Lost in The Weeds — Loving Our Kids to Loneliness

Last summer, my six-year-old son, Dashiell, was briefly lost. His summer camp—a small nomadic hiking group comprised of about a dozen six-to-nine-year-olds, a few CITs and the camp director—had been scrambling over some rocks down by the water. A number of the kids fell. Dash, one of the group’s youngest and smallest members, forged ahead while the counselors tended to scraped knees and hurt feelings. At some point, when he paused to look back, he discovered that he was all alone. Surprised and scared, he ran in the wrong direction.

Children have a tenuous grip on time. Dashiell’s latest method is to measure its passages in episodes of his favorite show “Bluey,” a wholesome, charming, sevenish-minute-long Australian cartoon about a family of anthropomorphized dogs. If there are five minutes until dinner, that’s almost one Bluey. If we ask him to read for 20 minutes, that’s a little less than three Blueys. You get the idea.

When he ran headlong into a field of weeds that reached well above his head, the seconds stretched like a rubber band. Impossible to measure in episodes of Bluey, this was the period of time he later focused on, as it was his first independent encounter with fear. Later, when telling the story, he demonstrated how he’d flailed his arms and batted the weeds away from his face. Somewhere within the dense overgrowth, he lost his shark water bottle. While we don’t know exactly how long he was stuck in these weeds—likely more than a couple of minutes, likely less than ten—it was an adequate amount of time for the dread to sink deeply into his little body. 

Soon enough, he heard a voice and headed toward it. Within moments, he was clutching the hand of a young CIT. Shortly after that, he was running along the rocky shore toward his friends. They called out his name. They crowded around him. They asked him where he’d gone.

It was only 9:30 in the morning. The fog still hung heavily on the chilly East Bay air. The camp director, Dashiell’s former preschool teacher—a thoughtful, mellow guy in his mid-thirties with a kind face and a newborn at home—determined that Dash was okay, and that, rather than call and worry us, he’d wait until the end of the day to tell us what had happened.

When I greeted Dash with a hug at 3:30 that afternoon, the camp director approached me more formally than usual, his hands folded in front of him. He said that Dashiell had a story to tell, that something kind of serious had happened. Dash looked up at me with big eyes, the kind that usually communicate guilt, and I briefly wondered if he’d done something out of character, if he’d hit or pushed another child.

Dash let his former teacher tell the story. As he spoke, I started to feel bad for him, for what he must have gone through. When I was 12 years old, my family took a trip to the Grand Canyon. At a lookout point, we lost track of my carefree eight-year-old brother. In the quarter of a Bluey that it took him to find his way back to us from the bathroom, I experienced time the same way I had when I’d awakened to my first large earthquake the year before, and, in 45 seconds, had learned indelible lessons about the illusion of control and the fragility of everything we consider unshakeable. While, in general, Dashiell’s former teacher seems to handle crises with greater aplomb than I—while he seems more connected to nature, better able to regulate his heart rate, less likely to have a running correspondence with his gastroenterologist—I couldn’t help but feel pity for whatever had happened inside of his body during those ten minutes. Losing someone else’s kid is no joke.

Throughout the telling, Dashiell’s big eyes stayed locked on my face. I kept my response muted. I mustered a smile, said that it sounded like a good scare and a good lesson. I gave him another big squeeze. When the director told me that Dash had had an accident later that morning, something that hadn’t happened to him in years, the size of his scare began to sink in. 

Because we live a few hundred miles from my parents, a while back, we started recording nightly videos called “The Daily Dash” and posting them on a shared photo stream. In the videos, he regales his “fans” (about a dozen friends and family members) with anecdotes, shares artwork and uses the ottoman and stuffed armchair to demonstrate how far he can jump now. I don’t know how many “fans” he thinks he’s reaching. If he had a more developed concept of numbers, it could be in the millions. Seeing that he can’t imagine anything larger than his elementary school, I don’t really know how to do the conversion, but let’s say that, in his mind, he’s addressing hundreds. But that hundreds is most of us.

That night, as we lay in bed and recorded the Daily Dash, he asked me to tell the story. A few moments in, he pulled the covers over his head. When I got to the part about being stuck in the grass, his body began to shake. I stopped the video and held him. I told him he was brave and strong. I told him he was safe. I told him, now that he knew to stay put, he would be that much safer if, at some point in the future, he ever got lost again.

It wasn’t until later, when he was soundly asleep and my wife and I had put away our phones and books and turned off our reading lamps, that his trauma was visited upon me. First, there were the what-ifs—he’d been near the water after all. And the paths wound through small hills down which he could have tumbled. But looming larger in my mind’s eye was the image of the grass he’d been stuck in, of it towering over him, of his small hands frantically swatting it away from his face so he might see a way out. Lying there, it occurred to me that he’d likely carry this memory with him for the rest of his life. And the realization that I could not protect him from it sat in my stomach like a pastrami sandwich, a McDonalds Value Meal, or some such food that my nervous gut has no hope of digesting. 

