An Instinct Took Over.
I was driving down the road, with Dylan in the passenger seat, when a groundhog wandered right into the path of my car.
Seeing the animal barely in time, I slammed on the brakes, throwing my arm in front of Dylan to hold him back from the windshield. Yes, we have seatbelts. Yes, he was wearing one.
But an instinct took over – an instinct I didn’t even know I had.
I remember similar incidents in the car when I was younger, and my dad’s arm shoving me back into the seat when we made an abrupt stop.
I was always a bit grateful for that arm.
I watched a movie, The Blind Side, a true story about the young life of Michael Oher, a player in the NFL. In the movie, Michael is involved in a car accident while transporting a young boy. The boy, who was very small and sitting in the passenger seat, would have been crushed by the air bag, except that Michael Oher reached over with his arm and stopped the air bag as it deployed.
It turns out that Michael Oher tested in the 98th percentile for “protective instincts” – something that serves him quite well during football games.
I wasn’t so sure about my “protective instincts” until that groundhog crossed the road.
I remember once, long before the boys were born, I was standing outside with my cat in the evening. Kitty was wandering around in the backyard when she suddenly burst over the top of a hill and raced toward me – followed by a fox.
Without any conscious thought, I stepped between the cat and the fox, and the fox stopped cold two feet from me. It looked at me for a second – just a second – before I started screaming and running at it. Then it ran off.
Somewhere inside me, those protective instincts do lurk. But usually, they just lurk. Usually, I visualize what I would do … but then things happen, and I am never fast enough to do those things.
The boys get hurt, skin their knees, break their nails, bump their heads. So far, it hasn’t mattered that my protective instincts are based mostly in my imagination.
Then, when my arm flew out to stop Dylan from flying into the windshield, I thought, gee, maybe I can do some good after all.
Most interesting, of course, is that Dylan is eight inches taller than I am, and almost the same weight.
But I am still trying to keep him safe.