If you've been around for a while, you might remember the Night of the Bat. I was lying next to Stella right before she went to sleep, and a bat wriggled in between the storm and the window. We heard it skittering in distress there. It still gives me the shivers to remember its winged silhouette, scrabbling frantically at the interior glass.
This felt like a worrying development, in the moment. I was pretty sure that a bat able to squeeze in through the tiny space between the upper and lower parts of the storm window could find a way to squeeze through the similarly tiny space between between the upper and lower parts of the interior window, and the prospect caused me some alarm.
Recently Stella was telling the story, and I discovered that our memories diverged. In my version of the story, I told Stella in a calm but firm voice to go right away and lie down in Joe's room with the door closed while I figured out how to relocate the bat safely. But in Stella's version, I said, "AAAAAHHHHHH, IT'S A BAT GET OUT OF HERE GO GO GO GO GO!!!!!!!!!!" Only with more exclamation points.
I suppose in a way we are both right. What actually came out of my mouth would have passed for calm and firm with anyone, literally anyone, outside my immediate family. I promise you, it would have sounded calm and firm to you. But my kids know me well enough to know when I am faking the calm part, and Stella was filling in my (completely accurate) thought bubble.
I've grumbled about this before, the way that my kids knew I was faking calm when our car developed a power train fault while we were hundreds of miles from home. The part I didn't know was that their brains -- or at least Stella's brain -- will apparently just go ahead and fill in the flail-y inner monologue even though I am doing an EXTREMELY PERSUASIVE impersonation of a calm person responding sensibly to a fixable problem.
Maybe it's good that kids know me so well? Maybe it's good that it's rare for me to try to hide something from them, even if the something is panic? I'm casting about for a positive spin here, because it does not seem quite fair to me.
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