My sweet boy had been really scared. My impish little laughing boy, who, even when he was a toddler and communicated through a combination of monosyllabic sounds and sign language, had always relished telling stories, couldn’t retell this story without shaking, burrowing under the covers and hiding his face. I longed to do the impossible: to extract and annihilate this memory, to return him to the body he’d inhabited every night of his life before this one. 

Weeks passed. We traveled to Portland to visit my sister-in-law and her partner. Time and adventure inserted themselves between Dashiell’s trauma and its position in the forefront of our minds. He told his aunty stories of his trip earlier in the summer to Los Angeles to visit his grandparents, of new friends he’d made at his various camps, of art projects he’d worked on, books he’d read and cartoons he’d been watching. We played board games and ping pong, frequented the local parks and museums, ate at food trucks, went to Multnomah Falls, the Columbia River, the Sandy River. He and I spent five hours at the popular indoor trampoline park Sky Zone from which we miraculously emerged COVID-free. His charmed life regained its luster.

Still, when the story of getting lost came up, he wanted me to tell it. And as I did, he quietly watched his aunty watching him, as if gauging, by the size of her reaction, just how unsafe he had really been (and to see if his mom and I had been telling him the truth when we’d told him there was nothing to be scared of now). It wasn’t until I got a couple sequencing details wrong that he finally spoke up, correcting my mistakes. In that moment, I realized that Nora and I had to take him back to the site of the trauma, so he would know that we knew what he was picturing when we told the story of that morning, so he could imagine and visit the place again without fear, and so his memory of the event might be a little less lonely.

Made of landfill from 20th-century construction dumping, the Albany Bulb is the tip of a tiny peninsula in the San Francisco Bay. Local artists have repurposed the retrievable junk, making sculptures and structures, some functional and others purely aesthetic. Graffiti covers every available inch of concrete. Sweet Fennel, French Broom and Pride of Madeira grow up to eight feet tall in places while California Buckeye grows upwards of three or four times that in others. Hawks, hummingbirds and migratory birds patrol the skies and the shallow bay waters, while a variety of insects and reptiles inhabit the palm-tree dotted shore.

This place, which for ten long minutes had felt hostile to Dashiell, has, over the years, been both a refuge for some of the Bay Area’s tens of thousands of unhoused residents, as well as a site of institutional violence in the form of their expulsion. Not that this makes The Bulb exceptional. It’s impossible to experience public spaces in our enlightened corner of the country without being reminded of the ways in which we mistake over-policing, the criminalization of poverty and forced displacement for safety.

The disappearance of public spaces from the landscape made the job repairing Dashiell’s relationship to this one feel that much more urgent. Because through reclaiming and rebuilding public spaces, we might develop the kind of bonds that manifest a safety worth striving for—the safety found in communing with nature, in nurturing our own physical and mental health, and in facilitating and fostering connection.

The morning of our planned return to the Bulb, Dashiell begged to stay home, but we were resolute. We reminded ourselves that to heal ourselves we must pivot into discomfort. FYI, that’s not how we persuaded him. We did not say, Dashiell, son, you must pivot into discomfort. Our actual words were something closer to: “If you do this, you can get an ice cream.”

We parked the car and walked along the path that led to the shore, letting him take the lead. We stopped to admire a shark carved into a felled tree trunk and a 10-foot tall junk sculpture of a humanesque figure called the “Beseeching Woman” with long hair and outstretched arms. Dash tried to get his bearings. After about a quarter of a mile, he began insisting that this was going to take too long. He suggested that I put him on my shoulders. We coaxed him forward, sticking to the dirt path, heading north between the landfilled hills and the water. At a fork in the trail, he led us away from the water and up an incline toward a dense thicket of weeds. After ascending the hillside for a couple of minutes, his eyes widened. He pointed. He said that this was the grass. He wondered aloud if his water bottle might be hiding in there.

Dropping my hand, he pointed and retold parts of the story that, by this point, we all knew well—of swatting grass away from his face, of hearing Ari call out his name, of reuniting with his friends. Nora and I told him how happy we were that he’d found it.

A couple of years ago, while playing at preschool, Dash cut his forehead above his eye. It wasn't serious, didn't require stitches, but it was the first time he’d bled enough to stain a shirt. It was evening by the time I finished work and checked in with him, and, as always, he was eager to tell the story. He described the table corner he’d clipped and the way the blood had dripped from his brow. He said that he’d cried. Later, he called my parents to tell them the story. Then my sister-in-law, then my brother, then my mother-in-law. 

The next morning when I dropped him off at school, his classmates greeted him and his cool butterfly bandage with fanfare and awe. After the mob dispersed, his friend, Anya, walked through the gate with her dad. 

Dash looked at her, then a bit beyond her like he does when he's having a think. Then he ran across the small yard and stopped in front of her. "Hey, Anya," he said through his cloth mask. 

Anya looked up from the daisy she was clutching in her hand—Anya and her dad often arrived at school at the same time as we did, but took an extra couple of minutes getting inside because she had a habit of stopping every few paces to pick up a rock or a weed or a fallen flower petal. 

"Anya," said Dash. "I wanted you to know that yesterday, when I was crying and you asked me if I was okay, I didn't say anything, but it wasn't because I was mad at you. I was just upset about my cut. I just wanted you to know that." Anya met his gaze and smiled with her eyes, then looked back down at her treasure. Dash ran off to play with some friends. 

