What Ms. Moon Said

I read this today: I wish I could write like her, but I can't.  She is one of those people with the gift of being able to capture in words what others feel but can't manage to articulate.

Hopefully she will be ok with me capturing a paragraph of the post I linked to above: if not, I'll take it down.  This is what she wrote, in reference to her grandson play-hiding in the house and scaring her to death when she couldn't find him:

"Owen was not really lost, but merely, as he said, "peek-a-booing" and has no idea why we were so upset he was right there, right THERE, and so clever, we came and went through the library and never saw him and I told him that he has no idea how much I love him, NO IDEA, and he doesn't but someday, he will. It makes no sense, our fear of a loved one just disappearing, it is perhaps one of our deepest fears, it resides in the bones next to the exhaustion, next to the heart by our love and our pumping blood. When you have a child the blood pumps out a new message, never before heard or felt,  which is keep the baby safe, keep the baby safe, keep the baby safe, and every breath we take after that is a whisper of that prayer, that command."

This struck me so hard: from the moment my eldest was born, keep the baby safe became all that mattered.  In a way that I had never anticipated.  Yes, I'd known that babies are tiny and fragile (but blessedly, as it turns out, less fragile than they look) but something about being handed that tiny bundle upon discharge from the hospital completely floored me.  I'd never spent much time around babies before, and these (surely delusional) nurses were trusting that I! I of all people! would be able to figure out how to take care of this tiny whimpering bundle in my arms, or even to understand what he needed.  My parents were there to help at first, and thank God for it, but when they left I watched their car leave from an upstairs window and cried, I was so overwhelmed by the sheer dull weight of the responsibility that was suddenly squarely upon me.    

Fortunately, as it turned out, my son did fine.  As did his two younger siblings, when they came along later.  But to this day I am overprotective.  I know it, I understand it, and I couldn't change it if I tried.  It is part of who I am, the mother hen who watches over her chicks and protects them from all threats, real and anticipated.  It is a sign of my love for them.  As my own mother has said to me more times than you could even begin to imagine, "If I didn't love you, I wouldn't fuss."  

However, I can also recognize that there is such a thing as too much protection.  Too much blunting of the world's risk.  Too much of not allowing a child to fail or be hurt or make a mistake or learn to deal with adversity.  I don't want to fall into that trap either, so it becomes a balancing act: on the other side of the scale are my husband and his father.

Let me hasten to add that either man would willingly give his life for these kids if need be.  They are loving and protective as well, but in a different way.  Were it left to me, the kids would never swing too high on a swing and jump off or stand on the monkey bars or play football or do anything in which there was a real possibility of them getting hurt (well, I have held the line on football so far, but they do need to take physical risks as part of their development and I know this although I hate it) so I hand them over to one or the other of the men and ask them to please return the kids with minimal bleeding if at all possible.  And then I go away so that I don't have to see what they are letting my children do!

It really does take a village...