Not a chance

Ahistoricality commented on another post: I’m not the first to make this point, but our nation’s “zero-risk” approach to life is going to paralyze us if we don’t start pushing back on it pretty hard. This is a huge personal issue to me, so I’m going to devote a post to it.  Thanks, A!

As a teen/young adult, I was a risk-taker.  I went running alone in the middle of the night, got high with friends of friends of friends, and once accepted a ride home from a bar with a stranger I later found out was on parole for manslaughter because I was too wasted to find my car.  I took weekend road trips with 2 female friends and hung out in South Chicago clubs until the sun came up, then slept in my car in the parking lot. Worst of all,  I drank and drove.

Not all of those things carried the same level of risk, of course.  Drunk driving? I should have been locked up for endangering other people, not just myself. But running alone at night was basically safe in a town of 10,000, and on the jazz-seeking road trips I was with friends, and sleeping in the daylight.  However, smoking with strangers, and getting in a car drunk with a man I didn’t know was just plain stupid.    At 19 I didn’t know how to evaluate risk — any of these things seemed equally safe to me.

Flash forward to me at 24, the mother of a toddler in a strange city far from my family.  I was comfortable leaving her with a neighborhood teen in the evening, knowing that I wasn’t far away and the babysitter’s mom was at home right down the street.  As she entered first grade I let her ride her bike around the block while I washed dishes in the kitchen or drank coffee with a neighbor, and stay at the life-guarded, gated, swimming pool while I ran to the grocery store.  I had learned to evaluate risk and make a reasoned judgment.

Then the unthinkable happened.  Just a mile away, a 6-year-old little girl, the same age as Julie, was abducted out of her bed in the middle of the night and murdered.  In that instant, the world became an overwhelmingly dangerous place.  I stopped going out in the evening.  I couldn’t let my daughter outside to play in the backyard surrounded by an 8 foot fence unless I was sitting on the step where I could see her.  I was afraid to be home alone with the children, fearing I couldn’t protect them, and got a large guard dog.  And I stopped sleeping at night for fear someone would come in through a window and steal the kids if I closed my eyes.  Of course, as I became more and more sleep deprived, the paranoia grew until it consumed me. I lived with that level of fear for almost 2 decades, driving the kids to school because I was terrified they’d be abducted if they walked, making them call me as soon as they arrived at a destination and panicking if they were 5 minutes late. Not just as grade schoolers.  When they were in high school.   Now they are almost 27, 23 and 19, and have managed to grow up in spite of me, but I still struggle with the fear that someone will snatch them up and harm them if I’m not there to guard them.  Given that they’re adults who live in 3 different states, and me in a 4th, that’s impossible.

Most of this hyper-vigilance is, of course, my mental illness, with a big dose of PTSD.  But it’s more than that.  News coverage, like that of the murder of Tricna Dawn Cloy in 1988, surround us and bombard us until we feel there’s nowhere safe.  We lose our sense of proportion and become unable to evaluate risk in reasonable terms.   We freeze up.  We want a guarantee of total safety before we’re willing to step out and take a chance, particularly with our children.  Child abductions are still rare enough to make the national news, but we live as though a pedophile kidnapper were behind every tree.  We’re afraid.  We make our children afraid.

I’m trying to relearn that risk isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Taking a chance means being willing to fail in order to succeed, and we should be able to evaluate those odd objectively.  Going for a morning run in the park is a reasonable risk, as is taking a solo vacation, or submitting a novel. Yes, there’s a chance of failure, but the potential reward makes it a good payoff.

That doesn’t mean being stupid, however.  We need to recognize when danger is real and respond accordingly, by locking our house doors, checking references of daycare providers, making sure the brakes on our cars are in good working condition.  And that also means stopping to question whether what we’re hearing on the tv is told to scale or if it’s inflated to sensationalist proportions in order to win ratings. Quite often, there’s more at work than just the facts.

I need to let my children take risks, too. They’re intelligent adults who know how to take care of themselves – I need to remember that the next time Julie doesn’t answer an email, Meredith doesn’t call, or Tony doesn’t return my text message. They have good judgment and should be encouraged to use it, not made to feel guilty for having something other than cotton wool wrapped lives.

As Ahistoricality said, we have to push back against our zero-risk tendencies or we’ll live paralyzed lives. I’m not Jewish but Rosh Hashanah is a good time for NewYears resolutions. This one will be mine.

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