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'Balloon boy' as metaphor

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Ruth Marcus

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 23, 2009

In the matter of Falcon Heene, the 6-year-old boy who stashed himself - or was stashed by his parents - in the attic while a frantic world thought he was adrift in a homemade balloon, let us stipulate a few things:

That there is something presumptively wrong with people who name their children after birds of prey; that the Heenes, if this was indeed a hoax, make Jon and Kate look like Ward and June; that Andy Warhol was right, except his 15 minutes have stretched to 30 in the age of cable; that a constitutional amendment to prohibit parents from exploiting their kids on reality TV shows might be in order.

But all that isn't what really interests me. What interests me - and what I suspect helped make the episode so compelling - is Balloon Boy's flight as metaphor for the process of parenting.

You might say it doesn't take much to command wall-to-wall cable coverage, and that would be a fair point. Any random freeway chase will fill up the time nicely if there is helicopter footage available in real time.

Yet it is the threatened child, for obvious reasons, who truly grabs our attention: the toddler trapped in the well, the third-grader snatched from her bedroom, the teen gone missing - and, as my colleague Eugene Robinson tartly pointed out a few years back, the blonder the better.

If you are a parent, you know - in one of those ways that you try to shove out of your consciousness, because there is no point thinking about it - that this sort of thing could happen to you. That no amount of vigilance, really, can shield our children completely from random acts of violence or fate. The ancient branch that falls at precisely the wrong time. The flu that should merely have sidelined but ends up killing. The tractor-trailer, out of control. To have a child is to know the certainty of joy tempered by the omnipresent possibility of loss.

Which gets us to Balloon Boy as metaphor. The silvery balloon hurtles through the air. It bobs, sickeningly. A child, or so we think, is inside, unseen. There is nothing to do but watch, horrified, and hope for a soft landing.

This is the essence of parenting. You must send your child out into the world, even though you know she is going to get bruised. There will inevitably be the party invitation that doesn't come, the team that isn't made, the once-close friend who snubs. You can't stop this; in truth, you shouldn't if you could. In "The Blessing of a Skinned Knee," psychologist Wendy Mogel describes the phenomenon of parents foolishly "trying to inoculate their children against the pain of life."

The balloon strains against its mooring. You give the ropes some slack. Someday, too soon, you will have to let it float free.

Ruth Marcus' column is distributed by Washington Post Writers Group.

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