Sleepless
I am not one to stay awake nights worrying. To the contrary, when I'm upset all I want to do is go to sleep and sink softly into oblivion. I have been known to sleep well past 15 hours if things are bad enough. But it seems there is one thing that will keep me awake: my daughter's safety.
She walks with her friends to her dad's house from school every day, and on my days I pick her up there - it gives her a chance to socialize and it gives me an extra 45 minutes of day to get things done before I dive into mom mode. Today I happened to be 15 minutes early because there was no point in coming home from the grocery store just to go back out to get her. Usually she arrives 5 minutes or more late because she takes her time, lost in the timeless land of the eleven year old girl social circle.
Today - 15 minutes early by some miracle - I had barely been in the driveway a minute when she came jogging toward my car. I could tell when she got close that something was bothering her but it wasn't until she got into the car that I realized that something was really wrong.
On her walk home today she and her friends wound up standing in the middle of...what kind of crime would you call it when one guy is threatening and chasing another one with a knife? Attempted murder? Attempted assault with a deadly weapon? I don't know for sure, but my baby was in the middle of it, and the guy with the knife ran past her with the bare blade protruding from a belt-loop, mere inches from her body.
Fortunately, once she was no longer between the two, she had the presence of mind to walk away calmly and remind her friends to be quiet and not look back. Fortunately, the assailant was too busy chasing his quarry - who had somehow deeply offended his family - to bother with a handful of bystanding kids.
She was, of course, visibly shaken. I called the police, found out they were already on the scene, and took her for ice cream. Then we spent about an hour walking around the neighborhood while the adrenaline and cortisol drained from her system. She talked, I listened and praised her judgment and insight (she was worried about the guy with the knife - he must really be hurting to lash out at someone so violently and she hopes he uses this incident in which no one was hurt as a chance to grow and change), and reassured her the best way I knew how. Later she asked both me and J about times when we had been that scared, probably for reassurance that it was possible to get past it. She never cried, which surprised me. She was pretty clingy though, and worried that the knife guy would find her and try to hurt her for being a witness. I reassured her the best I could.
And this evening I'm packing to go to PDF in the morning, though suddenly my enthusiasm for it has drained. If not for my commitments, I would probably back out.
Finally at 11 J and I headed for bed, after checking to make sure she was sleeping okay. I barely sat down on the edge of the bed before the tears came. I wasn't expecting them at all. I had been so calm, so reassuring, so accepting of the things that we were powerless over in this situation (it's a walking school district without buses; there's never a way to completely protect kids from danger - you can only give them the tools to cope with it; it was a fluke and unlikely to happen again, etc), I assumed it was real. I guess it's hard-wired in parents somehow to downplay things like dangerous near-misses for their kids, to protect their sense of safety. Nothing makes kids feel less safe than panicking parents.
But finally in bed I had my chance to grieve, though it's hard to explain what it is that I'm grieving. I guess it's the loss of some part of her innocence. I've been fine with boobies and fashion and clearer boundaries as the judgment gets clouded by hormones, but the loss of her innate sense of safety was harder than watching her head bleed when she was a toddler, harder than letting her go off to kindergarten, harder than anything I've yet to do as a parent. It seems silly in a way - nothing really happened. But the knowledge that it could have, and the thought of something happening to her, of me losing her and suffering the way my friend R has at the loss of her son this year, well, it all comes flowing fresh again, and the knot in my stomach - really the thing that won't let me sleep, writhes and clenches like a preying snake. J was so comforting and sweet that I almost felt like I let him down by getting up.
Tomorrow I will go and talk to the principal about it, and I will try to secure her either an escort or a ride home. She has a detention after school tomorrow, so all her walking companions will likely leave without her. She shouldn't have to walk alone right now. If I have to I'll stay back and drive her to her dad's. Maybe it will make me feel better about going away and "leaving her" for a weekend of play. Though she's with her dad - it's not like I'd even see her.
Getting it out in writing seems to help. Maybe now I can try to sleep.
