Parenting is scary. Most parents are, on the inside, a quivering mass of semi-irrational fears. My husband is afraid of crossing the street. There’s a name for it: he’s dromophobic. When we cross as a family, it’s a dramatic undertaking involving terse instructions and white knuckles. He insists on holding both children’s hands, being skeptical of my own ability to get myself across safely, let alone take on the responsibility of the life of one of our children. Heaven knows how I actually manage to cross the street without him. He’d rather not think about it.
I would be a little offended by the whole scenario, except that I get it. I have a comparable fear of swing sets (for which there is no fancy title, apparently–I’d call it swingerphobia, but that might confuse people). Who puts their child on a strip of rubber suspended from two chains, with no seat belt, straps or other safety features, and shoves them eight feet into the air at an angle nearing 180 degrees, for FUN? Well, I do. But I’m not happy about it–and I’m scared to death every time I do an underdog that I’m going to knock myself out. If I could stuff them into the marginally safer baby swings for the rest of their life, I would.
I’m also terrified of motorcycles (motorcyclophobia, don’t you know), which you wouldn’t think would be a problem with preschool aged children, except that my three-year-old daredevil has regular tantrums over the fact that I won’t get him one (“I won’t fall off, Mommy, I won’t!!). No wonder my blood pressure almost doubled when I was pregnant with him. Throw in some concerns about whether my children will be permanently scarred by the 12 seconds of the Paranormal Activity 2 commercial they saw on TV, whether I’ve foreshortened their career trajectory because the local kindergarten gets mixed reviews, and whether they will inherit my amblyopia (phenomenally poor depth perception–particularly unlucky in a motorcyclist), and it begins to make sense why most teenagers come to the conclusion that their parents are crazy. Which we are, really.
What semi-irrational fear of yours is just grounded enough in reality to drive you a wee bit around the bend?
About Peryl Manning
I have a strange fear of stairs. I can go up and down the, but I have to put both feet on one step before I go to the next step. My niece and nephews (and brother and sister and sister in law and father) all just go running up and down the stairs. My mom does the same thing I do, but she had two back surgeries and can’t do it any other way.
I freak out when they run up and down the steps, but I hold it in, because, I don’t want them to have my strange fear
I have the same fear – not to quite the same degree, but when my 4 yr old was nine months, he went down a set of basement stairs and I almost had a heart attack. I still get teary thinking about it!
I pretty much hate all playground equipment. Why does it have to be so high? Why monkey bars? Is it necessary for my child to be hanging 5 feet off the ground upside down over bark dust? No. My husband hates going to the park with me & the kids because I white knuckle it the whole time and have paranoid fantasies of ambulances, etc. Crazytown.
Twitter Name: jlweinberg
I hear you about monkey bars. We currently have a few girls in my son’s school in casts due to their love of them…
I’m always afraid that when they get sick, they’ll die in the night and I won’t notice until morning. So far they’re lived through every illness, but you never know with the next one.
Twitter Name: crackedmum
Oh, my heart! I have a similar worry when they’re both at school – every phone call could be the one…not obsessively, just there in the back of my mind!
If I was your child, I’d have given you a heart attack. I LOVED (and quite frankly still do love) swinging as high as I could get myself. Then jumping off. Heaven.
Thank goodness I grew up in a different time, when parents didn’t feel the need to supervise playtime. I don’t know if my mom would have survived it!
Twitter Name: msmegan
I have an irrational fear of reachable knives in the kitchen. My kids have tempers and I have this freaky recurring nightmare where one of them carves the other one up. Oy.
I have a fear of knives and having to someday teach my kid how to use a dinner knife. I had this phobia even before I practically severed a chunk of my finger off (thank god for health insurance!!). I can’t watch when other people use knives because it makes me nervous. Thankfully the kiddo is only 2 so I’ll have some time before I’ll have to deal with it…