To the climbing world, I’m Tradgirl, but to three boys and a girl under the age of six, I’m Aunt Dawn. I’m the Aunt who’ll chase you in endless kitchen/dining room/living room loops with a sock on my hand trying to “get your nose” or run pell-mell downhill with two kids jammed into a jogging stroller urging me to “run faster, Aunt Dawn!”

My non-climbing friends (and sometimes my climbing friends too) wonder why I’m not making frequent trips to the emergency room, but I wonder why those kids don’t. “Stay in the middle,” I remind the littler ones as I bounce as high as I can on a trampoline sans net trying to knock them over. You can see how safety conscious I am: In the middle they fall on top of each other, but at least they don’t bounce over the edge.

Most kids are inappropriately fearless, but these are some adrenalin-driven children, especially if Aunt Dawn is involved. They trust me like you trust your favorite belayer. If I flip one upside down, hold him by his ankles, spin him like a helicopter, and toss him on the couch, then immediately there’s a semi-circle of tiny tots in front of me. “Aunt Dawn? Can you do that to me?” Shortly followed by round two: “Do it again!”

Kiana at two and a half is both the youngest and the only girl, but that just makes her more determined to keep up. “I can do it,” she insists. In that regard, she’s a bit like her Aunt Dawn, only sweet, outgoing, and optimistic. “It’s my favorite,” she’ll assert convincingly about anything you have and she wants, including foods she hasn’t tried before. In her defense, she came back for seconds on that purple cabbage.

I’d like to be so fearless and adventurous again. Even with one of my most trusted belayers holding the other end of the rope, I get scared. “Falling, falling, falling,” I cried in the endless milliseconds it took to get caught by a blue Alien on Dirty Gerdie. Not, “wheee!” Not, “Do it again!” Not, “That’s my favorite.” But afterwards, feeling shaken and mad and scared and disappointed all at once, I told Todd, “I don’t want to not be able to do it.” That was Kiana.

I heard her voice when I said it and I did do it–for her, for the girl I used to be. “When I’m a boy I can,” Kiana told me after her mother nixed some activity or other. Kiana will grow up. Never to be a boy, but I hope to be a woman who knows she doesn’t need to be a boy and who’s always ready to “do it again!”

Boldville, 5.8 (Dawn)
Unsung Hero P1, 10a (Todd)
Blistered Toe Direct, 5.9+ (Dawn)
Retribution, 10b (Todd)
Red Cabbage, 5.9 (Dawn)
Dirty Gerdie, 8+ (Dawn)