You have to be this tall to ride.
When I was four years old, my parents took me to an amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio called Cedar Point – aka the roller coaster capital of the world. The story goes that I cried and cried on the drive down as they tried explaining to me why I would only be able to go on the kid rides and not the grown-up roller coasters. Even when we got there and they showed me the “You must be this tall to ride” sign as proof, I still cried.
I wonder about that four-year-old girl who knew she wanted to ride those roller coasters without having any idea what they were all about or what was in store. Even though each one had to have looked like Mt. Everest to her, even though people were screaming as they rode them, she wasn’t scared.
When I was finally tall enough to ride one, I was like an addict, finishing one go-round and then running back in line to do it again...and again...and again. I craved that total loss of control – the twists, the turns, the anticipation on the slow hill climbs, the stomach-flipping drops that sucked the breath out of me.
Fast forward to my thirty-eighth birthday and two failed IVF treatments. I hadn’t been on a roller coaster in at least a decade, but I needed to scream. A lot. So my husband and I went to the one place where it’d be completely and totally acceptable for an adult woman to scream in public – Six Flags. And while it felt good to give my brain a jolt of adrenaline, something new was part of the equation, something that hadn’t been there decades earlier – fear.
Last summer I took my son to Discovery Kingdom as a special summer adventure. He zeroed in on the biggest and scariest ride the minute we walked into the park. There was no way I could take him on that thing – it went upside down! Horrible things might happen. H-o-r-r-i-b-l-e things. Somehow I talked him into riding The Joker instead – from the ground, it looked pretty tame with just a couple of hills.
Looks can be deceiving.
I should have known something was wrong when there were two sets of restraints – one at our waists and one around our legs. But it was too late to second-guess – we were locked in. Literally. Within a few seconds, we were upside down as we barreled through the first corkscrew. My son was laughing next to me while I clamped down on his leg with my right hand, hoping that it’d be enough to stop him from falling out.
Somewhere in the middle of that ride, the fear gave way to acceptance – I couldn’t control this. No matter how hard I held on and braced for the worst, I couldn’t control what was coming next. At no point, did I enjoy that ride, not one second of it. But I survived it and I’d go through it all again to hear my son laugh like that – his freedom in total opposition to my fear.
2020 has turned into the mother of all roller coasters with so many twists and turns and hill climbs and drops – there’s nothing fun about any of it. And yet there are moments, like the one right now where I’m typing from a table plopped in the middle of the woods, where I can finally breathe and remind myself to believe: I will survive this, too.
NOW ONTO THIS MONTH’S FEEL-GOOD FINDS:
