Come on in

Well after my doing everything possible last night to avoid night time predators breaking into my home stealing all my tat and killing me in my bed, I realised I'd left the study room window open.  Not just open a crack, no I don't do things by halves, it was wide wide open.  So open in fact that anybody seeing it would think that my house has already been done over and that they got the sofa out that way.  
I do not like the kids being away.  I do not know why I feel so much safer when they are home.  I am the parent, I am supposed to protect them and make them feel safe and secure.  When did it come to be the other way around?  Now they ring me to make sure I have locked all the doors, turned off all the switches and taken out my contacts before I go to sleep!  I was home just 10 minutes yesterday when I set a tea-towel on fire and also a spray bottle of bleach.  That didn't go on fire though, just melted a wee bit!  I have become my Nana.  I can sense Alzheimers knocking at my brain and squeezing its way in.  My defence for doing very silly things and forgetting to do very silly things is that my brain is so full up of very important things that the silly things have no room to stay and so don't live there in my brain. Only the important things do.  
Sometimes I look in wonder at my two teenagers and marvel that I managed to keep them alive this long. I remember the day I took first born son home and kept expecting a nurse or hospital security to come running after me asking me where I think I was going with that little person.  I bawled my eyes out the first time he bawled his eyes out in the tiny run-down flat I'd took him home too and couldn't fathom that somehow it was up to me to keep him alive.  I was terrified.  I woke him at night to check he was breathing, then wondered why he never slept a full night through until he was three.  I also woke him to play with him.  With baby number two I broke all the rules and kept him in bed beside me.  
You don't get more experienced the more kids you have, you just get used to living in fear.  The love your kids bring into your heart is the reward you get for the lifetime of fear that never leaves your heart, no matter how old they are, that something will happen to them that you won't be able to fix or kiss better. Leaving my kid at the airport to be borne off into the sky and be in another place where I can't get for several hours if he needs me goes against my mothers heart and logic.  I put my trust in God and his Dad and those people who will be in his space while he is away from me and  hold my breath until he comes back to me.  I cannot think of those parents who watch children disappear into the sky to emigrate or go to war, because my heart hasn't got the ability to cope with that.  Like when you see somebody bury their child, you cry and grieve with them and yet you also plead to God 'please never mine'.