Fear

Fear- An unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.

Yesterday I took my daughter, Janai, to her yearly eye exam. She is 13 and has been wearing glasses since she was a little girl religiously. I mean she wears them from the moment she opens her eyes until I take them off her face when she falls asleep. if she can’t find her glasses then her day is done, she won’t leave the house, not even for school. For the last two years she has been begging me to allow her to get contacts. I kept saying no because one, I didn't feel like she was responsible enough yet to handle contacts, but also because of my own fears.

I have noticed that in my 19 years of being a parent, I have not allowed my children to experience alot of life because of my fears. My fears of them getting hurt, my fears of them getting taken, my fears of them losing their life. So many fears.

I can remember the moment I began projecting my fears on my children. It was just before my son’s 15th birthday. I was so nervous that he was turning 15. See, 15 is the age that I watched my twin brother get ripped away from me and our childhood as he would know it. Never to be seen again for almost 10 years. That was the year that my husband and I began having the conversations with Jamir about being a black boy in America. You know those talks, how to conduct himself if he got pulled over by the police, how to dress so he doesn’t get labeled as a thug, how to be a good man, those talks that we have with our black boys. I didn’t want him to leave the house without me, or eat certain things, or be around certain people. I barely allowed him to stay the night at a friends house or even walk to the corner store. Jamir received the projection the most simply because he was my first child and honestly had no clue what I was doing at the age of 18 becoming a mom.

By the time Janai was born my fears were locked and loaded. She definitely wasn’t leaving the house. As she grew up, she began to do something that jamir never did. She challenged my fears. She needed to understand the why, and that made me so uncomfortable because it forced me to question why I had so much fear. It required me to look at my trauma and deal with the residue. By the time we arrived at Janai’s eye appointment yesterday I had given her so many reasons why she wasn’t ready for and didn’t need contacts.

• You’re to young

• You’re not responsible enough

• They are going to hurt in your eyes

• You won’t know how to put them in and take them out

Again, so many fears. All of my fears, and none of hers.

Janai sat in that chair and the first thing her eye doctor said was, “So are we doing contacts today?”, because she is MY child, she answered for herself immediately before I even had a chance to think about it, “Yes we are”. Her doctor began to explain to her the rules and