A little while ago, two different advice columnists published the same letter from a woman driven to distraction by her mother's apparently distractibility.
You see, her mother never locks her car door while she's driving. She goes walking alone in the moonlight and comes back to her unlocked house. And all without some dreadful thing happening to her.
This poor woman has warned her mother of all the horrific things that could happen to her. Her warnings apparently fall on deaf ears as her mother goes about enjoying her life.
This is interesting to me.
I'm all for enjoying one's life.
I'm even more all for not letting someone else snatch that enjoyment from me.
In my life, I am the mother locking the doors and praying her children will always be safe.
Even more interesting were the advice columnists' responses.
The first one said (and I paraphrase): Leave your poor mother alone to enjoy her life. It's only just on this side of the line of possibility that something awful will happen to your mother, and some people simply prefer to not concern themselves with gruesome but remote possibilities. And maybe hinted at: Get some counseling.
The second one said (and I paraphrase): Good gracious! Did your mother grow up in the Garden of Eden that she is so naive as to have no idea of all the dangers lurking out there to catch someone like her unawares?!
Actually, there were dangers in the Garden of Eden. But I digress.
As one who devours every news story of mishaps to people, analyzes them to discover if she might be making the same mistakes herself, and corrects things about the house if she is, I am pretty sure that such a letter will never be written by a child of mine. I also intend to teach my children properly impressively about Dangers Out There and How to Avoid Them while they are properly impressionable, and then not nag them about it when they become adults.
In this story, there are clearly four points of view, leaving out mine. Or, perhaps I should say, two points of view shared by two people each.
I can see both as valid.
I suppose if the mother who is the subject of the letter was naive before, she certainly cannot be after her daughter has educated her until she is blue in the face. She's making a conscious choice to be unconcerned.
I suppose it's all a matter of how comfortable one is walking around in her own skin. Personally, I am more comfortable knowing for sure that no one could have entered my house without making a huge mess and/or racket to tip me off.
Where do your ideas fall?
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I think about this a lot since I often have a lower level of concern about safety issues than the women around me. I have to remind myself to be concerned about things like being in a parking garage alone at night or running outdoors in the dark. To me it just seems that the people most likely to do us major harm are the people we see everyday, not the stranger lurking in the shadows.
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