On Getting Back Up

On Saturday, Goldie and I were walking through Palisades Park on one of those mornings when the ocean is glistening and everyone slows down a little without meaning to. It was her first real beach walk. We went down the Montana Avenue stairs. The same ones I used to take multiple times a week before she came into my life, a ritual I’d let go of once she arrived. I’d been playing it safe, keeping to the upper path where the ground is even and nothing leads anywhere new. That morning I decided to go back down.

She approached the sand like a tiny scientist, nose down, tiny tail high, completely absorbed in whatever the ground was telling her. I’ve always loved firsts. In my life and now in hers. On the way back toward the car, she found a patch of grass that must have held the most extraordinary smell of her short life, and she did what dogs do when something is that good. She flopped onto her back and started rolling in it, legs in the air, spine twisting, squiggling around like she was dancing. Pure joy. No self-consciousness about any of it.

I was standing there smiling when a little girl and her father walked up beside us. She wanted to pet Goldie. Her father asked if it was okay and I said yes, though I mentioned Goldie might bark a little, not because she’s unfriendly, she’s just a puppy who sometimes doesn’t know what to do with new people. The girl listened and then took one small, deliberate step backward. “Oh no, no,” she said softly. “I’m cautious around dogs.” The way she said it stopped me. No embarrassment. No apology. Just a clear, practiced knowledge of herself, like she had spent real time learning that about who she was and decided she was allowed to say it out loud. I told her I completely understood.

So the three of us stood there watching Goldie roll around in the grass. A couple passed by with two small dogs and stopped nearby. The girl turned to them and asked if she could pet one. The woman smiled and lifted one of the little dogs toward her. The girl reached out slowly, carefully, with everything she had.

The dog snapped.

Not hard enough to bite, but fast enough to scare her. She pulled her hand back and went down to the ground in tears, not the quick kind from surprise, but the heavy kind. The ones that come when something you were already afraid of confirms itself right in front of you. She curled inward and held her hand against her chest even though we could all see it was fine. Her father crouched down beside her. “Is your hand okay?” he asked. We all knew it was. He asked anyway. He didn’t pull her up. Didn’t tell her she was fine or that it wasn’t a big deal. Didn’t need the moment to be anything other than what it was. He didn’t coddle her either, he just refused to abandon her in it. He stayed there while she cried, for however long she needed, which was maybe thirty seconds. Then she stood up. He opened his arms and she walked into them. They hugged the way a present father hugs his daughter, like he had nowhere else to be. After a moment he looked down at her and said the thing I haven’t stopped thinking about. “I’m just so proud of you,” he said. “You went for it. And I’m so proud of the way you came back.”

Not proud that she tried. Proud of the rebound.

I’ve been sitting with that ever since. We spend so much time celebrating the attempt, the bravery, the leap, reaching toward the thing that scares us. And that matters. But what he was honoring was something rarer. The moment after it goes wrong. After the fear you named turns out to be exactly right. After you’re on the ground and your hand is fine but something else is hurt and you don’t quite have words for it yet. She got back up anyway. And someone was there to see it. Not to minimize it or rush her through it or turn it into a lesson before she’d finished crying. Just to witness it. Just to say: That. Right there. That’s the thing.

Goldie eventually shook herself off, scattering grass everywhere, and trotted back toward me like none of it had happened. Already onto the next thing. As we started walking the girl turned and waved. I waved back. I wanted to go over to the father and tell him what I’d just watched. How rare it is to see someone hold a moment like that without flinching, without needing it to wrap up cleanly or look different than it did. But some moments don’t belong to you to enter. So I carried it home instead.

And I keep coming back to this: how many of us learned to recover quietly? How many of us got back up before anyone noticed we’d fallen, and got so good at it that we stopped expecting anyone to see what it took? What would it change, in us, in the people we’re raising, in the way we love each other, if we celebrated that instead of the performance of being fine? That’s what I keep coming back to. Not the fall. Not even the bravery. The rebound.

I’m still learning how to let someone see it.

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