When my daughter was two weeks old, I was standing at the top of some steps and, for a minute, I held her tighter because I was truly afraid that the wind would blow her out of my arms. It sounds crazy now, but the urge to protect your child is hardwired and sometimes irrational. Indeed, for the first few years of their lives, it seems like our main occupation is to keep them from certain death. You scoop tiny chokeable bits of things out of their mouths; you grab them by the pants just before they fall off a chair, the stairs, the top of the slide; you stop them from prying old gum off the sidewalk.
And of course sometimes kids do fall, and there you are in the emergency room, freighted with guilt or panic or both. Most of the time, they are fine, and you get used to a certain level of parental worry. But there's another opposite and almost equally terrifying thought that we don't talk about as much: what if something happened to us before our kids were old enough to take care of themselves?
We're usually so preoccupied with our children's well-being that our own safety is an afterthought. But the deaths of two notable mothers over the past week, both with young children, have made those thoughts hard to avoid. But another week of work, school projects and laundry is already upon us; it won't be long before we forget Richardson and Goody. That's perhaps one blessing of having young children. The struggle to simply keep up with the everyday doesn't leave much time for fretting over hypotheticals. Be safe!
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