Rerun Tuesdays

Posted by Terry McNichols

This was posted June 16, 2008, and we are rerunning it today for our new readers, in advance of tomorrow's post about some of my own fears.

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. - Elizabeth Stone

My Texas son blogged poignantly about an incident that happened in the middle of the night recently. Someone drove by their rural home and took a potshot at their house, breaking a large picture window and embedding a bullet in their laundry room door. They are justifiably freaked out, buying some black-out curtains to make their house less visible from the road at night, and wondering what they can do to ensure their safety and the safety of their daughter, whose room is very near where the bullet entered.

The fears related to keeping our children safe will strike a chord with every parent and grandparent. This incident brings back memories of my own night terrors and feelings of inadequacy about protecting my children. Just like Garp, in the following quote, I wish I could be granted the same vast and naïve wish:

If Garp could have been granted one vast and naïve wish, it would have been that he could make the world safe. For children and for grownups. The world struck Garp as unnecessarily perilous for both. – John Irving, The World According to Garp

My daughter-in-law wrote: "You try to protect your children by feeding them right and teaching them to look both ways and not using nasty chemicals and buying expensive carseats and really, it's not enough." I will write, one of these days, about how I calmed those fears for myself personally, but this is enough for today.