The First Rung
My daughter just gave me an imprint that's changing everything about how I relate to fear.
Three days ago, Ember pulled herself up to the first rung of her Pickler triangle. She’s seventeen months old. The rung is six inches off the ground.
What happened next is reorganizing in me what it looks like to learn when you’re afraid.
The climb itself lit her up — hands gripping wood, feet finding the bar, her whole body excited by the reach for something just beyond what she knew how to do.
Then she got there. And she froze.
Her face crumpled. A high-pitched cry tore out of her. I could see that she was safe. Her body couldn’t. She was somewhere new and didn’t know the way down. Her legs locked. Her eyes searched for mine and Kiki’s, wide and desperate — someone standing on unfamiliar ground, needing to know they’re not alone up there.
She needed a hand on her back. Someone else’s nervous system holding what hers couldn’t yet. She’d grip us as we helped her down, her whole body clinging to the contact.
And then she’d climb right back up.
Up. Freeze. Cry. Hold us on the way down. Up again. Seven, eight times. Each time a little less cry, a little more climb. By the end, she climbed down by herself. Both feet on the floor.
And then she started clapping — full palms, huge grin, bouncing on her legs like she’d just summited something. The whole thing took a day. One day from terror to a standing ovation for herself — because every single time the fear got met.
I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s one of those things that rearranges something inside you.
It’s still reverberating in my body because I can feel the absence of this imprint in myself. I did not get this. At her age, I was either told not to be afraid, not met in my fear, or told not to do scary things.
And so I never learned what Ember learned in a single afternoon — that fear doesn’t need to be solved or overcome or avoided. It just needs connection. That’s the only thing it ever needed.
That’s what secure attachment looks like when we face the unknown. The fear doesn’t leave. The aloneness inside it does, and the body figures out the next step on its own.
I’m on my own first rung: building a school for partnership, hosting workshops, designing retreats, guiding people and couples into their intimate edges. And the place I’ve been avoiding is the place of being a beginner or being seen as one.
It’s the fear of the first rung. I try to be further along than I am as a way to skip past it. I go into visioning, planning, problem-solving. I try to skip to the next rung before I’ve fully let myself stand on this one.
My daughter is teaching me that what my inner child yearns for is simpler than any of that. He just wants to stand on the first rung and feel connected in his fear. Not to solve it or rush past it. But to have me meet him inside it — the part of me gripping the wood, legs locked, looking around for someone to say I’m not alone up here.
I don’t think this feeling goes away.
Life is an infinite number of first rungs. The fear won’t stop coming. It was never supposed to. I’m six inches off the ground. All I actually need is what she needed — to feel connected inside the fear. And to realize that the person who needs to meet me there has always been me.
If this landed — if you know what it’s like to stand on a first rung and feel alone in it — I’d love to hear about it.
And share with anyone you know who might be missing this imprint around fear as well.
