On not being afraid
On vacation with my in-laws recently, we spent an afternoon at a water park. Shortly after we arrived, I looked up from unpacking sunscreen and swim diapers and couldn’t immediately locate my one-year-old niece. I panicked, sure she was lying at the bottom of the deep end or had wandered off with a stranger.
We found her, not 15 seconds later, obstructed from view by a lounge chair. She was fine, not really missing at all, but my heart beat hard for the next ten minutes.
When I was pregnant with my first child, a friend said, “When you have kids, the world becomes a much scarier place.” She was right. Every summer, I run across a story about a child who suffocated in the back seat of a hot car. Some time ago, I heard about a toddler who was strangled to death when his head got stuck in a soccer net. My son, ten months old, has taken to standing up in the slippery bathtub, and I am just waiting for him to crash down onto the hard tile.
