Apparently FDR Never Met a Balloon

When I was a little kid I was afraid of a lot of things. I guess you could say I had a sensitive little soul, but in reality I think I was just scarred from having four older brothers. One time, my brothers told me that there were bears hiding in the forest that surrounded our house in and they would come get me if I was playing on my swing set. My mom never understood why I wouldn’t play on the swing set that I had been dying to get and so sometimes she would make me go play on it. I would sit on the swing, facing the forest, and timidly pump back and forth all the while searching the trees with bug eyes for any sign of hungry bears.

want to play on the seesaw?

Another time, one of my brothers told me that he had something to show me out in the front yard. When I ventured close to the front door, he told me that it’s was the boogey man outside! then shoved me out the door and locked it while laughing from the window as I cried. How you can possibly become a fully functioning adult after that, I don’t know.

Giant child eaters and nondescript undead creatures aside, the top of my fear spectrum was dominated by two hideously terrifying things. Look down at your little Sparky – that precious dog with the fluffy white fur, saucer eyes and wagging tail? That thing was a ferocious devil demon to me. I couldn’t go over to play at friends’ houses if they had a dog, or they at least had to ensure me it would be kept away at all times.

Get it away! GET IT AWAY!!

Thunderstorms were also panic-inducing. I’m not sure why – maybe it had to do with the lightening that struck one of our trees in our front yard, leaving a perfect jagged lightning bolt shape. I guess I assumed that if a tree could get hit, so could I. One of the houses I lived in as a kid had a screened in porch. My family would gather together to watch the fantastic flashes of light and hear the sounds of the booming thunder over the trees. I hid under the kitchen table.

So with such a wussy for a Mom, I assumed that Landon would also exhibit some aversions to certain childhood experiences. Maybe the closet monsters would cause him distress or perhaps the tornado sirens that go off occasionally might be cause for concern. You can understand my surprise, then, when I found out that Landon is utterly terrified of balloons.

To you it's just a harmless celebratory trinket


To Landon it looks like this

Yes, balloons. The helium-filled balls of joy that are the desire of every carnival-going kid the world over. I found this out last week while joining a friend at Chick-fil-a (pre-kid I would never have stepped foot in this place. Post-kid, I see it as it really is: The Best. Restaurant.Ever. I even used emphasis periods because that’s. how much. I mean it.). Anyway, the staff kindly asked if Landon would like a balloon like the other kids and I said yes thinking he would like it. Apparently I don’t know my child at all. He cried from the second that balloon came near him. On the way home, I even had to pull over the car to get the balloon away from him because he was freaking out so much. We still have the pathetic, deflated, non-threatening shell of a balloon wafting on the floor of our living room and every time he sees it, he crawls past it at super warp speed as if the string is going to slither around and catch his little leg.

I’m not sure what to make of this fear. Should I be grateful that his life is peaceful enough that the only thing he can find to cause him grief is a weightless piece of rubber? Or should I be concerned that my kid is headed for many days of viewing the world from inside his locker? I am also not sure how to handle this. My husband (only half kidding) suggested the “flooding” technique in which you surround a person with the object of their fear so as to inoculate themselves against it. So do we tie big bouquets of balloons on every door handle and stuff his room full of them (I’m sure my pediatrician would love that) so that everywhere he looks it’s a frightening array of creepy messages like “Over the Hill!”, “Welcome Baby Girl” and “Congrats Grad!”? That is the stuff adult therapy is made of.

I favor the ignore it and it will go away approach (it’s worked with a lot of stuff so far, I’m seeing how far I can take it). I figure we just accept it as a quirky stage of childhood and move on. Besides, it’s only a matter of time that he will find something else that will cause him great distress.

Like girls.