I can't protect her from the world, nor should I. But sometimes I truly wish I could, if only for a while. All this letting go just wears on you after awhile. And as I well know, this is only the beginning.
She walks with her friends to her dad's house from school every day, and on my days I pick her up there - it gives her a chance to socialize and it gives me an extra 45 minutes of day to get things done before I dive into mom mode. Today I happened to be 15 minutes early because there was no point in coming home from the grocery store just to go back out to get her. Usually she arrives 5 minutes or more late because she takes her time, lost in the timeless land of the eleven year old girl social circle.
Today - 15 minutes early by some miracle - I had barely been in the driveway a minute when she came jogging toward my car. I could tell when she got close that something was bothering her but it wasn't until she got into the car that I realized that something was really wrong.
On her walk home today she and her friends wound up standing in the middle of...what kind of crime would you call it when one guy is threatening and chasing another one with a knife? Attempted murder? Attempted assault with a deadly weapon? I don't know for sure, but my baby was in the middle of it, and the guy with the knife ran past her with the bare blade protruding from a belt-loop, mere inches from her body.
Fortunately, once she was no longer between the two, she had the presence of mind to walk away calmly and remind her friends to be quiet and not look back. Fortunately, the assailant was too busy chasing his quarry - who had somehow deeply offended his family - to bother with a handful of bystanding kids.
She was, of course, visibly shaken. I called the police, found out they were already on the scene, and took her for ice cream. Then we spent about an hour walking around the neighborhood while the adrenaline and cortisol drained from her system. She talked, I listened and praised her judgment and insight (she was worried about the guy with the knife - he must really be hurting to lash out at someone so violently and she hopes he uses this incident in which no one was hurt as a chance to grow and change), and reassured her the best way I knew how. Later she asked both me and J about times when we had been that scared, probably for reassurance that it was possible to get past it. She never cried, which surprised me. She was pretty clingy though, and worried that the knife guy would find her and try to hurt her for being a witness. I reassured her the best I could.
And this evening I'm packing to go to PDF in the morning, though suddenly my enthusiasm for it has drained. If not for my commitments, I would probably back out.
Finally at 11 J and I headed for bed, after checking to make sure she was sleeping okay. I barely sat down on the edge of the bed before the tears came. I wasn't expecting them at all. I had been so calm, so reassuring, so accepting of the things that we were powerless over in this situation (it's a walking school district without buses; there's never a way to completely protect kids from danger - you can only give them the tools to cope with it; it was a fluke and unlikely to happen again, etc), I assumed it was real. I guess it's hard-wired in parents somehow to downplay things like dangerous near-misses for their kids, to protect their sense of safety. Nothing makes kids feel less safe than panicking parents.
But finally in bed I had my chance to grieve, though it's hard to explain what it is that I'm grieving. I guess it's the loss of some part of her innocence. I've been fine with boobies and fashion and clearer boundaries as the judgment gets clouded by hormones, but the loss of her innate sense of safety was harder than watching her head bleed when she was a toddler, harder than letting her go off to kindergarten, harder than anything I've yet to do as a parent. It seems silly in a way - nothing really happened. But the knowledge that it could have, and the thought of something happening to her, of me losing her and suffering the way my friend R has at the loss of her son this year, well, it all comes flowing fresh again, and the knot in my stomach - really the thing that won't let me sleep, writhes and clenches like a preying snake. J was so comforting and sweet that I almost felt like I let him down by getting up.
Tomorrow I will go and talk to the principal about it, and I will try to secure her either an escort or a ride home. She has a detention after school tomorrow, so all her walking companions will likely leave without her. She shouldn't have to walk alone right now. If I have to I'll stay back and drive her to her dad's. Maybe it will make me feel better about going away and "leaving her" for a weekend of play. Though she's with her dad - it's not like I'd even see her.
Getting it out in writing seems to help. Maybe now I can try to sleep.
I can't protect her from the world, nor should I. But sometimes I truly wish I could, if only for a while. All this letting go just wears on you after awhile. And as I well know, this is only the beginning.