"The screams of the 4-year-olds inside the kindergarten could be heard out in the street. When people ran in to investigate, they found what one witness said was a scene 'too horrible to imagine' — blood everywhere as a knife-wielding man slashed 29 children, two teachers and a security guard." (MSNBC)
This story sweeping the Internet from Beijing, China is horrific, but it's not the only of its kind if you read the article. Mentally unstable people are prevalent in China. And there's no shortage of them in the United States. Something like this could happen anywhere. And it does. This is what scares me most being a mom. That I won't be able to protect my children from the "what if's" in life.
Have you ever sat down as a family and created a plan of escape in the event of a house fire? We have. But I still obsess over it. How would I get all the kids to safety when their rooms are spread across the house? Who would I grab first? What would I do if one were trapped? I lie awake some nights running this over in my mind.
And that's not all. Every horrible scenario you could imagine has run through my head at one time or another - kidnapping, molestation, drowning, robbery, carjacking, hostage situations or one like the China incident. How would I protect my children in each of these events? What if our car went off the road into a lake, how would I get all three of them out before we drowned? What would I do if the ice cream man took off with my daughter (first of all, I never let her near those creepy trucks). I mean, I could go on and on about the frightening situations my brain conjures up.
It's a scary world we live in and we are fighting to protect our children and keep our sanity at the same time. And trying to do all this without terrifying our kids. It's a fine line we walk between preparing them and scaring them. And one thing I'm trying to pound into my own brain is that I can only protect my kids so much. And I can teach them to protect themselves as much as possible. After that, I have to let go and trust that the Big Man upstairs is watching over them. Otherwise, I'll drive myself insane.
What are some of your fears? How do you handle preparing your kids for the "what if's" in life?
2 comments:
If you ever want to learn to shoot, call me. Missouri and Kansas are concealed carry states.
Woops...forgot to mention: http://www.corneredcat.com
The site says: "This site is about women and guns, not about cats. But in a way, it's about the cornered cat in all of us. It's about the determination to get away from an attacker if you need to. It's about making the decision to say, 'Not me. Not mine. Not today.' And it's about the tools to make that decision stick."
Without being dramatic, I've had friends, male and female, who were victims if violent crime. No more.
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