Fly, Baby, Fly!

It’s one of those SoCal beach days in mid-April.  We’re at the old Santa Monica Pier.  Even though it’s more than 100 years old, its splintering wooden planks still stand, still swarm with people in its arcades and souvenir shops and on its carnival rides. My daughter, who just turned ten, is climbing up the trapeze rig. She’s learned to follow the commands, and when the call goes out, “hep,” she jumps off the platform and glides across the sky. Another “hep,” and her legs go up and over the bar, and “hep,” she’s upside down, her brown braid trailing behind her torso ten feet in the air. With a final “hep,” she drops to the net six feet below and bounces a few times before somersaulting off and unclipping the wire from her harness.
 
I have no interest in joining her on the platform, regardless of the lines and net. I’m weary from doing so many terrifying things after I moved here three decades ago. I spent years being afraid of what made up the very bones of my life here. There was driving:  merging onto the 405 freeway for the first time and having my mouth go dry and my pulse quadruple. There was work: standing tall while an impossible boss berated me, screaming and throwing things. There was my personal life: calling my parents to tell them my husband was moving out and having to admit to myself that our marriage had failed and to face being alone in this huge city. There was money: signing the final escrow papers to buy a condo all by myself, taking on years of debt. My personal safety net, my primary support network of family, was hundreds of miles away in a little town in the Midwest. But over the years, I found another safety net here — a good job, a tribe of friends, and a little family of my own.  And I’m not scared all the time anymore.
 
I marvel not only at my daughter’s courage, but her innate ability to discern what is and isn’t truly frightening. When she was playing in the backyard at the age of three, she burst into tears and ran inside to escape the “stingy bug,” an orange and black thing. We tried to assure her there couldn’t possibly be a bug in our Westside Los Angeles yard that could hurt us, but it took almost an hour to calm her. My husband later identified the bug on a website; it was a tarantula hawk, a spider wasp that preys on tarantulas by paralyzing its victim and dragging it back to its lair. This spider wasp then lays an egg on the prey, which hatches into a larva and continues to eat the living host. One website noted that its sting is “one of the most painful on the planet,” and has been described as five minutes of “excruciating, unrelenting pain that simply shuts down one’s ability to do anything, except scream.” What this horrifying creature was doing in our backyard and how it made its way there remains a great mystery. But I will never doubt her fear of another bug again.
 
I confess I have fears I know aren’t rational. For instance, after experiencing turbulence on a flight back to Los Angeles after my father’s funeral ten years ago, I became afraid of air travel. In my fragile state, the fright of those moments dug into me like the claws of a grizzly. But realizing that doesn’t make a difference. So even though I’ve flown for decades and no matter how many times I read it’s the safest form of travel, when I fly I take a half valium, distract myself with a crossword puzzle, and close the window shade to make it through take off to keep from feeling like my heart is going to leap out of my chest.
 
It’s her turn on the platform. It strikes me how her joy on the trapeze represents what I want for her:  in all ways, to soar past unnecessary fears. This time when she jumps out, another guy is swinging upside down on a second trapeze on the opposite side of the platform. “Hep,” she’s upside down and swinging. “Hep,” she releases from the bar and is momentarily airborne before the guy catches her outstretched arms.