I was 8 years old. The main floor of our house consisted of a kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms – for the five of us. But upstairs, where my grandmother lived, there was more space. My little sister, who was one at the time, was relegated to the main floor, where she flew around, tiny feet kicking in a plastic baby walker. Mainly, she was in the kitchen because the linoleum floor was much easier to traverse on plastic wheels than the carpet. As her legs got stronger, though, the whole place became her realm.

I would push her around in that little chariot, kind of like it was a shopping cart. The more quickly I went, the more she would laugh. I would later do the same, pushing her around in clothing baskets and even sitting her on a wooden chessboard. The walker’s seat was red, with some rips from whoever had it before. The rest of it was just beige plastic. There’s no way that thing makes it to the Target sales rack these days – with all things baby now having real regulatory safety standards.

Our hallway was linoleum as well. And I remember one day when the kitchen door was left open, and she made her way out there. That little walker wasn’t built for the five stairs that she went down, bloodying her little baby nose. I still remember the mark she had on the right side of her face after the fall. I assume baby gate sales were lower in the early 1980s than they are these days. Nor did we have plastic plugs to keep our little fingers from the electrical outlets. My mother was solely dependent on Mr. Yuck stickers to keep us away from liquids that could do real damage. Those little cupboard locks weren’t so prevalent either.

I have a tiny scar on my right arm – remnants of an accidental run-in with the lit end of Joe Vaccarello’s old-school Winston smoke. He was standing in my kitchen, and as I flew by with my sister in her walker, I didn’t see his cigarette, and he didn’t see me coming. The smoldering end of a lit cigarette reaches about 800° between puffs. That explains how I got a third-degree burn so quickly. Face the facts: today’s nicotine vaping, chewing, and Nicorette gum – way fewer house fires, and way fewer blisters on kids.

Isn’t it strange how, four decades later, I can still remember where Joe was standing, what he was wearing, who else was in the kitchen, and even that I was wearing a tank top, which provided no protection from bare skin to red-hot ember contact. I quickly went from running my baby sister around in her walker to sitting on the couch holding an ice cube on my arm…crying my eyes out. People smoke less these days, yet on the rare occasion when I see the end of a cigarette, I still remember that day in my kitchen in 1981.

And that’s the opener.

It’s so easy for us to recall stories about the things that hurt us – easiest when the pain is physical, not quite so much when the pain rests in the mind or the spirit. In poker, we call it snake-bit – when your hand seems unbeatable, like a full house, only to be crushed by four of a kind. The next time you have a full house, it just doesn’t feel like that strong of a hand anymore. The same thing happens when we trust a person who lets us way, way, way down. It makes it so hard to trust the next person who comes along.

That’s the experience too many of our children have. When the very people who were supposed to provide them with care and love did anything and everything but, the rest of the world became something they had to worry about. And whatever it is – the snake that bites – one can’t help but look out for anything that looks like, sounds like, or feels like the person or the situation that caused them such pain.

*The problem is, you never see them coming*

You know what the venom does, right? It suffocates hope, all while feeding fear. And fear – as an instinct of survival – it works. The longer fear works, the more hope simply stays away.

Sound shitty?

That’s because it is.

Fear sneaks in quietly, like a thief – strongest and most effective when nobody’s looking…or when no one seems to care.

Hope, on the other hand, can return – but in a much different way.

Hope comes back when someone notices. When someone slows down. When someone does the opposite of what hurts us. For children especially, hope is rebuilt not through speeches or programs, but through consistency. Through adults who show up again and again. Through safe hands. Through honest words. Through moments that say: You matter. You are seen. You are not alone.

Most of us carry scars – some visible, some not. Some from pushes down the stairs. Some from burns we never saw coming. And some from people we trusted who didn’t protect us the way they should have. But scars also tell us something else: we survived. We healed. And somewhere along the way, someone held the ice to a blistered arm.

We can’t undo the snakebite. But we can teach someone how to trust poker stats again. We can be the adult who changes the pattern. We can be the steady presence that makes the next hand feel possible to play.

Probably, that’s the real work – remembering where we were hurt, not so we stay there, but so we know exactly how to stand up, and to show up…for someone else.

Holding the Ice for Someone Else

One of Them Started Singing

In the Land Between Fairy Godmothers and Flamethrowers