Apparently, my children are attending spy school. That is the only explanation for why I, the consummate prying parent, am so completely in the dark about what it is they DO all day.

Case in point: I’m told that our elementary school had a mock lock-down drill for a gun in the school recently. I learned of this from a fellow parent over two weeks after the fact. It was the classic “so what did you think of that mock drill?” moment.  To which I, the mother who prides herself on having her finger firmly on the pulse of all things that concern her children, could only reply: “huh?” 

Chatterbox. Thus, I ask my darling second-grader, she of the chatterbox ways each day when I pick them up from school: “honey, did you have a special sort of thing at school? It might have involved, say, cowering?” She pondered for a moment and then said, brightly, “Oh yeah! We had a code red - and we got to turn off ALL THE LIGHTS and LOCK THE DOOR and we had to go to our special place and stay down. If we had to stay a long time we got to eat candy bars but we didn’t so we didn’t get any candy bars.”

This prompted me to say - exasperated - “honey, you know when mommy is driving you home and says “did anything happen today” and you say “no” (or tell me all about how Lissa brought a My Pretty Pony for show n’ tell) well THAT is the time I should have heard this story!”

Mind you, if a classmate loses a tooth she is ALL OVER that report. Yet huddling in the dark for a “Code Red” garners nary a mention? My son, for the record, completely failed to mention this occurrence as well.

Apparently, it has no more impact on my children than all the times I spent practicing covering my head with my hands in the hallways of various school buildings in case of tornado. I don’t know whether to be glad it’s not traumatic - or sad that it’s not traumatic.

Generation Gaps As youngsters in the 1960’s, my parent’s were subject to Bay of Pigs era bomb drills. It seems almost quaint now, the notion that “duck and cover” would protect them from an atomic bomb’s certain annihilation.

I was born years after the Bay of Pigs invasion, and I have never participated in a bomb drill. If only because by the time I was in school, we were deeply involved in playing chicken with the USSR and had moved on to nuclear bombs.  “The Day After” was an Afterschool Special detailing how much you really did NOT want to surive a nuclear attack. At that point, even the most optimistic educators were admitting outright that a standard issue school desk probably wasn’t going to provide much cover and that ducking was likely to be a complete waste of our last nanoseconds on earth.

Such was the bliss of our formative years.

Now, post-Columbine, our children have assault drills and are taught to huddle behind locked classroom doors. Many schools have security systems, buzzers, and metal detectors. Visitors now sign in and out with an efficiency, and background check, worthy of the FAA.  It certainly makes those cute little signs taped to my elementary school’s doors two decades ago: “please check in at the office. Thank you!” seem both hopelessly naïve and endlessly nostalgic.

Forget “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Today, talented and dedicated teachers who chose the profession only because they wanted to teach, are forced to calculate how many children can dive for cover behind an overturned snack table.

This is sad.

This is wrong.

This is life.

Protect. As a parent I want to protect my children from every single thing that could possibly cause them sorrow or worry, even as I know that it is impossible to protect your children from the sorrows and worries that are rightfully theirs.

Reflecting on it I think that perhaps the best thing I could hope for is that my own children are both well prepared and somewhat resigned.

The truth is that when your child has spent the morning being drilled in what one should do if a mad gunman turns up in the second grade, perhaps the best response a parent could hope for in answer to “what did you do today honey?” is a relentlessly cheerful “nothing!”

In fervent hopes that “nothing” will be all it ever is.

 I’m not hopelessly uncool. I’m sporty. I know this because it says so right there on the side of my big boxy mini-van. “Grand Caravan SPORT.”

 I had never wanted a van. I was not a van person. I shuddered at the very thought of a giant, boxy vehicle roughly the length and width of a football field. Then I watched the rivets that adjoin the side panels in a garbage truck pass inches beyond my nose while my daughter, then three, wailed in terror from the rear seat. At that moment, as my cute little sporty sedan was dragged sideways in a sickening crunch of metal, I wanted an enormous, air-bag laden vehicle in the worst way.

We went van shopping that weekend.

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  It kills you to see them grow up.  But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t. 

 ~ Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams 

The nice thing about getting married is that you inherit a whole new set of people to fret about.  

My niece, for example, is aflutter about learning to drive. According to the State Department of Motor Vehicles she will be eligible to drive within the next thirty days. This is impossible, of course, because she is only eighteen months old. Okay, sure, the calendar says she is going to turn sixteen soon, but I know she’s only eighteen months old because I just met her yesterday, or so it seems, when my husband-then-boyfriend took me to meet his sister and her “baby.” She was a cherubic toddler resplendent in a bride’s costume for Halloween, I was the new-girlfriend unaware of my future as a bride. Now the years have telescoped in on themselves to bring us to this place where she will, inexplicably, be sixteen years old and entrusted with a driver’s license. 

