How brave you'll be

Depends on who's watching

William Baxter Closson, Detail from Night Moths

I would like to tell you that, when the moth dropped into the beam of my headlight, paused, and headed straight for my face, I stayed calm. I’d like to tell you that I gently removed my headlamp, held it down by my waist, and drew the moth toward me so that I could observe it—the size of it, the blurry beating of its wings. I’d like to tell you that I was brave. But that’s not what happened at all.

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One thing that no one tells you about becoming a parent is how brave you’ll have to be. You will have to be brave about little things like cockroaches and dead mice and cuts that bleed. And you will have to be brave about big things, like turbulence over the Pacific so intense that everyone on the plane shrieks with every bump. You’ll have to look into your children’s huge eyes and say, “Weeee!” when, really, you want to claw your way out of this metal tube, unfurl your gargantuan wings, clutch your children to your chest, and fly them back to dry land. You’ll have to be brave when you drop them off at school after another school shooting, when you wish them a wonderful day and tell them how much you love them, all the while your heart is less a fish flopping in your chest than a fish gasping for air, expanding to the point of explosion, and contracting again into a painful knot. You will not be the one who teaches them to be afraid. The world will do that for you.

I’ve learned to love moths. I do not fear them. But when the hummingbird moth dropped into the beam of my headlamp on my walk back from the barn several weeks ago, I didn’t have time to remember what magical creatures they are. When it began moving toward me like it was on a high-speed retractable leash attached to my face, I didn’t have a chance to put on my curiosity hat. Instead, I screamed. I SCREAMED as loud as I could ever remember screaming. I ripped the headlamp from my head and flung it as far as I could and then I fell to the ground, onto my knees and covered my head with my hands. I stayed crouched there, on the dampening grass, my two dogs sniffing my hair, my ears, my armpits. I could hear only Cinder’s tail furiously wagging, womp womp womp, but not the lawnmower hum of the moth’s wings. I sat up on the mowed footpath. Around me, the grass was deep and dark, grown long in this unusually warm autumn season. Somewhere out there was my headlamp.

Sometimes, when you pretend to be brave about something for long enough, you actually become braver. I can now see a cockroach cross the sidewalk and not jump out of my skin. I can get information from a stranger, dress a wound, and talk about the future death of my animals without crying. But sometimes my bravery is just a veneer. Sometimes it doesn’t go deeper than that.

After I found my headlamp in a goldenrod thicket, I laughed thinking about my kids witnessing that encounter. They would’ve been so confused—why was their mother, who was always stopping them to observe this moth and that beetle—on the ground in a fetal position? I chided myself. You are so silly.

But wait. It’s not silly to be scared. It’s not a small thing to feel your feelings without having to temper them or shape them for anyone else. It’s a scream in the night; it’s a return to yourself. Tomorrow, I’ll be brave again.