The setting:
An overcast day, perfect for strolling in the park and checking out the local fish ladder. Salmon are swimming upstream, doing their salmon-y thing. Big fish. People are doing their people-y thing, taking pictures, talking loudly over the low roar of the water, leaning over the tops of the pools to get a good look at the fish before heading down to the inside area to watch the fish through the windows. I’m there with my son, choosing to spend our hanging out time doing something, honoring every possible public message about how males need to move, that if you want to connect with a guy, give him the option of doing something active or else suffer the “squirm factor.” And, I wanted him off the computer.
The story:
My son and I peer down into the pools with rushing water and lots of salmon. Everyone’s looking over the edge. The water looks black, the fish a shiny, swerving silver; then the water looks green, then grey. We’re mesmerized. There’s a family next to us, a little girl of about 4 or 5, an older girl of about 7 or 8, and a Mom. The little girl is holding a faded brown-ish, beige-ish teddy bear, just like Christopher Robin holds Pooh – a bear paw in her tiny little hand, the bear dangling at an angle by her leg. A.A. Milne really got it right, I think. Then I see it – the bear is in the water. It begins traveling away, and the girl begins an inconsolable wail. This goes on for a long time. My son looks at me imploringly – the girl’s distress has gone straight to his central nervous system, his eyes are wide and teary, and he needs something to be done. At just this moment, the older girl implores, demands, really, “What are we going to do?”
I couldn’t understand how the mother wasn’t consoling her daughter, offering some form of reframe, helping her calm down and soothe herself. I was fairly high and mighty – internally – in that I was sure there was nothing to do. The bear belonged to the fish now, its fur all puffed up and wet, and it was sailing, face down, away. Nothing to do but accept it, offer comfort, perhaps a life lesson, and then move on. I was irritated by the older girl’s entitlement; she was way off track. As far as I could tell, the only thing to do is to get your sister to stop screaming, and then all of you will handle the loss. Get over yourself.
I knew what I was going to do – exit scene right, head down to the lower level and put some distance between us and the unending agonizing wails. Offer some words of comfort to my son for how hard it is to be around someone who is so upset, remind him of how her sadness makes sense since her bear might mean a lot to her.
My son and I continued to the fish windows, and were amazed at the foot-long and even larger salmon determinedly making their way up the ladder. We took several pictures, trying out different camera settings, flash and no flash, and then my son tugged at my arm and eye-ball pointed to his left. There was the youngest girl, right next to us. I hadn’t seen her or her family come down the stairs. And I’d heard nothing. She had been consoled. Finally.
But then I saw what my son’s eyeballs were really pointing at: she had the bear in her arms. It was wet and bedraggled and looked much smaller than it did in the water, and she was clutching it with her whole body. I turned to the mother and asked how she got it, and mumbled something about how lucky her daughter was. “Oh, I didn’t get it. My husband did. He saw there was a ladder and he climbed down and got it.”
And then I got it. Mothers comfort first, act second. Fathers, they’re the ones who jump in – sometimes literally – to fix a grievous wrong, to restore happiness and the sense of the world being a safe place, when something has threatened that safety. I felt both stupid and limited for the confines of my reaction, and awestruck by the lickety-split decisiveness of this girl’s father, who I still had not seen.
Later, at another part of the park, I saw the family again, this time all four of them. The father was leaning on a fence, and his youngest was to his left, still bear-hugging the precious object that was, recently, cleaving her world in two.
“You get the Father of the Year award,” I said loud enough for the daughter and my son to hear. I wanted both of them to understand how truly awesome and magnificent a gesture this was, the best example I’ve encountered recently of chivalry and honor and the willingness to protect that we seem to have drilled out of so many men since we think these somehow disempower women. “Nicely done.”
“Well,” he said, downplaying things. “I broke a few rules, I guess, but I figured if I got caught I’d have a pretty good explanation.”
Not, “I wasn’t sure I could reach the bear.”
Not, “The water sure was cold.”
Not, “Good thing I didn’t get swept away with the force of the water.”
Not one word of doubt, or concern about the danger involved, the grossness of entering green, teeming, fish-filled water, or the bone-headedness of entering a body of fast-moving, fish-filled water without a life jacket, a rope, an anything.
The only thing he knew was that he was going to get that bear, rules and fish and water and safety be damned. His daughter was in distress. He had to fix it.
And he did.
What would the mother have done had her husband not been there? Would she have climbed into the water? Seems doubtful, as no woman in her right mind would have entered water that looked like this.
Look at what’s in that water!
Gone for help for someone else to attempt to fish out the bear? But she might have lost too much time by seeking out an employee and the bear would have been irretrievable.
I’m pretty sure I would have done nothing to save the bear had it been my son’s. I simply didn’t think there was anything to be done. Like a balloon that soars above the tree line, the bear would be gone, and the only thing to do would be to send it off with good wishes and turn all attention to mourning the loss.
Maybe I’d have tried something, gone for help – if it was my son and his ear-piercing distress, perhaps I’d have been mobilized to attempt every last effort to save the bear, as I had a couple of years ago when his dragon kite got stuck in a power line and we tried about a gazillion ideas to retrieve it before giving up. My genetic structure may have been mobilized to destroy all obstacles. But the woman wasn’t moving, wasn’t even consoling her daughter. She seemed paralyzed.
No amount of being loved by her mother, which I’m sure she is, can replace what this girl experienced being loved by her father. His active-style love will enter her psyche and set the stage for her expectations as she gets older. The older daughter did not seem to be the least bit disempowered from growing up with a take-charge father; her first response was to demand action, even if she knew she herself couldn’t perform it.
Mothering and fathering are not the same, and shouldn’t be the same, and we should all just shut up about thinking women can do it all and men should talk about their feelings and fish don’t need bicycles. Well, these fish didn’t need a stuffed animal, either, so this guy, without any words at all, plucked it from them and restored his daughter’s world to her.
I hope all little girls get the message from their fathers that their distress matters, and that it’s worth it for a guy to try to alleviate the distress. When she gets older and more than teddy bears sail away – full-blown hopes and dreams and friends and crushes and loves slip right out of her hand and there is nothing her father or anyone can to do bring them back – well that will be a different kind of inner scream coming from the girl, because it won’t be able to be made right. But by then he’ll able to console her, tell her he wishes he could jump in and fix things, but he’ll be right there by her side as her tears dry and she figures out what she’s going to do next, right after she wipes her tears with his handkerchief. At least he can give her that.
Feminism be damned, I hope men keep jumping in and breaking the rules, doing whatever they can to undo a woman’s pain, putting clean handkerchiefs in their back pockets, doing all they do without talking about their feelings. I haven’t been comforted by a teddy bear for years. When I’m in distress, my husband is willing to jump in to fix whatever he can. When there’s nothing to be done, he’s by my side, my makeup is smudging his hankie, offered up wordlessly before I could even ask for it.