~:: So Where’s Your Helmet? ::~

Murph comes home tonight, very late.  We aren’t picking him up at the airport; his betrothed is.  She’ll drop him off.  I’m determined to wait up, but will probably be draped ignominiously across my computer, here on the couch.  Maybe snoring.  I hope not.

Today, the carpet cleaner came.  He was a perky guy in a baseball hat, and his technique leaves no residue.  We hit it off as he was spraying enzymes on the carpet in the new room.  And in the course of conversation he said something really amazing.

“I am an optimist disguised as a pessimist who is actually a realist.”

He said he’d gotten it from a movie.  Wherever he got this idea, the second it hit me, I rang like a bell.  THAT IS TOTALLY ME.

Gin’s husband, Kris, laughs at me – pretty openly – about always anticipating the worst.  Okay – if YOU had seen coyotes casually trotting across their street and disappearing into the wild sage mess that covers their entire wilderness neighborhood, wouldn’t you get a little weird about letting the kids go outside?  Or if somebody warned you to be careful, walking the trails through that area because of rattlesnakes – and you actually say, “What if there’s a rattlesnake?” would you expect to be the butt of your son-in-law’s hilarity?

Yeah.  I thought not.  So the men in my life generally think I worry too much.  Like, I always made the kids were seatbelts and helmets and made sure my teenage girls had cel phones with them when they were driving at night.  Stuff like that.  Wild, huh?  And I warned them about smoking and drugs and people who think shoplifting is fun.  I know how weird that must sound to my menfolk, but – oh well.  Overprotective.  That’s me.

One thing I do: when I hear about something bad that happens to somebody, I don’t say, “Hey, that happens to one in ten-thousand people.”  I figure, if bad things can happen to other people, then they can happen to me.  It’s not like I’m better that other people, or magically protected or something.  I mean – the person it happened to didn’t get up in the morning and say, “I bet I get hit by a car today, because I’m just that kind of person.”  Or, “Hey – I’ve got to remember that assault I’m scheduled for after I go grocery shopping at Target tonight after the session.”  Which is what happened to a violin player who came into the studio the next day for a session and told us about it.  Some crazy guy on drugs.  She was just in the wrong random place at the wrong random time.

In real life, bad stuff sometimes happens.  But not very often.  Unless you make the kind of choices that put you in the way of bad stuff, like hanging out at dives after midnight on the weekend.  (An emergency room nurse friend of ours filled us in on the regular results of that scene.)

All of this said, yeah – the first thing a mother does when she walks into a room is check it out for all the age-appropriate dangers.  Then, armed, she knows what to be watching for out of the corner of her eye.  It’s our JOB not to assume that everything’s going to automatically be just dandy.  Because when you are in charge of kids (or horses – or puppies), you know that dandy is NOT business as usual.

But forewarned is forearmed.  And the non-mother audience, having blithely lived through the same moments without experiencing any alarm – because the MOTHER has anticipated and cut off at the pass all possible emergencies – goes away with the assumption that peace and safety and orderly life are the natural way of things.  In other words, the non-worriers are spoiled.  Protected.  Lulled into a naivite that borders on irresponsible thinking.  Which is why it can be very dangerous to leave a child with a non-mother of any kind.

I knew a woman once who explained that she could not leave her children with her husband for even a little while.  She tried it once, left him with the baby in the bathtub.  He got a phone call – which he left the baby to answer (????)  and got so wrapped up in the business of the call, forgot the baby entirely.  When she got home, she found the child still in the tub, asleep.  Amazingly, luckily, the drain wasn’t sealing right and the water had disappeared.  “Oh,” her husband said.  “I forgot all about him.”

“She’ll be fine.”  “It’ll be fine.”  “It’s going to be all right.”  People who say these things cannot be trusted.  They are feckless.  They are unacquainted with the rigors of reality.  If they said things like, “Yeah, there’s a possibility that – whatever – could happen, but we’ve checked out the equipment, and somebody will be watching every minute.” then you maybe could trust them.  A little.

So I come off being a pessimist.  Because I anticipate the problems.  Realistic problems.  Not things like alien abduction or meteor collisions.

The thing I have to point out here, is that I DO things.  I go places.  I even fly – which is pretty good, considering some of the stories my father, once the director of a huge airport, has regaled me with over the years.  I take trips and chances and plan things and allow my children to travel half way across the planet.  Because – because seeing potential problems is different than being paralyzed by surety they will happen.

Inside, I believe that everything is going to turn out okay.  While all the time the realist outside of me understands that you can’t ever know that for sure.  I am so completely hopeful inside that I use my outside as a bit of chain mail, a way of preparing my reason for the day when something really does go badly.  I know it can.  I simply hope – hope strongly – that it won’t.  This is a balancing act.

Rachel wrote in her blog not too many weeks ago about prayer – about saying, “Thy will be done.”  It’s the same thing, bowing to fate while all the time keeping your fingers crossed behind your back.  Oh, there are times I wish I were feckless – just barreling along happily on the total assumption that everything will always work out.  But again, without somebody doing a heck of a lot of work in the background, “always” is an incredible leap of naiveté.  And I figure, my job is the background work.

I’m not really going anywhere with this.  Just thinking about what my randomly chosen carpet man said to me this morning.  It was just so gratifying to meet SOMEBODY in this world who knows who I am.  And appreciates it.

Pretty good disguise, huh?