Big Feeling (Comic #597)

Kids are amazing creatures, very much themselves, very much impressionable, and give them good attention and they can blossom like flowers. Seeing the world with such newness is such an interesting and challenging thing. So many experiences you’ve never had or never had many times, so you don’t even know what weathering things is.

I remember the first time I got a stitch. I was so scared! There’d been an informational thing on TV about heart attacks recently and we’d just moved to Australia from China. I’d been running up and down the hills on our new-ish farm and suddenly got stabbed by this terrible pain. I gasped over to my mum, scared I was having a heart attack or was allergic to Australia or come down with some terrible disease.

Mum explained stitches as a sort of cramp you got from exercising sometimes. I asked why I’d never got a stitch before. I think she gave some combination of maybe I was running about more or maybe getting older. And I was scared that I’d get this terrifying pain every time, and mum said I might get it sometimes, but if I exercised more it would be less likely to happen. I think I was 6 or 7 and I remember feeling so sad that I was old and unfit now, I got a stitch just from running up and down a hill.

But anyway, it was a scary pain, and I thought I might die, but I didn’t. Which has turned out to be all the scary pains of my life (and I am prone to cramping pretty badly!). So hooray for that and hooray to you.