Thank you for visiting my blog! If you enjoy it, you might also enjoy Mom vs the Wasps, which is a fun post about facing my fears for the sake of my children. Well, mostly it’s about me running away from wasps.

Do ropes courses teach our kids valuable life lessons?

I sure hope not, because last week at the zoo, I refused to let my 8-year-old even attempt a ropes course. In my defence, there wasn’t enough time. We had already spent hours looking at the animals and playing in the splash pad and I had dinner plans back home. Nope, there would be no ropes course.

Okay, to be honest, I never had any intention of letting her do the course anyway. Why would I want my sweet child precariously balanced 30 feet above my head?

I’m terrified of heights. I’m the white-knuckled passenger on the airplane that screams with every bump. Flying? I don’t even like bridges. In fact, that day on the way home from the zoo, I refused to drive over the 131-foot-high skyway and I drove around looking for some sort of lift bridge instead. Sure, it made us super late, but I thought with a little luck, we’d get to see an enormous ship sail past. Who doesn’t love ships? They let people travel at sea level, where we belong.

Apparently, my daughter doesn’t share my love of the ground. She wanted to do the rope course, 30 feet up in the air.

I have personal experience with rope course obstacles that are 30 feet in the air. I did a rope challenge when I was a teenager and I can assure you that I learned nothing. Zero character development whatsoever.

It was at camp with my church youth group sometime back in the 90s. These were the good old days where we could cross from Canada to the US without even photo ID, though it baffles me that we would leave our free healthcare behind. Especially when we did terrifying ropes courses and played games like dodgeball with frisbees, which is every bit as painful as it sounds.

I loved my youth group. I thought the people in it were so cool – much, much cooler than I was. I really wanted to impress them, and one boy in particular. Of course.

On the morning of the ropes course, we were all sitting in the dining room eating our breakfast and I overheard my crush talking about the course finale: the Leap of Faith. He was listing the handful of girls that planned to try it and he sounded impressed. That was all the motivation I needed; I decided to do the jump.

What is the Leap of Faith? Imagine walking through a forest and finding a tall tree with all the branches cut off, except for stubs left behind to act as footholds. Halfway up the tree, the branch stubs are replaced by staggered metal brackets. At the top, the tree trunk is cut clean off, leaving a small flat surface to stand on. A trapeze bar is suspended a few feet away — your goal is to jump from the tree and catch it.

Crazy, right? And I was going to do it. To impress a boy.

One by one, kids in my youth group did the jump. Some of them caught the trapeze bar with ease. Some of them touched it but didn’t get a good grip. They all seemed to be having fun, unconcerned with things like gravity laws or basic common sense.

I was one of the last people to go — probably because I was terrified. By the time my jump came, at least half of the group had gone back to the lake to cool off, but there were still a handful of people left to cheer me on as I triumphantly jumped my way into a cute boy’s heart. Or to watch me fail spectacularly.

I put on my safety harness and I started the climb up, up, up. About halfway to the top, I felt queasy.

Don’t look down, don’t look down.

I kept going, all the way up. I struggled to manoeuvre onto the top of the tree. Why did it look so much easier for everyone else? Gripping the brackets tightly, and I moved my knees up onto the tiny platform so that I was kneeling. Then I forced myself to let go of the brackets.

Don’t look down, don’t look down.

I lifted one knee up and placed my foot down in its spot. Then I lifted my second knee up and put my other foot down. I made myself stand.

I vividly remember that my toes were hanging over the edge because the surface of the tree top was so small. Actually, for years I’ve assumed that I exaggerated the experience in my mind. We weren’t possibly that high. It couldn’t be that narrow. Then I found this photo here on an abandoned blog — there are a couple more on this post. Again – this is in the US where hospitals cost money.

I stood there on that tree, 30 feet in the air. I was dizzy. I was terrified. I wondered how on earth I was going to get back down. People were cheering for me from the ground but they were just background noise, muffled by the blood pounding in my ears. I didn’t care about being cool anymore; I just cared about being on the ground. And not peeing my pants in the process. I briefly considered climbing back down but I was 100% sure that I would fall flat on my face if I tried.