Panic

I feel all panicky today, probably for no good reasons, except for they feel like good reasons to me.

• Reason #1- today was donuts with dad at Bud’s school and after the donuts, the children were to wait in the auditorium until school began at which point they walked to their classrooms. When I was there for muffins with mom, the same program was in effect, only there was no chaperone and it was very chaotic. I ended up driving Bud home so he could get on the bus rather than not know WTF was going on in the school. But Hub left him there today, said it was no problem; he’s a good kid. Which is generally true, but today is also field day and I feel like he could easily just get lost in the shuffle and nobody would know. And I don’t know, I’ve just been so involved in reading about poor Kyron Horman and how he just disappeared from his elementary school. And his sunny smile just reminds me so much of my Buddy. And so….I panic.
• Reason #2- My mother has the girls today and it is sunny and gorgeous out, so she is letting them swim in her little blow up pool. The teeny tiny blow up pool. But I am so nervous about something going wrong, and she is there alone with no car (or a drivers license to be honest with you) and well, what if there is an emergency?
• Reason #3- Among having something like 12 jobs scheduled for today, Hub has a long awaited appointment with a dermatologist. He’s had this bump on his back for as long as I can remember and his doctor, something like 10 years ago, told him it was a sebaceous cyst. I get them and have them removed all the time, so no biggie. But it has grown recently. And is hard. And remember when he went to see that holistic chiropractor type dude? He told him he didn’t think it was a cyst at all and could be something awful. And well—what if it is?

Do you have these days sometimes? Where you realize you could lose your whole family in the blink of an eye? It’s horrifying. They don’t tell you about this when you fall in love and have babies. You hear about the good—the love and family and fun and you hear about bad too—tempers, bullies, and broken hearts, but nobody tells you about the fear. It lingers there, usually in the quiet distance, but sometimes blaringly visible as it is to me today. If something happened and I lost my husband, or even worse, one of my children, I don’t know how I could possibly go on. I know for certain that I would never be the same. The thought alone is almost too much to bear.

So I’m pushing it down. It’s really all I can do. Well that and hope that they all outlive me so I’ll never have to know.