Cellar Dwellers….

It seems with each week that passes, my kids get a little more daring, a little more adventurous and a little more independent.

My seven year old wants permission to ride her bike three houses away un-chaperoned. My five year old wants to run to retrieve the mail from the community mailbox down the street. They both want to choose their own clothes (usually looking like they are candidates for first year clown college), comb their own hair (fine by me, they cover their heads with both hands and scream as if I’m tying knots with my teeth and yanking them out for sport when I do it), they open the fridge, select a flavour of yogurt, grab a spoon from the cutlery drawer and peel back the lid (which they proceed to lick clean) and are showing a number of signs that full on independence from Mommy and Daddy is somewhere on the horizon.

Except, that is, when it comes to going downstairs to the basement.

They can play in the backyard in a fort filled with bugs, that is nothing more than mangled branches that have created a gnarled cave as if once inside you are looking at the world from the inside of a whale’s mouth and think nothing of it but the basement? Forget it.

They will pick up a slimy snail or frog from the garden but at no time will they descend twelve stairs without an entourage, a flashlight and a noise making machine to ward off evil villains, wild animals or whatever uninvited house guest might be squatting down there.

The kids have a playroom, a guest bedroom, Daddy’s office, rec room and it’s completely finished with a bright and cheery atmosphere but try telling them that. Even when they play the Barbie tossing game where she goes flying down the railing and lands at the bottom of the stairs (which makes me very happy when she dislocates something) they fight over who will have the terrifying task of racing down the stairs and back up with a now one legged doll, unassisted.

I have explained to the girls that this is their home and there is nothing to be afraid of but flashback thirty years and I was that same scared little girl asked to bring up a loaf of bread from the deep freeze and my heart would stop for the few seconds it would take me to leap to find the string that would trigger a dangling light bulb with no shade or casing of any kind in the pitch black, dive into the bottom of the deep freeze that was big enough to house several frozen bodies that sat next to a larger than life furnace whose erratic buzzing noises were enough to get my heart jump started to a full on pound, popping buttons off my shirt until I ran so fast back up the stairs (sometimes four at a time) I would fall, injuring myself and often smushing the frozen loaf of bread right out of the bag.

I would fling the bread, huffing and puffing, barely breathing, tears of joy I had made it out of there alive, sweating profusely, so I understand why the girls have this fear of the unknown that lurks beneath, I just wish I knew how to make it more welcoming.

Our printer is downstairs so when our five year old wants to print some hidden pictures to take on a car ride, she won’t go down alone.

I’ll ask the girls to go jump on the mini-trampoline which they do happily when together but try asking just one of them and they look as though I’ve asked them to jump on a trampoline in a haunted house, surrounded by rabid dogs and not just any rabid dogs, rabid basement dogs, the worst kind.

I bet if I laid their Hallowe’en candy out along the stairs they’d follow the trail….Hmmmmm

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *