Bonding Over Monsters
- JP | #Intangibl3
- Sep 22, 2017
- 4 min read
I’m six years old.
I’m lying in my bed at night, wide awake, praying that I don’t see claws extend up toward me from the floor below. I know the monsters beneath me want nothing more than to pull me down into eternal darkness, so I pull my legs tight against my body and make sure that every edge of the blanket is tucked between me and my mattress.
My cocoon complete, I listen intently. I know that the purple monster with the big head that lives in my closet will come out at any moment to seek his revenge for being forced to survive in such small living quarters.
But it’s not my fault he moved in.
Soon, my imagination begins to wonder. My legs and arms feel less tense and my cocoon is feeling more like an oven.
I jerk the blanket off over my head and suck in a long, sweet breath of fresh air, making sure that none of my appendages hang over the edge of the bed in any way. The creatures are still down there, after all.
I flip my pillow over to feel the coolness against my warm skin as my mind concocts any number of excuses as to why, this night, I’m now safe.
Maybe the monsters just weren’t that hungry tonight. I made it through the mandatory fearful period, you know, that first ten to fifteen minutes, every night after the light goes out. There was just no way that they’d still be thinking of eating me a whole fifteen minutes after I climbed into bed.
It takes but minutes for my eyes to grow heavy and my breathing to become even. Those moments are spent in faraway lands full of adventure and magic; danger and heroism. My sleep is peaceful.
It turns out that, as firmly as I believed that those monsters wanted me for dinner, they never actually bothered me. They ended up being, for all intents and purposes, figments of my imagination. In May of 2016 I slept in my childhood room once more, with my wife, and it was almost as if the creatures had never existed to begin with. It’s funny how these things work.
Now, having a son of that age, I’m hearing him tell me of the strange, creepy monsters that scare him just as I was scared twenty years ago. He tells me of the ones that scare him the most like living, murderous dolls. Just as Chucky was my worst fear as a boy of my son’s age, he too despises the little, knife wielding, ginger bastard.
In this, I understand him. It seems an odd thing to give me insight into my son’s thought processes and character, but I’ll take it. He’s a lot more like his mother than he is like me, and I’m still trying to decipher that strange mix of my wife’s quirky attitude and dry humor mixed with my sarcasm and incessant analytical thinking. I don’t understand him as well as I’d like to, but I suppose that that is par for the course for many parents today.
However, I want to. I want to understand my son and so even if it is the shared childhood fear of possessed dolls, I will use it. I will use it because it is a commonality between us. When he brings up his fear of the things that go bump in the night, I can share my experiences with him. I can let him know that I’ve experienced virtually the same things that he’s experiencing, and that, in fact, most others experience as well. It’s a way to connect with him and to show him that he is connected to others through similarities and the shared experiences of humanity.
If one truly desires to understand another then the most reliable way of doing this is to find commonalities that they may share. When people have things in common they have a much easier time of getting along and even forming a bond of some kind. Now, when my son feels alone and scared he will know that not only did his dad experience that same fear, but that undoubtedly there are many millions of other children feeling the same thing at the same time.
Night fall, or more accurately, bed time, has ever been a source of anxiety and fear for children.
Maybe that is just because they don’t really want to go to sleep and so their minds cook up imaginary monsters to keep them awake. Regardless of the reason, I’m finding that the enterprising parent can find ways to bond with their child(ren) in the unlikeliest of places.
Thanks for reading, see ya soon!
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