Hey you.
I want to tell you a little story that might stick in your mind and pop up when you go to try and help when it would be best to simply be present and supportive -- which is more times than we think!
Let me know if you have ever run to the rescue of someone because you were feeling anxious or high-strung. I suspect this is a lot of us...
Once, we had a cat named Pancakes.
Pancakes was wily and doglike, bold and loud, orange and insane and fun and foolish. He lived with us for exactly one year to the day before he passed away. A cat to beat the band.
One day, Pancakes, who was an indoor/outdoor cat and was outside with us exploring our property, got himself up a tree farther than he had intended. The look on his face when he realized how high he had climbed was telling, and soon he was meowling and croaking his dismay down at us.
My son was intent on rescuing him. He was newly seven years old, and his desire to preserve was as strong as his desire to destroy—one of my favorite ages for little boys.
“Pancakes!” he cried. He threw his hands high up toward the much-higher-up cat and branches, confidently but incorrectly declaring, “Jump! I can catch you!”
Pancakes could have gotten down. Even if the tree had been 50% taller, he would have managed; cats are unbelievable creatures with skills precisely for such situations. But what they often lack is practice—and for many, confidence. Although this didn’t apply to Pancakes.
In the spring of 2021, I had just twelve months of mind-altering grief under my belt and thirteen months of the culture shock that was the global Coronavirus pandemic in the rearview mirror. Any discomfort I could possibly alleviate for myself or my child, I did.
So I fetched a footstool, opened a can of water-packed yellowfin tuna, and begged.
This resulted in me washing tuna juice and blood off my skin in the shower after Pancakes leapt onto me, hooking his claws into my arms to pull himself closer to the tuna can. The three of us—the tuna, the cat, and I—ended up askew on the big bed of bright green moss that had accumulated under this particular tree.
After I got out of the shower, my son ran upstairs and said, “Pancakes is in the tree again! We have to help him!”
I thought, We didn’t need to help him the first time, son, and took my time drying off.
From my third-floor bedroom, I could hear the caterwauling slicing ribbons through the treetops and could feel my son’s rising anxiety. He loved this cat. Between the worst President in U.S. history declaring a national state of emergency on his sixth birthday and discovering his grandmother dead six weeks later, the stress of little things simply amounted to too much.
We walked out to the tree and stood on the moss carpet below. Pancakes moaned regret and despair. My Pisces son clutched his head.
“He’s fine, baby. He was fine the first time, actually, but I wasn’t brave enough to walk through your anxiety so that you could walk Pancakes through his. But I am brave enough now, and I think it’s our obligation to sit here with him while he gets down by himself.”
“That sounds harder than just getting another can of tuna,” he observed.
“It is, and that’s exactly why I didn’t do it in the first place. It’s challenging to hold your own emotions while you make space for someone else to safely feel theirs.”
We sat on the green shock of moss and talked to each other, letting Pancakes know every so often that we believed in him and wanted him to try and come down.
After about fifteen minutes, Pancakes skittered down the dogwood tree and headed up toward the house. My son watched and said, “I feel so proud of him!”
“Yes,” I said, “just as I feel so proud of you.”
Next week we are talking about ear piercing and kids and Claire's and nickel allergies and personality types and clipping wings and more.
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