Rain Walk

The Importance of Teaching Your Children How to Get Wet

There’s an afternoon in my early days of fatherhood that I will never forget. My daughter, our first child, was just a few months old when I took her on a walk in her stroller to a big park––just in time for a full-on Charleston rain bomb thunderstorm. I had forgotten the plastic rain cover for her stroller and the sun visor was useless. When the skies opened up on us, we were both soaked in seconds. I looked down at her as she blinked at the raindrops and what I saw in her eyes was, “I trust you with my life and you do this?!”

It was one of those big-wheeled strollers so I ran like hell through rain so thick I could barely see ten feet ahead. I aimed for where I knew I’d find a shelter and soon saw its silhouette through the sideways-pelting storm.

An old man smoking a Swisher Sweet had the same idea but had gotten there first. I ramped the concrete slab floor with the stroller as thunder pounded and lighting flashed. Every time I glanced into the basinet, those little brown eyes were looking up at me saying, “What have you done!?”

Meanwhile the shelter’s filling up with the pungent aroma of Swisher Sweets and now she has a new thing to judge me for. Then, by the time the rain let up, the streets were flooded. Just getting home without a boat was another obstacle course that I imagined she rightly blamed on me. When we finally got home, and I lifted her wet onesie-clad body from the stroller, I had a moment of reckoning. With all the skills I had acquired (or thought I had) in 39 years of life, taking a baby on a walk in the rain was enough to make a fool of me. The worst part was, I of all people should have known better.

When I was six years old in Shreveport, Louisiana, we had that same kind of Southern summer downpour one day. It had to have been a weekend because my father was at home. As I stared out at the storm, he asked me if I wanted to go on a “Rain Walk.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that, but I liked the sound of it. As an Ad man, he was always coining new terms, so it’s highly possible he didn’t even know what he meant. But the definition soon fell into place: a walk with no raincoat or umbrella, to get soaked on purpose.

I was all in.

The sidewalks were flooded up to my shins but we walked a mile, at least. I ruined my Sebagos, and it was worth it. When people we knew stopped their cars to ask if we needed a ride, we would laugh at them.

“We’re on a Rain Walk,” we’d say.

They’d look at us like we were crazy, which made us laugh even harder as they drove away.

The real thrill of a Rain Walk was that it defied society’s pursuit of dryness and put us in our own water-logged aristocracy from which we could laugh at the world of raincoats and umbrellas. It was my earliest lesson in the unexpected joys of thinking differently.

Through the years, my dad and I did our best to keep the tradition going. When I became a young man, it took on an aspect of relationship therapy for us. If we hadn’t connected in a while and a good hard rain started coming down, one of us would find the other and say “Rain Walk,” then the other one would say it back in reply. We had an unspoken pact that neither of us could ever say no to a Rain Walk.

We kept it up for the rest of my father’s life, like an affirmation of our relationship as father and son. He was always my nudge in the back when I was standing on the edge of the diving board.

Turns out, I had to learn how to do that from the other side when I became a dad. But I got better at it after that rainy day at the park. I learned that fatherhood is not just about keeping your babies dry, but also giving them the courage and the humor to get wet. That protecting them from the storms you’re there for is less important than preparing them for the ones you’re not.

The little girl in the basinet is eight now. As I write this, she’s off at a three-week sleepaway camp in North Carolina. Tromping through streams, camping in the woods, and swimming in an ice-cold lake. Living her best life in a barefoot world of girlhood camaraderie.

The one thing that I went out on my own and bought for her to bring to camp this year was a brand new raincoat.

And I hope she doesn’t use it.