could it be true that despite our best efforts to do the right things for them, we are predestined to taint our kids? It stands to reason, knowing there’s no such thing as perfection and that everyone carries some amount of childhood baggage into adulthood. But is that our parent’s fault?

If it is true, I’m sure I haven’t even begun to crank out the damage I could-or will-do to my kids.

How about the times I’ve made my oldest daughter cry? Trust me, with a little girl in the house, drama is never far away.

But beyond the every day triggers such as enforcing bedtimes or denying the third cookie before dinner, there are genuine childhood heartbreaks. The things I hope she’ll one day recall with a nostalgic chuckle instead of under hypnosis in a therapist’s office.

Will she remember the time I broke her heart when she was 4? One minute I was transferring “Hamster,” her Beta fish, to a temporary container to clean out his bowl, and the next minute I was watching him slide straight down the kitchen sink drain.

After registering what had happened and scanning the room with my peripheral Mom-vision to make certain she hadn’t witnessed his plunge, I considered an emergency run to Wal-Mart for a replacement Beta.

But instead, I decided this was an opportunity for a lesson on loss. And the value of a drain strainer.

The second time I broke her heart was a lot more difficult and a lot less preventable. A miscarriage at Week 13. I’ll never again underestimate a child’s ability to do two things. One, to feel loss-even if it’s the loss of something she never fully had. And two, to grieve-especially when it’s over something that can’t be fixed, even by Mom and Dad, who are supposed to be able to fix anything.

Most recently, heartbreak happened when we gave away the first kitten in a litter we are still in the process of pawning off.

We took Kitty Columbus, as she came to be known, to meet my sister, who was going to deliver her to a new home. On the way, we began the difficult task of cutting our ties with the runt of the litter. The ugly tears spilled out of that girl for two hours.

As far as I can tell, she has forgiven us. She may be badmouthing us on the playground, but she’ll have to trust that her time spent nurturing newborn kittens was worthwhile, even if she was warming them up for someone else’s litter box.

We talk about all of these misfortunes every now and again. It helps her appreciate what she does have. She lost a ‘Hamster,” but got a turtle and she did ultimately get the little sister she wanted. The last kittens are moving into new homes, but she still has weak parents who agreed to let mamma cat have one more litter.

The same book that told me I will damage my kids also said, “All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”

And this theory was confirmed by Gill in the movie “Finding Nemo,” who told us that “all drains lead to the ocean.”

Based on that, Hamster could be swimming in the warm waters of the Caribbean by now.

Our daughter likes to think his drain ride led to a more exciting place. We all agree that in one way or another, he’s now swimming with the fishes.

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