Call me cavewoman
Posted on October 29, 2007
Filed Under kids, parenting, suburban joys, bat-ass crazy, Anxiety |
Though I’m no stranger to conflict, the fact is, really, truly, deep down, I just want everyone to get along. I particularly would like everyone who is nice enough to read my blog and benevolent enough to actually comment here from time to time to get along. So it follows that I have been stewing about Anymouse and Kristen’s sharp words in the comment section of Friday’s post.
And I’ve given the whole thing a lot of thought and decided that, Kristen is in no way abnormal or, as Anymouse chose to put it, “a scary white suburbanite mother freak.” (By the way, I do not condone such a smackdown on my blog and hope that future disagreements will be of the measured and academic variety. Decency and kindness, people; decency and kindness.)
While Kristen was feeling anxious about the scary trash guy at the park and I was fighting the urge to get on the horn and demand Justin’s removal from my O’s idyllic class setting, there were people the world over wrestling with their own unreasonable anxieties. Show me a person who doesn’t fret about at least one thing that is, admittedly irrational, and I’ll show you someone on a serious class-B drug regime.
As I see it, humans are given to anxiety attacks and bouts of irrationality because our ancestors, also anxiety riddled and overly cautious, passed these traits on to us. It makes a whole lot of sense that back in the day of loin clothes and hand-hewn spears, those hominids that stayed close to home, were suspicious of strangers and ate only well-cooked, freshly butchered slabs of mammoth in well-defended caves surrounded by burning torches, lived longer, produced more children and therefore played a great role in perpetuating the paranoid gene pool. It’s natural selection at work. We are bred to be suspicious and fiercely protective and at times irrational.
In modern times, there are few things about which we humans can feel legitimately suspicious and anxious. Having developed tools and fire and weapons of mass destruction, we can now only fear the wrath of Mother Nature, the possibility of a freak accident, each other, oh, and sharks. Yet our brains are hard wired to worry and worry we will. Our anxious thoughts turn to things that, statistically speaking, don’t warrant our concern; things like dying in a fiery plane crash, contracting bird flu, being struck by lightening while talking on a cordless phone, being the victim of a home invasion or a car jacking or a drive by shooting, loosing our children in a Columbine-like tragedy or loosing our children to the crazy trash guy lurking in the park.
The nervous energy that has gotten us this far as a people needs an outlet and the network television news team whips up a steady stream of ghastly stories and serves them to the attendant masses night after shocking night. While there may not be more tragedy in the world than there has been in the past, there certainly is more 24-hour coverage of said tragedies. The average brain when exposed to the incessant onslaught of bad news launches something similar to the fight or flight response. It’s either don’t drive a car at all (flight) or buy a car with five thousand air bags, a steel enforced cabin, outfitted with state of the art child car seats that the fire department has installed (fight).
It’s hard for a human to determine when he or she is being irrational. My Better Half has banned me from using WebMD. He is tired of my developing ovarian cancer, bladder cancer and malignant melanoma on a weekly basis. Now I just drive my primary care physician to drink.
When O and G were babies I wanted My Better Half to tell his mother that she wasn’t allowed to drive our children anywhere while babysitting. (I have seen the woman drive with her knees while answering the cellphone, applying lipstick and changing the CD.) I lost that battle for awhile because MBH wouldn’t make the declaration and I was too much of a wuss to make it myself. That is until she babysat for the long weekend and admitted to having difficulty snapping the buckle. She recounted, after the fact, that instead of staying home for the weekend, she just drove around town really, really slowly. Was I being paranoid and unreasonable or was I just predisposed to thinking my children weren’t safe crawling around the backseat of a car while the driver navigated with her knees, received incoming calls, touched up her lip gloss and sorted through the soundtracks?
And then there is My Better Half’s own irrational fear surrounding male baby sitters. Even though he had devoted and competent young men as baby sitters when he was young, he absolutely will not allow me to hire anyone of the male persuasion to look after our kids. He thinks that any teenage boy who wants to work with children has a scary problem and, no, he wasn’t molested or assaulted as a child. It’s just his own version of parental-paranoia.
So here we are, all of us, battling our urge to stay home, keep the kiddies under lock and key and hoard canned goods and fire arms.
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