I’m tickled at LuLu’s brightening and new-found independence. She’s excited about operating the microwave, learning how to heat water to prepare her lunch and answer the phone. But with each new independent step, I’m reminded that I need to watch her carefully, to make sure she understands exactly what she’s doing. For example: To avoid things like foil in the microwave, or the wrong burner being heated up.

And Marie’s blog about EMDR reminded me of the one incredibly successful EMDR session we had that literally cured LuLu of her fears of vents on rooftops. When LuLu was a young child, she was very afraid of the whirling vents on the tops of roofs, used to vent attics. The only thing that even began to make sense about this was that there were these vents on the rooftops of the various levels of her orphanage. Perhaps she could actually see these outside a window from her crib during some traumatic event.

Regardless, the therapist suggested that we try a modified EMDR technique to rid LuLu of this very specific, very debilitating fear.

At the time, we were living in a ranch-style house that had two of these vents on the roof. The vents actually caused us to have an invisible “fence” around the property past which LuLu would not go, because she could actually see the top of the roof from there, and the vents.

When her preschool and kindergarten bus would bring her home each day from school, I would go outside to greet her, because she would freeze with fear at the sight of the vents. Or she would come shooting off the bus like a rocket, with her head ducked and running as fast as she could until she was where she could no longer see the roof line.

So, rather skeptically, I agreed to the EMDR and watched the therapist administer it. It looked so simple that I thought this could not have possibly done a thing, except make me a few hundred dollars poorer in therapy bills.

The very next day, I heard the bus pull up in front of our home, but was on the phone. By the time I got outside, the bus had pulled away and LuLu was playing in the flower bed by the mailbox, near the street. I was puzzled, since she’d never done this before. And for the days after, she would slowly walk up the driveway, as if she didn’t have a care in the world. When I asked her if she was afraid of the vents, she smiled and said, “I used to be, but these are just helpers to vent our attic.” I was amazed.

Before I got the opportunity to call the therapists to thank them, a new problem arose. LuLu’s “invisible fence” was gone, and she was playing in the street. No longer could I send her outside and not watch her extremely closely, because she no longer had the boundary of the house as her restricted area. I called the therapists and jokingly asked if they could “take it back”, since having her confined to the yard close to the house was a huge convenience for me.

Instead, it was time for lessons of when not to go into the street! Independence never comes easy!

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