In conjunction with the nonprofit industrial complex and mind-numbing corporatist DEI pablum, the brilliant poet Natalie Diaz has soured me on the word empathy, pointing out that, (and I’m paraphrasing here) if empathy were actually possible, none of us would get out of bed in the morning. For how could we possibly feel the pain of a parent separated from their child at the border; of a Palestinian family that, in an instant, loses multiple generations to IDF bombs; of a child whose brother, sister, mother or father is ripped from their home by our life-shattering carceral system. Unless we experience it firsthand, not only can we never know that pain, we don’t want to know that pain. We don’t want anyone to know that pain. 

Having made this disclaimer, I will say that Dashiell practices what I used to unselfconsciously label empathy in a way that is bringing me back to the word. While he may be unable to feel exactly what others feel, he strives to comprehend feelings, to acknowledge them, and it’s this act of striving that is so moving, so instructive, so humane.

Standing before that wild fennel at the Albany Bulb, I took out my phone and asked him if he’d like to record a Daily Dash for his fans. I picked him up and we introduced ourselves. We panned the landscape. Then I put him down and handed him the phone. As he addressed his fans, he hopped excitedly from one foot to another. He asked them if they remembered the story of when he got lost. When I confessed that I’d never posted that video to the stream, he started from the beginning.

When he got to the climax, he said, “I looked up at one point and there was no one there. And I said ‘Anybody? Anybody?’ And then I started to run, and I started crying, and I lost my water bottle in here, my shark one, and then someone named Ari heard my crying and she found me.” He showed his fans some fennel seeds that he was clutching in his left hand. “We are gonna take these seeds and then plant them in the back yard so I’ll always remember when I was stuck and how I got out and how it’s not scary anymore. Because now I know it’s just a small patch of grass.”

I wondered about his busy feet—his hopping had persisted through the retelling. I imagined, hopefully, the trauma might be working its way out of his body. When I asked him about it, he confessed that he really needed to pee.

After barely getting his pants down in time to relieve himself against a nearby tree, he returned to the thicket. I asked him if there was anything he wanted to say to the grass itself. Maybe forgive it for scaring him.

“I forgive you…and I am sorry I just wandered into here. I am sorry for your roots, too, but the pokey plants really poked me and I’m sorry that I went in here and I bended you, but I was trying to get back to my group.”

Nora and I looked at each other and made that face that parents make at one another when a piece of their heart breaks for their child. I’m glad we held our tongues. If we’d tried to put that look into words, we would probably have used language like “cute” and “sweet.” And I’m not saying it wasn’t those things. It was. “The pokey plants really poked me and I’m sorry I bended you” has a viral video quality to it. But “cute” and “sweet” dramatically understate the depth of a child not only forgiving but also acknowledging the harm they did when they were lost and scared. It devalues the kind of empathy Dash was practicing, and the lesson he was teaching his parents.

It is futile to try to protect our children from fear. It is hubris that deludes us into thinking that this is a possibility in the first place. The night he had gotten lost, as I laid awake in bed, my heart aching at the thought of my boy, scared and alone amongst the weeds, I had ascribed my desire to uproot this memory to my boundless love for my child and my primal compulsion to keep him safe. But on reflection, I don’t think that’s all it was.

It is one thing to love our children, and it is another to be in love with them, and perhaps we have to guard ourselves against the latter—or, at least be wary of the tightrope on which we walk. Because being in love can veer precariously into possession, especially when we have power and authority over the subject of our love. Upon reflection, I think my impulse was a product of my narcissism. I was jealous. I’d missed a significant moment in my boy’s life—Dash, out there in the great wide world, having a traumatic experience from which I had been left out, powerless to intervene.

Pivot into discomfort. That’s what I had wanted to teach Dashiell. I suppose that’s what I was re-teaching myself, too. In taking him back to the Bulb, Nora and I were making the place, and by proxy the memory, safer and less frightening. We were honoring the depth of his experience. We were honoring his right to have experiences of his own. And we were making sure not to compound harm by aiding and abetting the burial of a painful one.

If Dashiell is going to grow into the kind of person I know he is capable of being, the kind who will continue to teach me things I have forgotten and things I have never known, I will have to let go of my fear of being left out. I will have to give him space to have his own scares. I’ll have hope that this lonely, scary, alienating life doesn’t wedge itself between him and nature, him and his community. And I will have to accept that he will at times be lost, and he will at times be afraid; that he will at times be hurt, and he will at times hurt others; and I will do so holding tight to the knowledge that as long as he can forgive—others as well as himself—he can hold up himself and those he loves just as his mother and I intend to keep holding him.

Zach Wyner is a writer and educator who works with incarcerated youth and adults in the San Francisco Bay Area. His debut novel, What We Never Had, was published in 2016 by Rare Bird Books. He is a contributor to Tikkun, Dime Show Review, The Good Men Project, Curly Red Stories, Unbroken Journal, Atticus Review and Your Impossible Voice. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco and live in El Cerrito, CA with his wife and kids.