The Things That Scare Us

King Cuddles had some vision issues that were discovered before he even turned one. His right eye turned inward and although we had initially thought that the crossing would eventually fix itself, my BIL pushed us really hard to get it evaluated. It turned out his tendency to miss steps, trip and fall in unfamiliar places and inability to catch a ball were not him inheriting my klutziness but a result of an eye muscle issue that made it really difficult for him to perceive depth. His pediatric opthalmologist had us start a couple of different exercises and PT, in addition with him wearing glasses, but at 4 years old, he hadn't made enough progress and had his first surgery to correct the issue so that he would have use of both eyes as an adult. Things stabilized for awhile before regressing around 8 years old and KC needed to have his 2nd surgery.

When he had his first surgery, he was too little to understand what was going on and was mostly excited about getting to have his own hospital issued iPad with Mickey Mouse on it going into the OR. For his 2nd surgery, he was in the room when the opthalmologist told us the news so there was no hiding it and his breakdown and fears were immediate. While I recognize and am grateful that we've for the most part been really fortunate, there's something really hard about watching your kid be scared and feeling pretty helpless when they're sick and you can't fix it. In preparation for the surgery and managing his anxiety, several friends recommended a number of resources from books to hospital aides to recovery plans, but my favorite, hands down, was Franklin Goes to the Hospital.

If you haven't read it yet, the core theme of the book can be summed up by Meg Cabot's the Princess Diary/FDR's quote - "Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something is more important than fear. The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all." We had a lot of conversations in the prep up to the surgery about how it was okay to be scared, but with an understanding that going through that difficult endeavor would lead to better things.

I've thought about that a lot more in the last year or so, probably far more often than KC has, mostly in regards to how I need to apply this lesson to my own life. While there's something to be said about leaning into your strengths and things that you're interested in/passionate about, I'm wondering if I often shield myself from other opportunities because of a fear of the discomfort. Things like public speaking or putting myself out there to try new things aren't wrong or necessarily bad. They're just things that scare me because I don't like the idea of looking stupid or incapable and my control freak tendencies don't want to increase the risk of that happening by opening my mouth. But there is a (very slow) realization that I can't get any better at these things unless I try them....so in the last few months, I've tried doing a few more speaking engagements and while they were not perfect by any means, I could see myself getting better at them as I was going through the process and it's a skill set that I could develop. Not an exact comparsion to my son's surgery as I hope he never has to do it again but correlated enough that I could be really proud of myself for doing something that scared me because of my understanding of the good that could come and to use that as a lesson for my own growth.

We had to do flu shots/COVID boosters this last fall/winter. As with every other child in the world, my kids hate shots, though KC has a higher dislike of anything medical given his history. What surprised me though was that he actually didn't have a meltdown when we told them we were getting shots (we have a long history of this consistently going badly - Queen Sass has climbed all the way under the stairs and into a planter where only she could fit and KC has bit a nurse so they could get out of their shots before unfortunately). Once assured of what the purpose of the shot was, he kept repeating to himself "okay, breathe, breathe, look away. It's okay to be scared, but it's going to be short so I hurt less later. Breathe, breathe, look away." And he was so focused on repeating it that he didn't even notice when the nurse had finished and was like "wait, that's it? That wasn't bad at all." Cheers to us both learning to be brave about the things that scare us. ;)