Well, maybe not exactly. I don't know what he sees, but ever since he was old enough to point I've believed the he sees something that I cannot. When he was a baby he'd point to a certain area where the wall meets the ceiling in his room. I'd look and look, and he'd point and point. I never saw anything there, but clearly he thought it was something of interest.
As he's grown up there have been several occasions where he's randomly made comments that give me pause. For example, when he was about 2 1/2, he said to me one morning, "Mommy! You got baby!" I stopped and said, "What did you say, Elijah?" so he repeated, "You have baby, Mommy!" Sure enough, I found out about two weeks later that we were expecting our third child, his baby sister Cecilia.
The other night was the first time he's come out and clearly told me, in no uncertain terms, that he sees something and he knows no one else can see it. Here's how the conversation went at bedtime:
Elijah: The monsters are back, Mommy.
Me: Monsters?
Elijah: Yes, do you see them? [pointing toward the ceiling]
Me: [looking up] No, I don't see anything there.
Elijah: No one can see them but me.
Me: What do they look like?
Elijah: They're small and there are a lot of them. When you turn the light on, I can't see them anymore, but they're still there.
Me: Are they scary?
Elijah: A little bit
So I offered to spray some "monster spray" around his bed, and he accepted (we use imaginary spray to keep away whatever is scaring them - one night Emmett requested "tiger spray"... you know, just in case there are any errant tigers wandering around the neighborhood). He pointed to a couple of areas that needed some extra "monster spray" and then went on to sleep peacefully through the night.
I was kind of stunned by the conversation and mentioned it to Marc, who did not find it at all shocking. He told me that Elijah had said the same thing to him on one or two occasions before, but he never thought much of it.
In the moment with Elijah, it never even crossed my mind that he was making it up. Of course, that doesn't mean that he wasn't making it up, or that it couldn't have just been his imagination running away with him. I've thought about this a lot, wondering if I could have handled it better. I'm sure a lot of people would immediately say, as Marc did, that there's no way Elijah was actually seeing something there, and I was being silly for even humoring Elijah or letting him think I believed he really saw something. Maybe it was a bedtime stall-tactic. Who knows.
But here's the conclusion I've come to: Who cares? Whether he was seeing something 'real' or not doesn't really matter. At least not to me.
If he was truly making it up, then maybe he sort of 'won' by getting my attention and keeping me in the room for a couple of extra minutes at bedtime. I can't say I feel it was that much of a loss for me.
If it was just his imagination, which I must reluctantly admit is the most likely scenario, that doesn't make it any less scary to him. I have an over-active imagination and will still occasionally lie awake at night with images from horror movies (I don't watch horror movies, but if I accidentally catch a glimpse of a preview on TV, that can be enough to do me in), or worse, terrifying news stories flashing through my mind. If I can help Elijah feel safe and loved in moments of fear, and possibly even empower him to make the scary things go away, I think that's exactly the kind of mom I'm trying to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment