Out of Control

April 4, 2007 in family, I pontificate, life in the big city

Last summer, I went shopping at the Clackamas Meier & Frank (detail for you Portland readers! Both of you!) with my mother. She’s getting frail, and it’s hard for her to walk long distances, so we borrowed a wheelchair from the mall and I wheeled her round. At one point, we were waiting for an elevator when a mum with a kid and a baby in a stroller came along. The little girl, who was about 6, saw a water fountain and started to take a drink. Her mother freaked out. “Stop! That water’s dirty! Don’t touch it!!” she shrieked at her startled child. “But I’m thirsty,” whined the girl. “We have bottled water in the car. We’ll go there now.” The mother shooed the girl and the stroller into the elevator and they were off.

I stared after them in horror. Dirty? A drinking fountain in an American mall? Does that mother have no idea of what safe drinking water actually means? I felt sorry for that child, growing up in a safe environment yet being raised to fear the world around her.

I do realize I’m being judgmental. Maybe the child has some drastic hidden illness; maybe the mother was traumatized at a drinking fountain by a bully and has to confront her hidden fears every time she goes to the mall. Or did that sound sarcastic? The point is, I don’t know this woman’s story. But she typifies what seems in many ways to be modern America’s take on the modern world—it’s beyond our control and that scares us; we will deal with this by pretending we can control every tiny bit of life, and woe betide anyone who messes with our illusion!

Shannon posted a link to an article that deals with this. Raising children in fear. It’s something all mothers struggle with. How do we keep our children safe without communicating to them a debilitating caution with an activity as basic as drinking water, especially when that caution is overblown?

Elliot was born in July, 1995. The day I brought him home from hospital, I opened up the paper from his birthday to see what the headlines for this auspicious date were. And I read about the fall of Srebrenica, and how Muslim “men,” 13 and up, were rounded up and shot through the back of the head, until they all fell into a mass grave. This is how this world treats men, and I had brought a man-child into this world. I was terrified. I didn’t see how I could bear the burden of motherhood, the burden of desiring nothing more than the life, health and happiness of my children, fighting against all the uncaring billions who didn’t see how precious he was.

I worried a lot when my kids were little. I would pray against car accidents, cancer, weird bug bites, terrorism, predators, disease in general, earthquakes–OH and that they would grow up to be friends with each other and still like me and do well in school and get advanced degrees and spouses that I like and and and. I had the sort of attitude that if I could just think and plan for every possible contingency, somehow that would protect me against it, in some sort of weird superstitious way. I finally realized I couldn’t possibly think of everything. I might miss the spider bite, or the e-coli in the spinach, or the freak accident where a bookshelf collapsed or the head flew off a hammer or something else that I’d never even thought of!

And so, I realized that to stay sane, I had to not worry quite so much. I had to learn to take calculated risks; which is to say, not to engage in foolhardy behaviour (like driving the roads of Mauritania without a seat belt…shut up Donn! I do too wear it sometimes!) but not to be so afraid that you can’t (literally) share a bowl of zrig with a friend. It’s not so much that we ignore the dangers, just that we accept them as part of life as it’s been known on earth since the Garden of Eden. It’s not fatalism, it’s not superstition—it’s living life.

Our times are unique. We are safer than ever—much less likely to die in childbirth, to lose children to smallpox or TB or even the flu—yet we are much more aware when something does happen. We hear of bird flu in China and we are afraid, because the distance from there to here has shrunk to a matter of hours and minutes instead of weeks and months. Events such as Sept. 11 have shown us anew what was always true—we can’t control our world. We can’t keep planes in the air, or airborne diseases at bay; ships from sinking or potato famines from happening. We don’t have magic cloaks to shield our loved ones. And part of helping our children grow up (which is actually our job) is letting them learn it—teaching them to see the world as it is, and live in it not hide from it.

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21 comments

April 4, 2007 at 7:19 pm

mopsy

I thought the article Shannon posted was very interesting, too. I think over-protection is a form of neglect. Ill-prepared children become ill-prepared adults.

There has to be a balance between the extremes. I like to think I do an okay job, but I know there are areas where I am over-protective and areas where maybe I should care a little more.

Of topic, but I wrote about you in my latest post. Just so you know 😉

April 4, 2007 at 7:31 pm

planetnomad

But even being imbalanced in some areas means that overall you are doing an okay job, I think. I know I should be more careful in some areas (i.e. seatbelts) and relax more in others, but it is inevitable that we give our children some baggage to take with them into adulthood.

April 4, 2007 at 7:48 pm

Kit

All so true, creating an atmosphere of fear for children to live in is completely counter-productive, they need to learn to trust the world and themselves and live positively rather than negatively – then they will be equipped to deal with the unexpected, as they will believe in their own abilities.

And I also comfort myself with the thought that they need something to tell the therapist when they’re grown up – too perfect a mother would be an oppressive standard to live up to!

April 4, 2007 at 8:34 pm

LIB

Two thoughts:
1) Your post had a similar message to Leslie’s “Love Not Fear” .
2) Regarding the drinking fountain: when some people drink from those, they put their mouths right on the spiget, so the next person gets the first person’s germs. But I think it is going too far to never drink from a drinking fountain.

BTW, did you know that M&F is Macys now? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy's_Northwest

April 4, 2007 at 10:03 pm

Rebecca

I have a much-younger brother who was over-protected and coddled to the point that he is now a big overgrown adult child incapable of looking after himself, of coping. I find it very hard to find that balance, of being careful and careless ENOUGH.

April 4, 2007 at 10:09 pm

Rocks in my Dryer

EXCELLENT post. Very well-said, as always.

April 4, 2007 at 11:48 pm

Inkling

Yes, I like the way you said it. I struggle with this–and it is a real struggle, trying to calculate risks. I worry about illness and germs because it so unbalances my life when someone is sick. There is so little room for error or flexibility in our lives. This pregnancy has been especially tough for me because it seems that all the baby info sites and flyers now are all about the dangers of this or that: eating fish, eating cheese, litter boxes, various viruses, parasites, and bacteria that could be lurking anywhere. You can’t even sleep in certain ways. And then there are the commercials and advertisements that would have you think if your house is not as sanitary as an operating room it is not clean. I know they do it to sell their products, and yet, I am often taken in by it. Lately to help myself cope I’ve been imagining myself as a farm wife. What is really essential to sanitation, health and cleanliness? Humans have been living and coping with dirt for a lot longer than Clorox has been around. I think this will get much better as my kids get older–I already worry only a fraction as much about my older child than my younger.

April 5, 2007 at 1:01 am

naturalsingleparent

Just as I tell myself that the possible exposure to germs my daughter gets from a drinking fountain, or eating the cracker that fell on the (relatively clean) floor, or when she was smaller teething on (relatively clean & safe) household objects strengthens her immune system. Similarly I believe that some reasonable amount of exposure to risks strengthens children’s ability to judge what is safe and cope with the dangers – strengthen the immune system of the mind or spirit, if you will.

And, for what it’s worth, I’ve been making an effort to avoid bottled water in favor of tap, because standards here in the US are actually higher for tap water than for bottled, and the plastic bottles are bad news for both health and environmental reasons. It’s hard to give up our illusions of control and safety even in the face of facts.

April 5, 2007 at 9:13 am

meredith

Living in Europe has helped me relax. When I saw a family member in the USA actually wash a raw chicken with some kind of special wash the chicken soap, I realized I preferred eating germy chicken.

April 5, 2007 at 5:55 pm

Gwen

I think growing up in Indonesia has made me much less worried about so many physical dangers. I know I have little actual control, and I also know that it’s possible to survive many things. What I do find myself worrying about, however, are emotional issues my children might face. I don’t know if this is better or worse …..

What’s interesting to me about people and worry is that while almost absurd amounts of protectiveness exist, at least in America, very little of that extends to the use of automobiles. People who won’t drink from drinking fountains drive as though those few sheets of metal have rendered them invulnerable, even at 75 mph. Curious what the brain is capable of rationalizing.

April 5, 2007 at 7:00 pm

Pieces

Very well said. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I saw some neighborhood kids fly down our hill on their bikes yesterday and had two thoughts.
1. No helmets. Stupid.
2. Why are their mothers just letting them ride around on bikes?! So dangerous!

Isn’t that interesting that I was appalled by the very thing I spent my childhood doing? I don’t want to raise my kids in an environment of fear. But sometimes I don’t know how to stop it.

April 5, 2007 at 10:21 pm

Antique Mommy

It is a precarious world in which we live, but to live in fear is not to live at all. I find myself imagining that where you live it is much more dangerous than in the US, but it’s probably not. Excellent excellent post.

April 6, 2007 at 2:57 am

Mad Hatter

Excellent post. I think declining birth rates in the West play a part here as well. I was one of 6 kids–farm kids. I now have only one child and likely won’t have more. In my parents and grandparents generations it was accepted that you had lots of children b/c you were likely to lose one along the way to war or disease or accident. Now I don’t pretend for a second that there was ever a time when it was easy for a parent to lose a child but today, in the West, our children seem to have such high premiums on their lives.

I hope that my daughter will have all the joy that came from the risks of my uncertain childhood without having to face the devastating consequences that such risks present.

Once again, excellent post.

April 6, 2007 at 4:18 am

Wacky Mommy

I was out on the playground at school today, supervising recess. (Portland, Ore., USA.) The big kids (grades 4-5) were racing around playing tag, really getting into it, but having fun. Super playful, smiling, calling out to each other. I hear the teacher say, “No tag! No! No tag!” and I’m thinking — Did I miss something?

No, they had a meeting earlier this week and “outlawed” tag, one of the other teachers told me.

My daughter’s take: “They’re worried if we have too much fun, we’ll break something.”

Me: “Like an arm, you mean?”

“No,” she says. “Like the play equipment. Or something. I don’t know why they don’t want us to play.”

April 6, 2007 at 4:21 am

Wacky Mommy

ps — the drinking fountains at our school have such lousy water pressure (our entire building needs an overhaul and the district refuses to help) that the kids put their mouths right on them just to get that little trickle. We’re all sick, all the time. It’s nasty. I took in bottled water but got complaints that it’s the district’s problem, not mine, so please don’t do that.

April 6, 2007 at 5:59 am

Michelle in MX