I think I just gave her a Barney the Dinosaur toy telephone last Christmas didn’t I? Oh no, that’s right. Last Christmas was the Victoria’s Secret tote. We’ve come a long way baby, indeed.  

Practice. Nieces, I think, are good practice for daughters. There a million little things – and big things – a meddlesome aunt like myself would love to foist off on my unsuspecting niece. In 700 words, however, things get boiled down to the basics and I can pretty much sum it up nicely in two: be safe.  

A car is an awesome responsibility. Yet, like most teens my niece has undoubtedly heard all the “near miss” and “I can’t believe I walked away from that!” stories that families inevitably tell. Don’t we all grow up hearing about how Uncle Hooty leapt from an out-of-control truck and walked away with only a scratch? We thrill to tales of how grandma once drove cross-country in station wagon packed full of kids, cargo, and a dog on her lap for three-fourths of the trip that blocked her view of the roadway for at least half.  

I am fully guilty for my own “meet cute” automotive story. Mine revolves around the fact that on my way to meet my now-husband for our first date, I completely destroyed not one car – but two. The “cute” part is that I shook off having totaled two vehicles due to nothing more than not paying attention, and asked ever so sweetly if the nice officer would pretty please drop me off at the pre-determined meeting place of my eagerly awaiting first date? (For the record, the nice officer did).  

I want my niece to understand that my “meet cute” story could have ended tragically. That runaway trucks are as likely to kill you as leave you without a scratch. That driving across the country with a dog on your lap is probably a bad idea.  

Do as I say, not as I do, indeed. 

Warn.  Our hearts quicken and throats tighten as we open the newspaper to yet another story of the tragic loss of teen drivers and their passengers.  

We talk and we lecture and we preach and we pray. We tell them to be careful. Be cautious. Be smart. Be safe. We tell them to just say no to every and anything that could cause them harm. Yet teens, by design, seem to live in the moment. You just can’t seem to tell them that life is a great big wonderful ball of risk.  

Humor us, I want to say. You seem – and feel – invincible. Only time, God willing, will show you how fragile life really is. Life is too short, and it can be over in a heartbeat.  Don’t take your safety or your number of days on this Earth for granted. As you head out the door, stop what you are doing, and remind yourself that you love your life, and your family loves you.  

Until then, I worry. While every young driver behind the wheel isn’t your niece, or mine, perhaps we’d all drive just a bit more carefully if we pretended that they were.  

And in the coming months, please drive with special care because mine, after all, is barely two.

That’s it. I’m done.
There is just only so much I can obsessively worry over and seriously? I’ve hit my limit.

Childhood obesity, white sugar, processed flour, artificial sweeteners, too much tv, not enough reading, lead in toys, toxic mold, toxic new homes, global warming, bullies, low self-esteem, high-self esteem, athletics v. academics, No Child Left Behind, whether seeing your parents naked will result in future therapy and how expensive might that be?

Whew. As someone who literally does “lie awake at night” worrying, this really cannot be good for any of us. Where is the study about what happens to kids with cranky, overwrought parents too tired to think straight? At what point do you have to start paring down your worries? There are only so many hours in the day and frankly, I may have to cast off lead and global warming.

Nutrition and obesity (although both my kids are slim) bears watching. Pedophiles and molestation I’m never going to quit worrying over. My kids will be 40 I’ll still wonder if they should ride their bikes alone. Seriously.

However, when do you just decide to put other worries on the back burner? To just start letting go of pretending we can protect our children from everything?

 Here’s the thing kids. I’ll recycle when I can but I think you are probably right to suspect I may be leaving the world a lesser place than I found it. We all are. Sorry about that but short of keeping my plastics out of the paper bins, I’m not sure what I can realistically do for you there.

The Lead Menace? Yawn. Overrated. Sorry but if lead is so scary why are all our parents and grandparents and the entire Baby Boom generation not brain damaged? Oh wait, scratch that …

 I’m not going to relax on “running with scissors” but I AM going to relax on the numerous things I cannot control RIGHT NOW. Or could lie awake nights fretting over to no avail.

So, um, eat your peas. Sit back from the TV. Read a book once in a while. Don’t chew the windowsills. Stay in my sight AT ALL TIMES and remember I love you even if I forget to worry about everything else under the sun.

And oh, that reminds me, I’ve got to worry about the sun …

So, what have you simply let go of worrying about?

More importantly, how guilty do you think we should feel about it?