Is it just me, or is the world going crazy(ier)? Things that aren't supposed to happen at all seem to be occurring with some frequency now.
My Eva has a lot of fear in her little body. Not the blatant, cling-to-mama's-leg kind of fear. But the what's-lurking-around-the-corner kind.
She hates open doors. Every bathroom & closet door has to be closed if she's near it.
She worries every time she hears anyone arguing.
She's quick to point out if someone is doing something she feels is dangerous. She's genuinely concerned for complete strangers.
She also worries about things that will never happen to her. Or at least, up until recently, I was confidently reassuring her would never happen to her.
When we go to the beach in the summer, she worries about sharks. Remember...she doesn't go more than knee deep into the ocean. So, I've always told her there are no sharks where she plays. Then, last summer, at a beach very close to where we were, a girl was attacked by a shark in shallow water. Great.
She worries about extreme weather. She always asks questions to see if I will know what to do when something terrible happens. "What if there's a flood? Where should we go?" "When a hurricane hits, what are we supposed to do?" It doesn't help that she likes to watch the news with me. So, when she sees something tragic on TV, she wants to know how to prepare herself to survive. Remember, we live in Kansas. I tell her all the time that there will never be a hurricane in Kansas. Or a landslide. Or an earthquake. Then, last night, Kansas had an earthquake. Just a small one (I didn't even know what it was until this morning), but the beds shook. Fantastic. I know she was thinking, "but you said that would never happen here!". I hate it when Mother Nature makes a liar out of me.
My sweet Eva worries about everything that little girls should never think about. When we go to the zoo, she wants to know how she can be sure the animals won't get out of their cages. I give her the basic, boilerplate answer: Because they just won't. Then, a few weeks ago, some moron set a menagerie of lions and tigers and bears literally loose. She watched the news with me as I sat open-mouthed in awe of that man's stupidity. Awesome. Again, out of the corner of her eye, "but you said that would never happen!"
So, as a mother, I'm left trying to reassure my kids that the likelihood of something dramatic happening to them in this tiny Midwestern town is too low to measure. Meanwhile, between nature and complete idiots, dramatic nonsense is happening all around them. Eva is a little ball of knots on a good slow-news day. What does it do to her when wild exotic animals are roaming the streets or earthquakes are shaking her house? Not good things, that's for sure.
So, if this stupid asteroid hits earth or a hurricane travels up the Missouri river, I will completely give up. I will huddle under the covers with her and we will tremble in fear (or frustration) together.
