Timeline/World: Through the Looking Glass – Atheria 1st Generation
Characters: Indrah Laruwien
Race: Dragon
Age: 98, physically about 28
Current residence: Atheria City, Eresiel
Final Word Count: 820 words
I admit that I am one of those people who believe that mistakes need to be made. Growing up, you need to make mistakes to learn from them. I’m not saying that if I see you making the same mistake over and over again, I won’t stop you and tell you why that mistake is being made, that would be cruel. The short version of things is that if I saw my child trying to climb up a tree that I knew wasn’t safe—but a fall wouldn’t do much more than lead to possibly a few bruises—I would let them do it.
I would—and used to tell them as they were little—that it was a bad idea but, from that point on, I let them decide whether or not they truly wanted to do that thing that clearly was a bad idea. It was on them to decide if the warning was enough to keep them away from the thing that seemed so fun but could possibly—dad had to be lying, right?—be bad.
You cannot coddle a child until they are adults. Coddling them will lead to them having no life experience and no sense of what they should and shouldn’t do in life. I admit that I haven’t seen much of that here but while I was out there, when I was still young and still growing up myself, to a point, I saw plenty.
One of the other dragons I grew up near, her parents would constantly be stopping her from doing anything. She had wanted to climb up to the lookout area, they didn’t let her. She had wanted to explore the neighbouring forest, they didn’t let her. The list was endless, and they were all things that I thought were good for the soul. I was five or six years older than her, I believe, and I’d had plenty of experiences. Plenty of falls from trees, plenty of slips while trying to get up to the lookout spot.
I saw the consequences of their refusal to allow their daughter any freedom of decision possibly more than they did. They were dead-set on making sure she was safe from the world as a whole and she developed a rebellious streak that was bigger than either of them could properly handle. This was long before she had managed to learn to use her wings—that was something else they refused to teach her. Learning how to fly is one of the things we teach them as young as they possibly can learn so that they do so in a controlled environment but clearly, they didn’t want her feet to even be off the ground.
That particular thing truly worked against them.
When she was twelve or thirteen—I was seventeen and preparing to head out into that big, big world—she finally sneaked away from her parents, climbed up to our lookout point, spread her wings and jumped. I think I can spare the details of the horror that happened after that.
For those that might think I should have stopped her, I would have, had I seen her up there on the lookout point. All I’d seen was her sneaking away from the housing that her parents called their own. I wasn’t about to follow her around to see where she was going. For one thing, where she wanted to go was none of my business and, for another, I had other plans and, again, kids used to sneak out all the time at that age back home.
It’s only the following morning that I heard about what happened and yes, it was a tragedy, yes, I’m sure it could have been prevented but there was nothing left to do for the parents but to mourn her passing and let it go. I’m well aware that this makes me sound cruel but, again, I’m pretty certain that if they’d allowed her a bit more freedom to experience things as she was growing up instead of protectively keeping her from everything, this wouldn’t have happened.
If they’d taught her to spread her wings and fly when she was four or five like the rest of us, she’d have been able to glide down from the point. If they’d let her head to the point before she’d decided to sneak out, she probably wouldn’t have tried to do these two things at once while there, either. There just are countless things that had been wrong with their overly protective streak and while the price paid was very, very high, it still happened and there was no turning back that clock.
That’s why I allowed my kids—with Elva’s blessing—to do things that could be dangerous. Certainly not so dangerous as to lead them to their deaths but they learned from their mistakes, and they understood that certain things just shouldn’t be done.
Works of JD Beckett 