Through the changing room wall I overhear a mother looking for a lost boy. Her voice is my only contact, so I notice how she calls his name as she paces in and out of hearing range. Within two passes a tone of panic has crept in, and she walks faster. By the fourth pass, I can hear her moaning, "No, no, no!" under her breath between calls of his name. I know these feelings all too well. Who among us has never momentarily lost a child in a mall or department store? How rapidly do you descend into worst-case thinking?
Every time some other man's adolescent daughter is abducted, molested, or worse, I have to fight this impulse to put my own on an 18" lease and keep her at my side until she is 35. I scour the news accounts, looking for some lapse of parental common sense, some error in judgement I would never make: anything that distinguishes me from this family facing unthinkable tragedy. All too often, it just isn't there.
My own daughter, on the other hand, debunks my fears--feels much more threatened by hazardous waste in our landfills, the rape of the rainforest, and destruction of the ozone layer; than any form of personal danger. She forced me to confront something critical about the number 13--perched precariously between the desire for adventure & independence and good judgement--that puts these young women in the headlines all too often.
We strive to provide our children with absolute safety, but all we can do is strike a balance between safety and freedom--to learn self-protection without resentment or rebellion against parental authority. I picked their schools, their doctors, their neighborhoods, and indirectly the kids they befriended. Anything that goes wrong is somehow my fault. Still it is unnerving to consider the main reason no one has seriously violated one of my children is that no sufficiently-skilled violator has ever wanted to.
Outside the fitting room, I come face-to-face with the mom of the recently-found boy (who had been playing hide & seek). Fifteen minutes after the re-union her eyes are still red. I don�t know when I will stop worrying, but until then I will continue to read the papers, and try to learn something.
� 2002 Gary Lynch. All rights reserved