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The apple does not fall from the tree. My son Ben knows that. Funny story: Once when I said, "Have you noticed that we often…," he chimed in with, "Finish each others' sentences?"
When Ben was two, he demanded, full tantrum, a chainsaw. We were at a hardware store. He said he needed it for his "work."
Well, my parents gave me an old typewriter when I was two. But, no, I did not buy Ben the chainsaw. Though I did give him real work. There may be no more charming a sight than a toddler in full protective gear scything weeds skillfully. And so I began asking Ben for his help regularly. Initially, there wasn't a lot of return on that for me. But by the time he was 5, there was.
And so I bought him tools and taught him how to use them. He got a jigsaw at age seven. He's been driving the tractor since age nine. By the time he got full welding gear at fourteen, he could fix pretty much anything. He has never once gotten hurt working.
How did Ben handle the gadgets and responsibilities? Well, he didn't spend his middle school weekends getting into trouble. Instead, thinking he had to protect the family from terrorists (it was 2001), he built enough full-scale trebuchets to win the Trojan Wars. In high school, he also created enormous mobile works of art, some powered by fireworks.
Along the way, he decided he wanted to become a mechanical engineer. But of course!
Except that finally, things changed. No longer inventing things I wanted to admire, he hung out in our driveway with his friends, where they smoked cigarettes and built a motorcycle that went too fast. He stopped talking to me except to grunt, "Stop worrying."
I should also mention that a cop once discovered in Ben's truck an interesting substance illegal in most states but not, thankfully, in Vermont, where we live.
One summer, when I wanted to take Ben far enough away from the siren call of oil-based fumes for us to have at least one good conversation, I cajoled him into going on college visits. First stop: Vancouver, Canada, and the University of British Columbia, where I had scheduled a visit with the Engineering department and an extra day to spend in the surrounding mountains.
I didn't tell Ben until we were at Grouse Mountain that I had bought us paragliding tickets. This surprise, I thought, was the perfect opportunity for us. Ever since the winter when he was seven and taught me how to ski, we'd enjoyed doing outrageous outdoor stuff. We mountain biked. We went deep sea diving. Now we could add something new to our list.
We got on the lift at the bottom of Grouse Mountain. I showed Ben our paragliding tickets. He seemed thrilled—though, as a taciturn teenager, he didn't actually say much. And then, as the lift left the ground, I got scared.
Very scared.
Fear of heights was not new to me. In fact, I had just shed that fear not five years before. I'd developed it when my two children were tiny. Kids are so slippery and unpredictable. They can, it seemed to me, slip through anything and fall to their deaths. Or, to paint a picture horrifying in a different way, I’m thin. I could slip through something and fall to my death, leaving my kids alone. Until their thin father got there. And slipped through whatever I'd fallen through and left them completely unprotected.
But, really, I hadn't experienced even a twinge of panic in years. So why, just when Ben and I were about to have fun, did I want to curl into a ball and moan? I didn't actually curl into a ball. I began thinking fast—and talking.
I knew that an engaging conversation can help calm me. Ben knew that, too. So when I told him that I was afraid, he didn't grunt, "Stop worrying." He kindly asked me questions, first about how I was feeling, and then about phobias in general. Hoping to continue distracting myself, I began talking about the genetic and environmental roots of fear. I’m a science journalist; panic is a topic I've researched thoroughly. I explained to Ben that there is a statistical association between anxiety in adults and a childhood marked by a lack of physical calming from the mother or primary caregiver. Not every anxious person got insufficient touch, but many did.
Ben actually seemed intrigued. So I also explained that, typically, a mother's arms are so familiar to a baby that the baby doesn’t even realize that he and his mother are separate beings. The discovery of that separation and the creation of autonomy is a process that psychologists call "individuation."
Having talked Ben's ear off, I felt much better.
"When does a child individuate?" Ben asked. Apparently, he wasn't ready to drop the conversation.
I didn't know the answer off the top of my head. "I’ll bet it starts when the child works up the nerve to walk or crawl away from his mother."
"Hmmmm," he said. And then, "Hey, can I paraglide today even if you won't?" Those are the words he said. But what I heard was this:
When does the mother individuate? When will you work up the nerve to walk away from me?
Before Ben could walk, he would crawl through our yard on a mountaintop in southern Vermont and graze on the johnny jump-ups, tiny blue and purple wildflowers. As I watched Ben and the paragliding pilot walk toward and then run forward off a 4,000-foot-high mountainside, I sat in a patch of johnny jump-ups. They held me as I trembled. I watched my son go up into the sky toward Vancouver. All around me were bright orange safety flags that I stayed obediently behind. Ahead of me, my son and the pilot hung unprotected beneath a bright orange sail. I flinched as they banked suddenly and headed toward Point Grey, the landmass on which the university lies.
That morning Ben had decided not to go to college at all after high school. Did I mention that? So what were we even doing in Vancouver? I watched until the glare from the sun obscured Ben and the pilot completely.
On my lonely ride down the ski lift, I had to control my fear of heights all by myself. To do so, I looked closely at the pine trees. Some, I realized, were shorn completely of needles. One bare tree was double-topped, with the two extensions looking like a giant thumb and forefinger in the "L for loser" sign. The tree was waving at me.
Laughter helps with fear, too.
It's actually two separate ski lifts that take you all the way down Grouse Mountain. The second was easier for me than the first. Once my feet touched the bottom I set off to find my increasingly emancipated and now, I was sure, alarmingly exuberant son. I knew he would be in the parking lot, filling his lungs with oil-based fumes, ogling the motorcycles, and reveling in thoughts about all the colleges he wouldn’t have to go to, and all of the work he could soon do.
