Dear Lyla,
When you are young it seems like the adults in your life think they know what is best for you; and often that is true. With age comes experience, with experience comes wisdom and with wisdom comes the ability to predict outcomes based on observed variables and past outcomes. I know that it can seem horribly cruel and unfair sometimes when adults dismiss the intuition of a child; nevertheless it is done out of love and no parent survives child rearing without making an error or two. I am positive that on more than one occasion as a young child I stomped my feet, stuck out my lower lip and declared that my parents hated me, were unfair and I might as well pack a bag and move out. For the life of me I cannot recall with any certainty more than one or two instances where I had felt truly wronged and misunderstood by my parents. However, one such breach of trust in my gut instincts by my parents is forever burned in my memory and it is the first recollection I have that my parents were not immune to making mistakes themselves. I was nine years old and it was summertime on Ottertail Lake. I had become enamored with nature’s creatures and my mother had become quite accustomed to the strays I would bring home (dogs, ducks and chipmunks just to name a few). Up until the sunny day on which this particular tale plays out, I never received a great deal of resistance from my parents when I brought injured wild animals home to nurse. I was particularly delighted to see that a turtle had dug a nest to lay her eggs in the ditch next to the county road in our back yard. Mama turtle had been out and about for a couple of weeks and had always confined her travels to the patch of prairie grass between the ditch and the lake; she steered clear of the road which was busy with tourists during the summer months. One afternoon I went out to check on her and to my horror she was in the middle of the road. I sprinted back to the house and breathlessly begged my mom and dad to help me get her back to the ditch. You see she was a very large turtle, a snapping turtle, and I knew it was dangerous for me to approach her. I also understood that she could be run over, or worse, caught and turned into turtle soup! To their credit my parents came outside to see how dire the situation truly was. Mama turtle was almost to the other side of the road and my parents felt that since she only had a few feet left to go that it would be in her best interest not to disturb her journey. In my heart I knew they were wrong. I felt my chest tighten and my respirations rapidly increase as I begged them to do something. I told them I had a gut feeling that something would go wrong; that she wouldn’t make it back to the safety of the tall grasses of the ditch. A few moments later a truck came speeding down the road and I was terrified that the truck would hit her; Grandma said not to worry that the truck would see her and slow down. Grandma was right, the truck slowed down to avoid hitting her. Not only did the truck slow down, it came to a complete stop; at which time a man got out of the truck picked up the mammoth turtle and put it in the back of his truck. I knew that this man did not intend to release her into a more appropriate habitat; I understood that turtle meat from a female this size could feed a family for a few days. While I was no stranger to the realities of country living and livestock, I could not bring myself to accept her fate as being a part of the natural order of things; and I could not help but blame my parents in being complicit in her demise. It is a rite of passage Little One, the moment where the veil has been lifted and you no longer see your parents as infallible and omniscient; and it is rite we must all partake of. On that day I felt my own mortality, not because the turtle met an untimely fate, because I understood that my parents were human and not beyond the reach of the cruel realities of the world we live in. In that moment I was filled with fear, uncertainty and sadness because somehow, at the tender age of nine, I realized that this day marked the beginning of the end of my childhood. Little One someday the age of innocence will end for you; I don’t know when and I don’t know how. I do know that it can be scary and a bit overwhelming. I want to share with you something that I wish I knew then; to understand the fallibility of human nature, and to accept it, is essential in creating a caring and compassionate human being. Thankfully, you are much wiser and more intuitive now than when I was your age. While I already mourn the day you will meet the sunset of your tender years; I am quite certain that when your time comes you will deal with the revelations gracefully, compassionately and wisely.
Letters To Lyla 