The Aquarium Crocodile

2.5 Years: “Um, mama. I thought there was a crocodile inside that fish tank, only, actually, it was just a tiny little green leaf that can’t hurt you. Only I’m a kind of scared and I wants to cuddle with Mama. Does Mama want to hug her sweet baby? Please, please?”

The downside of a child’s imagination is that it envisions the disturbing, not just the fantastic. Who among us doesn’t recall the eerie moments, late at night, when shadows on the wall became ghosts, the clutter in the closet became a monster, and the twigs clicking against the window became bony fingers?

These late-night fears and hallucinations serve a good purpose-- or at least they did a few thousand years ago. It’s a modern invention of Western civilization or young children to sleep separately from their parents and the rest of their families. A two-year-old wandering away from his family in the darkest hours of the night would be in very real danger, not from imagined monsters, but from real ones. Night time is when predators prowl. It’s when even the most determined human eyes can’t see to find their way home. It’s when, in times gone by, children were most at risk of being separated from their parents and never seen again.

It makes sense that our brains would develop over time to have a sense of fear about the things that go bump in the night. The instinct to stay near our parents is strong, and, not so long ago, it was very useful. And even though a toddler in a suburban home isn’t at any risk of being eaten by a crocodile-- even if one did, somehow, exist inside a twenty-gallon fish tank)—the instinct to shy away from the unknown and stay near mom is still there.

I don’t mind at all, of course. I spent the first three and a half years of my daughter’s life unable to sleep without her little arm curled around my head, with my hair twisted around her little fingers. I had plenty of reasons for it: we both slept better that way, and I no longer worried about the periods of sleep apnea she’d had as a baby, and I felt more comfortable and more bonded with her more easily. If my presence helped to fend off the crocodiles in the aquarium… well, that’s just icing on the cake.