Learning to Fall

When I took Olivia to her nine month well-baby check way back when, I mentioned to her doctor that she wasn’t sitting up, like, at all. She wasn’t even trying to do so. In fact, she barely had head control at that point.

I suggested that we might need an MRI to see if she might have CP. After all, she’d had a traumatic birth experience.

The doctor picked up my tiny, wobbly baby and held her horizontally above the exam table, her tummy toward the floor. He acted like he was going to drop her and she…didn’t react.

No reflexive movement at all.

When Olivia learned to walk at 29 months old, she was very off-balance. She fell. She fell a lot. We all watched her constantly and yet we weren’t able to catch her every time she fell.

One afternoon when she was three, Olivia was playing with Alyssa in the parking lot where I work. My mom had brought the girls to me so we could make the long drive home for the weekend. I liked to give the girls a few minutes to work off some energy before making them get in their car seats for the hour drive home.

Olivia tried so hard to keep up with Alyssa but her feet failed her and she fell. She fell hard. She fell hard on her face, damaging right front tooth. It was awful. She hadn’t even made the attempt to catch herself as she fell. Her hands didn’t come up to break the fall; she just fell, flat on her little face.

A few months later, I signed both Alyssa and Olivia up for gymnastics. I wanted Olivia to learn how to fall. I knew I couldn’t make her stop falling but I hoped that gymnastics would give her a sense of what her body could do, what her hands could do if she started to fall.

It worked. She learned to fall, to do forward rolls, to almost do a cartwheel. She learned to trust her feet and not have to watch them all the time.

This past weekend while at Alyssa’s gymnastics party, Olivia walked on the balance beam, all by herself. Sure, it was only two inches from the mat beneath it, but she had the confidence to do this. It was amazing and thrilled and she was so proud of herself.

On Sunday, I mentioned to Tom that these days Olivia practically ran up the stairs, no holding on to the rail or the wall, no taking the time to put each foot on the same step. No, she was running up stairs just like any typical six year old would do so.

She was my shadow most of the day, traipsing up those stairs as I put away laundry and made the beds, following me back down so we could play make over and then put on shows for Tom.

One trip up the stairs resulted in her starting down the stairs before me. And on the third step down, she slipped. Let me say here that we have fourteen steps between the first floor and the second. She started to fall on the third step down, meaning she still had eleven stairs to fall down.

I watched in horror as she slipped, tried to catch herself with the hand rail, but slipped down another step, her feet tangled beneath her. Her hands were still reaching for the rail, grasping and almost catching as she slipped down yet another step. In those few seconds as she slipped and fumbled to catch herself I had visions of her tumbling, head over bottom to the base of the stairs.

But that didn’t happen. She caught herself. She stopped falling after ‘only’ three steps. She ended up on her knees with both hands on the rail. She untangled her legs and stood up. I was by her side in seconds, taking her hand. We walked down the rest of the steps together. I picked her up when we got to the bottom and held her close, asking if she was okay.

She put her face in my neck and nodded her answer to my question. She was okay. We settled on the couch and I asked her if anything hurt.

She said, “Only my hands.”

I kissed her hands, so very grateful to those little hands for reaching up, for grasping and catching that rail. She’d caught herself. She’d stopped the fall all by herself. That little girl who’d once been the baby who hadn’t had any sort of reflexive motion, had reach up and stopped what could have been a horrible, horrible fall.

Thank you gymnastics, thank you chiropractor, thank you God for her tiny hands, hands that are so much stronger than they look. Hands that can catch a snowflake, a raindrop, a falling child.