Go Home for Dinner by Mike Pence

Author:Mike Pence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

25 Go First

Parents are the pride of their children.

—PROVERBS 17:6

When Charlotte was a little girl, we took a family vacation to Florida, which is still one of our favorite places to relax on the beach. During our trip, she had an experience that was painful at the time yet would later serve as a lesson in how to face her fears.

She and her siblings were playing in the sand and suddenly spotted dolphins close to the shore. Michael, always rushing in headfirst without a helmet, took off running, plunging into the water to try to catch up to them, and Charlotte was close on his heels. A few moments later, she was running back out of the water, screaming and crying, with her foot covered in blood.

I scooped her into my arms and ran her up to the hotel room where we were staying. We called our pediatrician, who told us she had likely been stung by a stingray, which we quickly found to be true based on the indentation the stinger had left on her heel. The doctor told us to soak her foot in hot water to neutralize the toxin, so I joined her by submerging my own foot in the nearly scalding bathwater. We took her to the emergency room to make sure the stinger wasn’t stuck in her foot and found more stingray victims there, seated in wheelchairs with buckets of hot water for their wounds.

A few years passed, and Charlotte was still afraid of stingrays. Karen wanted to help her overcome her fear and took her on a trip to the local aquarium. Karen had heard of a tank of stingrays that visitors could feed since their stingers had been removed. She thought it would be a great idea for Charlotte to feed them, but Charlotte refused, and crying, she resisted her mother’s efforts to put her hand in the tank. Karen decided she would go first to show her it was safe. Charlotte watched with tears in her eyes and a quivering lip as her mom grabbed some food, flattened her hand as the employees at the exhibit had instructed her, and slid it into the water. But before Karen knew it, she felt a pinch on her hand and jerked it out of the tank to discover a small cut. One of the stingrays had bit her.

They moved on from the exhibit, and Karen didn’t tell Charlotte to put her hand back into the tank. But the example her mother had set for her was an important one. Karen had encouraged Charlotte to conquer her fear, but she had done something else, too: she had demonstrated that she would be with her daughter through the scary moments, she would go first, and she wouldn’t ask her daughter to do anything she wasn’t willing to do herself. And, most important, if something bad did happen, that they could handle it together.

In life, there is always the next fear to conquer and the next unknown to face.

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