From The Frying Pan Into The Fire

I pride myself on not being a constant worrier.  When I had young children, I did my best to stay above the hysterical fray, accepting semi-truisms such as, “before the age of three, kids will eat fifty pounds of dirt.” I stayed vigilant but encouraged my kids to be responsibly independent.  But now, I am finding it increasingly difficult to avoid worrying about them.   

I'm aware that worrying is a relative term and know many a mother who has taken this preoccupation of worrying about their kids to new and dizzying heights.  I suspect that my heightened concern for them is mostly due to a sense of vulnerability … mine, not theirs.  After all, lots of scary things happen out there in the “real” world and that’s where my man-children now live.   

As parents, we have less power to protect our kids when they are living independently.  Whether we actually can is questionable, but the threat still appears larger from a distance.  The media bombards us with so many potentially threatening situations that are beyond our control, so we worry.  The stories are endless, “A new strain of staph found in gyms, (uh oh, my kids workout in gyms).  “A steam pipe explodes in lower Manhattan ,” (that’s not good, my son lives near there).  “Ipod use can lead to hearing loss,” (oh no …the whole family will go deaf.)   

Kids don't feel half as vulnerable as we do, or as we do for them.  They certainly don't want to hear our constant warnings, and who can blame them?  When I was a newly working twenty-something, my mother regularly mailed me articles about subway muggings.  I knew that she meant well, but I had my own fears to contend with and didn't need hers or anyone else’s creeping into my psyche.  So I simply stopped opening them and promised myself that, when I had children, I would do my very best to keep my fears to myself.  At the very least, I would not send them via U.S. mail.  

I think that I've been successful at keeping my fears at bay, however, there are exceptions.  Just recently, my oldest son and I failed to connect with each other over a particular twenty-four hour period.  I had left a few voicemail messages and did not hear back from him.  I began to get concerned because it was uncharacteristic of him not to contact me after getting a message or seeing a missed call.  I casually asked my other two sons if they had spoken to him in the last twenty-four hours and neither had.   

It turned out that he was fine.  Because of a series of inexplicable “cell phone glitches,” along with him being at a law school function and his cell phone battery dying, he did not even know that I was looking for him.  In these situations, I have to bite the bullet and suffer in silence (if you don't count the sound of me gnawing at my fingernails).  These are the occasions when predicable behavior proved unpredictable and unforeseen circumstances took logic out of the equation; when I could not help but imagine the worst and fear took my rational mind hostage.  It was not a good feeling.