Hand-holding

All four of us were walking back from Kimballs Ice cream after dinner on Saturday evening. Holly had become irritable earlier a few minutes earlier and wanted to walk twenty yards behind us, by herself, but after a short time I slowed down until she caught up with me. Her bad mood seemed to have burned itself out and she slipped her hand into mine as we continued making our way home.

“It’s nice to hold hands,” I said quietly, knowing this child whose sense of autonomy and self-definition seems to grow by the day would balk if I made a bigger deal of it than that.

“Why is it nice?” she retorted, showing the irascibility that crops up whenever she thinks I’m babying her. “I mean, yeah, it’s close and cozy and makes you feel really really safe, but why is that nice?”

Close and cozy and makes you feel safe, but why is that nice? I repeated to myself, followed by the thought, Oh, I wanna be you. I want to be at that place where there’s nothing special about feeling really really safe.

To take for granted a sense of closeness and safety: how luxurious. To see it as no big deal to feel cozy and safe: on the one hand, how obtuse, but it’s all right because she’s so young. To her, seeing that as no big deal isn’t insensitivity; it’s proof that the world has treated her very, very kindly thus far.

But that’s a special privilege reserved for a small percentage of the world’s children. I can’t be in that place myself; I can just feel grateful that Holly is there. A time will come when she feels much less safe: either because of global or national events, personal circumstances, or just a growing intellectual awareness of the possibilities. It’s not something I really want to think about: when, how and why will my daughter stop taking for granted a sense of safety and security. It’s just something for me to be thankful she has right now, at almost eight years old.

Other children the world over are so much more knowledgeable and so much sadder for what they know. Holly’s biggest problem right now is that she’s annoyed with us for some trivial interaction at the ice cream stand that I’ve already forgotten about: maybe we laughed at the wrong part of a joke she was telling us, or maybe Tim ended the game of lawn tag before she was ready.

It doesn’t matter. Within minutes she was past the slight, whatever it may have been, and happy to hold hands with me as we walked the last stretch of driveway up to the house. She feels comfortable, cozy and safe. Doesn’t everyone? Most of us know better, of course, but I’ll let her harbor that nonchalance for as long as I’m able.