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 over the pedestrian crossing, let alone taking on the responsibility of the life of one of our children. Heaven knows how I actually manage to cross the street, with the children, 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.
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Photo credit:
Double Line by Peter Griffin
