Traveling Tales: Fear Factor

Early in our visit, FIL made a horribly insensitive remark, which I will not repeat, regarding my older two children. Aside from being a completely inappropriate thing to say out loud (grrrrr!), his justification for the comment was based on the false premise that Dos is fearless and more of a tomboy than Uno.

He's wrong, of course. Dos is a happy-go-lucky girl who goes along with Uno's adventurous schemes, but Uno is the instigator, the mastermind. Uno is the one who would rather play pirates than princesses, who thinks she's a super hero, who declared last week that she wants to be a wrestler when she grows up. Dos is just glad to have a playmate.

FIL would know that if he spent more time with the girls -- as much time as MIL has, for instance. But he's missed out on a lot because (ah, the irony) he's terrified to fly (and doesn't like to drive farther from home than his local American Legion building) so MIL has come to see us alone.

He thinks Dos is braver because he once saw Uno run screaming from a dog that Dos sauntered up to pet. "That little rascal," he said in his thick southern Illinois accent. "She ain't afraid of nothin."

Well, she's not afraid of dogs, as Uno is, but she's my child; she's bound to have a few random phobias and neuroses -- and as it turns out, she has plenty. Hers include, but are not limited to, the following:

• House flies. On our final drive out of West Texas, a fly ended up in the car with us. She screamed and cried and screamed and cried until we shooed him out when we stopped for dinner at a Subway in Muleshoe.


• Forests, or even small groupings of trees because -- and this is the awesome part, lol -- that's where unicorns live. No, it's not the bears or the mountain lions or the disease-carrying ticks she's worried about, it's the unicorns.


• Unicorns; see above. She's concerned that one might poke her with its very sharp horn.


• The dark. That's a pretty standard little kid fear, though.


• Crumbs. I have no idea where this one came from, but she's paranoid that anywhere she sits or lies down might have crumbs on it. She does not want to have to touch them, so I am the designated sweeper of all crumbs, real or imagined.


• Public toilets and vacuums, because of the noise. That's another pretty common fear among kids, I think, though I don't pretend to understand it (children are among the noisiest people around, but they're not afraid of each other).

I offer you this list in Uno's defense (the only phobias of hers I can think of off the top of my head are animals and water), but I don't intend it to demean Dos in any way. I find these little quirks and differences endearing. I don't pit my girls against each other to make pronouncements or draw conclusions.

I also don't mean to paint a negative (if vague) picture of FIL; we all say stupid stuff sometimes, and this was just one interaction out of two weeks' worth. We had a lovely visit. I didn't address his comment at the time (it caught me way off guard), so he probably doesn't even know how much it offended me. And that's fine -- life has enough drama without adding to it, right? FIL loves his granddaughters; we love him; the end.

But for the record -- though she is wonderfully sweet and easy going and up for adventure and brave in the face of viciously licking puppies -- Dos is neither fearless nor the bigger tomboy. Just so you know.


~RCH~